Snarling in anger Ekodas ducked beneath a scything, toothed tentacle that would have taken his head off had it connected.
‘Restrain him,’ Ekodas barked.
Kol Harekh stepped in close and backhanded the magos across the head, using all of his strength. There was a heavy metallic clunk, but Darioq-Grendh’al was not felled. With surprising swiftness, the two servo-arms that extended over the magos’s shoulders darted down and forwards, taking hold of the Coryphaus by the shoulders. Ceramite armour groaned beneath the pressure, and Kol Harekh was lifted off of his feet.
Kol Harekh’s bolt pistol came up, levelling at the corrupted magos’s head, even as a dozen tentacles altered their form, their tips becoming elongated, barbed prongs, poised to impale.
‘Enough!’ barked Ekodas, his intonation carefully weighted to convey a portion of his gods-given power.
The magos froze, though he strained to finish his the killing blow.
‘Put him down,’ he ordered, and the magos gently lowered Kol Harekh to the ground. The Coryphaus lashed out, fingers encircling the magos’s scrawny neck. Ekodas knew that it would take little effort for Kol Harekh to tear the magos’s head loose.
‘Don’t do it,’ he growled. ‘We may need him yet.’
The Coryphaus released Darioq-Grendh’al with a snarl.
Ekodas gritted his teeth as he used his psychic powers to drag the length of metal impaling his leg clear of his flesh. His armour squealed in protest. Telekinetically, he lifted the razor-sharp spike up before him. It was slick with blood. Carefully, he ran his tongue along its length before he hurled it aside with a flick of his mind, sending it clattering to the deck.
‘My, my,’ said Ekodas. ‘That was quite a tantrum, wasn’t it?’
He walked slowly around the now motionless figure of Darioq-Grendh’al. The magos’s mechadendrites quivered with suppressed rage as he struggled against Ekodas’s will, straining to break loose and unleash their fury.
‘Locate the device,’ said Ekodas. His Coryphaus nodded and opened a vox-channel to the bridge, barking orders.
Still maintaining his hold over the magos, Ekodas walked to the view portal staring out into the void of space.
‘I have a lock on it,’ said Kol Harekh, finally.
‘Well?’ said Ekodas.
‘The device is on the planet’s surface.’
‘Without the device, we are not going anywhere,’ said Ekodas. ‘Get a hold of Marduk. Perhaps it is time for him to prove himself useful.’
The brilliant light of the Nexus Arrangement reflected sharply off the metallic body-shell of the Undying One. The silver sphere spun impossibly fast, hovering steadily between the ancient being’s elongated fingertips, which tapered to curving needle-like nails. It caressed the air around the device, fingers moving like the legs of some metallic arachnid, and it tilted its head to one side, as if captivated by the device.
For untold millennia, the Undying One had been trapped within the prison of its crypt. So long had it been confined that the heavens it now looked upon were strange and unfamiliar. A billion new suns had been born since the time of its imprisonment, and tens of thousands had burnt out, becoming lifeless, wasted husks or light-sucking black holes. Everywhere, it saw the taint of the Old Ones. Their engineered Young Races were spread across the universe in a verminous tide. Hatred, cold and ancient, burnt within its cavernous heart.
Now released, it would take up the old fight, and finish what had been started millions of years earlier.
With a slow, deliberate movement, the Undying One drew the Nexus Arrangement in towards its chest. The centre of the sun-disc emblazoned upon its breastplate sunk inwards, forming a half-moon depression, and the spinning device slotted neatly into place.
The Undying One’s body was jolted with the force of the connection, its metal spine curving backwards violently, and its head thrown back. A patina of shimmering iridescence rippled across its metallic limbs, and a web of intricate, golden lines burning with hot light crept across its every surface, delicate labyrinthine veins forming shifting, geometric patterns across its living-metal skin.
The solid, silver orb embedded within its chest seemed to blur, its seamless surface melting and reforming to become a series of delicate rings arrayed around a miniature, green-hued sun. Those rings began to spin around each other, liquid metal rotating faster and faster.
