Dark Angels: Lords of Caliban

by Gav Thorpe

  In the brief pause that followed, Cassiel turned and hopped further along the concourse, heading towards a stairwell twenty metres away. A las-blast skimmed from the wall next to him and Cassiel turned back again after only a few metres, firing once more at a pirate poking his weapon around the corner. The bolt hit the man’s lasgun, shattering the weapon, sending slivers of plastek into his old, wrinkled face. He fell back out of sight with a cry.

  More Unworthy burst into view, firing their weapons wildly in Cassiel’s direction as they raced towards the door, trying to outflank him. Bullets cracked against the sergeant’s armour and one struck the elbow joint of his left arm. His hand spasmed with pain and Incitatus’s mind core fell to the deck with a clang.

  Thoughts muddled with pain, Cassiel returned fire, cutting down two foes, but two more reached the haven of the doorway and disappeared into the hall beyond. The sergeant gazed numbly at the bike console lying at his feet and for a moment considered leaving it there; a free hand would be invaluable.

  He could not forsake the spirit of his mount, though. He had sworn on his honour as a warrior of the Ravenwing to serve and protect his steed as it served and protected him, and he was not about to abandon Incitatus’s machine-spirit to an uncertain fate.

  Summoning up what focus he could, Cassiel directed a deadly torrent of fire at the next band of reckless pirates to dash into the corridor. The first was flung back by two hits to the chest; the second fell with half her head missing; the third was sent spinning to the deck with a bolt in the shoulder, his arm hanging by threads of bone and sinew. As he fired, Cassiel dimly noted that there were about thirty rounds remaining in the feed belt of his weapon.

  With a last salvo of fire to drive back any more pursuers, Cassiel stooped to snatch up Incitatus’s cogitator. Gripping the boxy device to his chest he laboured towards the stairwell, aware that another door ahead passed into the same room into which some of the Unworthy had run.

  The pirates emerged just ahead of him, autoguns held at their waists, firing madly. Cassiel snarled as he was caught in the hail of bullets, his shoulder guards and plastron sparking with impacts, chips of ceramite and slivers of paint forming a dust cloud around him. Raising his bolter he returned fire, still slumping against the wall, hopping forward as best he could.

  The two men were cut down in a single fusillade, bodies raked with bolts, their blood splashing against the walls and decking. More fire rattled against the sergeant from behind, but this time he did not pause but with a herculean effort propelled himself towards the welcoming sanctuary of the now-empty doorway.

  He almost fell into the room – some kind of storage bay lined with empty shelves and broken crates – and only saved himself from toppling by slamming against the frame of the door. Cassiel pivoted and fired back up the corridor before launching himself across the corridor towards the steps.

  Even the sergeant’s enhanced muscles and power armour-boosted leap could not make the gap and he fell short, falling with a loud clatter a metre short of the stairwell. Rolling to his side, he fired blindly along the passageway, his good leg trying to find purchase to heave himself the last metre to the next moment of safety.

  A rocket sped past his head, exploding behind him.

  Cassiel had thought he had no strength left but the appearance of a heavy weapon amongst the enemy spurred him into another impossible effort, flinging himself bodily down the stairs. He rolled and bounced down the steps, cracking armour and ferrocrete, coming to an ungainly stop at a landing. Out of instinct he turned and pushed himself away from the wall, once more tossed and spun by his descent down the next flight.

  The chamber below was lit only by dim red emergency lighting. In the gloom Cassiel could see only one exit, a sealed door just to his right. Hooking the bolter on his belt, the sergeant tried the wheel-lock but it would not move, rusted shut by decades of neglect.

  The sound of boots on the steps caused him to turn, snatching up the bolter again. He did not need to check the auspex to know that dozens of foes were close on his heels, intent on his death. The sergeant fired as the first of them rounded the landing above, and kept firing as more and more Unworthy descended.

  Still shooting, Cassiel allowed himself to slump to the deck, propped up against the door.

  The bolter clicked empty but it took a moment for his pain-addled senses to register that he was out of ammunition. He tossed the weapon aside, but the hesitation allowed the Unworthy to set upon him with blades and rifle butts before he could draw his sword.

  Still Cassiel fought back, snatching a man by the throat to slam him into his companions. The sergeant swung the cogitator as a weapon, cracking open the skull of a pirate even as his fingers drove into the chest of a third.

  There was a heartbeat’s pause as the dead men fell away, the others behind blocked by their deceased comrades. Cassiel snatched his sword from its sheath, its glowing blade swinging up to sever the arm from a woman looking to drive a knife into the sergeant’s face.

  Cassiel’s rage at being cornered like an animal boiled up inside him. A maul clanged against his helm and an axe head skittered from his right pauldron as he surged up, power sword carving a bloody ruin through the foes that surrounded him.

  ‘For the Emperor! For the Lion!’

  The sounds of fighting from ahead had fallen silent, raising grim suspicion in Gideon. Like a white-and-black thunderbolt he had fallen upon the Unworthy as they had surged towards Cassiel’s last position, Eclipse’s bolters roaring as the Apothecary drove headlong through them.