The glowing sun at its centre seemed to swell, spilling light outwards in a blinding wave, and as the Undying One threw out its hands, the Nexus Arrangement began to operate as its creator had intended… and a psychic black hole was torn open.
Across the continents of Boros Prime, unaugmented men and Astartes reeled as the effects of the Nexus Arrangement washed over them. Many of them fell to their knees, gasping, as a terrible, aching pain clutched at the very fibres of their being. It felt as though their souls were being wrenched from their bodies and cast into the abyss, leaving them empty and hollow, mere shells.
A terrible, all-pervading pall of utter futility descended upon Boros Prime, affecting even the most fervent and strong-willed individuals. Millions of soldiers and civilians simply gave up, their will to fight fading, their will to even live deserting them. Some, men who moments before had been fighting for their lives, dropped their weapons and sank to the ground, a fugue of hopelessness overcoming them. With haunted, unfocussed eyes they stared into the distance, oblivious or simply not caring about what was occurring around them. Others turned their weapons on themselves, unable to live with this gut-wrenching emptiness in their souls.
Tens of thousands were slaughtered by the merciless necron warriors marching steadily through the streets, gunning down every living creature that they encountered, whether they resisted or not. It was a harvest of sickening proportions. The streets were awash with blood, and mutilated corpses and severed limbs were scattered about like discarded toys.
Those with the strongest warp presence suffered the worst. Blood clots blossomed within the minds of Imperial astropaths and the sanctioned psykers attached to the command sections of the Boros Guard, and they collapsed to the ground, their bodies wracked with violent convulsions, screaming incoherently as their souls were torn from their fragile bodies.
‘What in the Emperor’s name has happened?’ breathed Aquilius, clutching at a marble railing for balance.
Librarian Epistolary Liventius’s eyes were clenched tightly shut, and his teeth were bared in a grimace of pain. A droplet of blood ran from his left nostril.
‘My lord?’ said Aquilius in concern. The Librarian was leaning heavily upon his force staff, and after a moment he opened his eyes. They were bloodshot and sunken. He placed a hand to his temple, a shadow passing across his face.
‘My powers,’ breathed the Librarian. ‘They are gone.’
In orbit above Boros Prime, the Infidus Diabolus shuddered as if it had been struck with cyclonic torpedoes. It listed heavily to one side, its hull groaning in protest as the daemons that had infused its essence since before the outbreak of the Horus Heresy were banished. The strike cruiser’s central processing cogitator units sputtered and died. Reliant on the daemon essences bound into its mainframe, the ship’s thinking computers and hard-wired servitors were unable to function as the malicious spirits were driven out. The ship threatened to come apart at the seams, so intrinsic was the warp to its very existence.
Marduk dropped to his knees, a terrible empty pain clutching at his hearts as he felt his connection to the warp stripped away.
Aboard the Crucius Maledictus, the corrupted magos, Darioq-Grendh’al, seemed to shrink, his fleshy, daemonic appendages withering and beginning to rot at an accelerated rate as the daemon within him was sent screaming back to its plane of origin. Cancers and tumours long kept at bay by the infernal spirit that had become a part of the tech-magos began to bloom, and his life-support system began to bleat plaintively.
Skinless kathartes daemons took flight, but they had barely stretched out their flay
ed-flesh wings before they blinked out of existence, dragged back to their own turbulent realm of Chaos.
Arachnid-legged daemon-engines fell lifelessly to the floor, rendered utterly inert, their hulls nothing more than empty shells, the daemons bound into their iron skins dragged into darkness by the power of the Nexus Arrangement.
There was not a warrior brother within any of the Word Bearers ships that did not suffer as the link between the material universe and the empyrean was severed. Isolated from their gods, they were utterly and terribly alone.
Marduk regained his balance, steadying himself. Pain throbbed through his mind, but he forcibly pushed it away. Twice before he had experienced this emptiness, this complete isolation from the blessed warp.
‘The æther is being blocked,’ growled First Acolyte Ashkanez, massaging his temples. ‘We are cut off, adrift. It is… It is an abomination! Such a thing should not be.’
Burias was pale and drawn, and he stared at his shaking hands, the expression upon his face one of rising panic. Marduk could only imagine the horror of separation that the possessed warrior was experiencing.
Kol Badar was down on one knee, steadying himself with a hand to the floor. Never one to have been strongly attuned to the warp at the best of times, the Coryphaus was nonetheless shaken, his face waxy and an even more deathly shade than usual.
Marduk unsheathed his chainsword and studied it closely, turning it over in his hands. There was no familiar daemonic presence within the weapon; the daemon Borhg’ash was gone.
A blister light throbbed weakly on one of the few still functioning command consoles of the bridge. Kol Badar pushed himself to his feet and moved to it.
‘A message from the Crucius Maledictus,’ he said.
‘And what does the Grand Apostle have to say?’
‘Gods,’ swore the Coryphaus. ‘He has lost the device.’
‘What?’ said Marduk. ‘How?’
‘It does not say. He has identified its location, however. He is ordering us to retrieve it.’
‘Of course,’ he said. ‘Where is it?’
‘On the surface.’
Marduk scoffed, shaking his head.
‘He wants us to go back and get it, cut off from the warp completely, as we are? It would be suicide.’
‘It is suicide if we do not,’ said Kol Badar.
‘Explain yourself.’
‘The Crucius Maledictus has us in her sight. The message says that it will fire unless an attempt is made with the next fifteen minutes.’
‘He’s bluffing. His systems will be offline, just as ours are.’
‘Perhaps,’ said Kol Badar.
‘Gods!’ swore Marduk. ‘Fine. How do we do this?’
‘The daemon-infused guidance systems of the Dreadclaws will be non-operational,’ said Kol Badar, shaking his head. ‘We cannot use them.’
‘Damnation!’ growled Marduk, seething. ‘Assault shuttles, then.’
‘Five Thunderhawks and three Stormbirds were destroyed attempting to get us off-world,’ said Kol Badar. ‘None of those that made it out are undamaged. It will be weeks before they are ready to be redeployed. It would be futile to launch an assault using them. We will be annihilated.’
‘Then what do you propose, Coryphaus? Tell me! We must reclaim the device! Failure is not an option!’
The deck shook as the towering shape of the Warmonger stepped forwards from the shadows.
‘There is another way…’ the ancient Dreadnought boomed.
Within the darkened expanse of the Temple of the Gloriatus, Aquilius and the handful of Sternguard veterans of 1st Company were fighting back to back, desperately seeking to keep the necrons at bay. They had abandoned their location atop the temple half an hour earlier, when they had seen the Thunderhawk that had been closing on their position blasted out of the sky. It had crashed into the city below in a blossoming explosion of fire, killing all the battle-brothers on board.
They fired their bolters in short, concentrated bursts to conserve ammunition, but all were running perilously low. The inhuman automatons came on relentlessly, their movements unhurried and in perfect unison. In the darkness of the temple, their soulless eyes glowed brightly, and the flickering energy of their infernal weapons was reflected upon their silver skeletons.
Aquilius held the scrimshawed pole of the unfurled Chapter banner tightly in his left hand. Only in death would he relinquish his hold on it, and even then, the enemy would be forced to pry his fingers open before he dropped the holy standard. The young Coadjutor felt both fierce pride and an awed humility even to be in the presence of the holy relic, let alone to be holding it aloft in battle.
Were the situation not so dire, he would have been overawed to be surrounded by such vaunted heroes as now fought at his side. He could not imagine a better death than to fall fighting alongside these 1st Company Veterans, and death seemed a certainty.
The huge, gold-plated doors of the Temple of the Gloriatus had been obliterated, exploding inwards as arcs of green energy struck them, and the ranks of the deathly xenos had marched inside. Their mere presence was an affront, and the White Consuls had met them with bolter and chainsword, yet they were but a handful, and arrayed against them was a numberless tide of evil.
The White Consuls had been pushed further and further back. They had chosen to make their stand upon the stairs of the central dais, and it was here that Aquilius had planted the Chapter banner, swearing that while he drew breath, it would not fall.
The temple was immense, the largest cathedral in the Boros system, and tens of thousands of men and women made the pilgrimage to its hallowed halls every month, many using their entire life savings to make the passage. The arched ceilings soared impossibly high overhead, before disappearing into darkness. Each of the four expansive wings of the cathedral had their own pulpits, chapels and choirs, but it was within the central nave that Aquilius and the battle-brothers of 1st Company now stood. The sound of the enemy’s metal-boned feet upon the marble flooring echoed loudly through the cavernous temple.
Seven levels of tiered seating looked down upon them, and hundreds of low benches were arrayed upon the floor of the temple below the steps. All told, more than two hundred thousand worshippers could be accommodated comfortably within the temple walls. On holy days, a hundred times that number packed into Victory Square to hear the choirs of the Gloriatus and witness the sermons on flickering holo-screens. Now the floor was seething with deathly abominations, marching resolutely upon the White Consuls, death spitting from their ancient weapons.
‘Out!’ shouted one of the White Consuls as the chambers of his weapon emptied. The veteran battle-brother swung his ornate bolter over his shoulder and drew his power sword, itself a holy relic of the Chapter. Coruscating arcs of green energy took down two of the blue-helmeted veterans, stripping them to the bone.
Scores of the skeletal automatons were felled by the disciplined fire of the Sternguard, but more were advancing into the cathedral, their numbers beyond counting. The twisted wreckage of destroyed necrons was piled at the base of the broad stairs, which soon resembled an island amidst a sea of skeletal, metallic corpses.
The necrons were incredibly difficult to put down, each one soaking up enough fire to drop an Astartes before their implacable advance was halted. Even then, many simply rose back to their feet moments later, all evidence of the damage they had sustained gone.
Aquilius saw one of the necron warriors stoop and pick up its own arm, which had been blown off with a melta gun blast. Sparks spat from the robotic xenos’s shattered shoulder, but as the severed limb was placed back against the joint the sparks stopped. Metal ran like quicksilver as the joint reformed. Within the space of a heartbeat the limb was reattached, and the necron continued its relentless advance, climbing the stairs towards them.
The front ranks of the enemy were only metres away now, each heavy step bringing them ever closer.
Apart from the echoing stamp of their metal feet stri
king the marble in perfect unison and the crackling discharge of their weapons, the necrons made no other sound as they advanced. The lack of battle cries, the absence of screams of pain and cries of victory was, to Aquilius’s way of thinking, more ominous and unnerving even than the frenzied ranting of the traitor Word Bearers.
Step by step, the necrons closed the distance, until they reached the cluster of White Consuls at the feet of the golden statue of the God-Emperor. They hefted their weapons over their heads, intent on bringing them crashing down upon the blue helms of the Astartes. Aquilius saw that curving axe-blades of alien design jutted from beneath their deadly guns, and while the xenos were neither particularly swift nor skilled, they wielded them with deadly intent, their blows heavy and powerful.
Power swords hummed as they carved through skulls and alien ribcages, melting easily through living metal. Chainswords tore chunks out of skeletal limbs, and bolters fired at point-blank range sent obliterated necrons tumbling back down the stairs into their comrades.
Aquilius fired his bolt pistol, blowing out the back of the skull of one enemy before switching targets and gunning down another necron with a burst of fire. The mass reactive explosive rounds detonated within the xenos’s skeletal chest, ripping it apart. It fell without a sound but was replaced by another, stepping mechanically forward to take its place.
The ammunition counter on the back of his pistol was counting down steadily, and he was on his last sickle-clip. His last few shots were measured and deliberate, careful to ensure that every last bolt took down an enemy. With his final bolt, he gunned down a necron as it hefted its heavy weapon back over its head to strike him down. The shot struck it in one of its baleful, glowing eyes, and its head was split in two as it exploded, the ruin of its skull hanging from its spinal column. Still, it did not fall.
Aquilius gave a grunt of frustration as the two halves of the necron’s skull came back together, the damage self-repairing seamlessly. Tossing aside his bolt pistol, the Coadjutor grasped the pole of the Chapter banner in both hands, wielding it like a spear. The base of the pole was spiked, and with a grunt of effort, he drove it into the necron’s chest, smashing it backwards.
Word Bearers Page 92