  Confronted by the vengeful apparition of the Apothecary, unharmed and bellowing for vengeance, the Unworthy scattered, fleeing back into the ducts and holes rather than face his wrath. Coming to a turning, Gideon slowed, heaving his bike around the corner, the heavy machine pulping through the remains of a score of dead pirates. Cassiel had certainly taken a heavy toll before succumbing.

  Following the blinking light of the sergeant’s transponder on the display, Gideon came to a halt next to a stairwell. More bodies littered the steps, a mess of flesh and blood. The Apothecary saw from the auspex return that the Unworthy had withdrawn several dozen metres, scampering away through the narrow hatches and under-levels where he could not follow.

  With pistol in hand, Gideon descended the steps, treading carefully over the dead Unworthy. At the bottom of the stairs was a scene of total carnage: bodies lay upon each other, gouged, limbless or decapitated, at least another dozen.

  Of Cassiel there was no sign.

  It was only as the Apothecary shifted one of the bodies that he spied black armour. Dragging aside the dead pirates, he unearthed Sergeant Cassiel from the mound. He still held his power blade in one hand and the cogitator console of a bike in the other.

  ‘Brother? Brother Cassiel?’

  The sergeant’s armour was a bloody mess, but how much was his and how much had belonged to his foes was impossible to tell. His helm was scratched and battered, but otherwise seemed intact. Lowering to one knee, Gideon rapped on the sergeant’s breastplate.

  ‘Sergeant! Sergeant Cassiel!’

  The Space Marine’s arm twitched and Gideon had to react quickly, grabbing Cassiel’s wrist as he swung his power sword towards the Apothecary.

  ‘It is Gideon, brother!’

  Cassiel’s arm relaxed and he slowly turned his head to look at the Apothecary.

  ‘A welcome sight, Brother Gideon,’ croaked the sergeant.

  ‘For me, also. I am glad my efforts have not proved fruitless.’

  Gideon helped up Cassiel, supporting the sergeant with his free arm.

  ‘An effort that is appreciated, brother, but I do not understand something. There must be others requiring your assistance, why expend so much energy for me when my brothers still fight?’

  ‘I will attend to them soon enough, brother-sergeant,’ Gideon said, guiding Cassiel
to the steps. ‘None have been fighting harder than you. They know, as you did, that no matter where they fall, the Chapter shall not forget them, and nor shall I.’

  Cassiel looked down at the blood-slicked, battered casing of his bike’s cogitation engine.

  ‘Aye, I understand, Gideon. We stand together and fall together.’ He clasped the cogitator to his chest. ‘The Master of the Forge will find a new body for my steed, even as mine is repaired. We fight for the Emperor, for the Lion and, perhaps above all, for each other. That is what it is to be battle-brothers.’

  The tread of footfalls echoes from the broken buildings. In the distance artillery pounds other city districts, but close to the waterfront the fighting has moved on, the area secured by Belial and his Deathwing.

  Hundreds of dead orks litter the streets, but the Commander of the First Company does not see them. He sees the human carcasses, left to the elements for far longer. Thousands, piled against buildings and walls like snowdrifts, emaciated, dead of hunger and trampling, the crowds that waited for megatrawlers that never returned. Killed by their own kind in food riots long before the orks had returned to the city.

  He moves his gaze to his companion, Chaplain Asmodai. Nothing can be seen of the other Space Marine’s expression behind his skull-masked helm, but experience tells Belial that it will be a grim sneer of equal hate and disgust. Belial asks the question that has been nagging him ever since the Chapter returned to Piscina IV, several years after they had thought the orks defeated.

  ‘How could the Piscinans allow such a thing?’

  ‘They are only human.’ Asmodai’s assessment is as true as it is brief, but the Chaplain expands on his point. ‘They were weak. It was a mistake to leave the task of eradicating the orks to lesser warriors. They vacillated, became distracted, and did not finish the task at hand.’

  ‘You might cast such an accusation with a clear conscience, but I was here at the start. I am just as responsible for not ending the threat of the orks.’

  ‘I did not intend the criticism, but if you feel you should share similar blame I am happy for you to accept it.’

  ‘Then I shall take it as such. I am aware of any deficiencies in my past conduct, and make no attempt to avoid or excuse them. I am grateful that we have returned to Piscina so that I can rectify shortcomings in my leadership and personal performance. It is to my shame that the Beast escaped retribution to wreak such havoc upon the Emperor’s domains, but its spawn shall be eradicated.’

  ‘As they should have been at first encounter.’

  The orks, their remains, lay scattered across the road, felled by my fury. I stood amongst the ruin left by pistol and powered blade, alone, my dark green armour splashed with the congealing blood of my foes.

  Upon the left shoulder guard of my green battleplate I wore the symbol of the Dark Angels, which I prized as an award above all other merit. My right shoulder was marked with my personal heraldry – black to denote the time I had spent in the Ravenwing, slashed diagonally with a red band from lower left to upper right for the killing of Furion, an inverted blade above as the swordsman’s honour and the commander’s icon of the iron halo below.

  Honours that I had earned in fierce battle, but none of those encounters had been more closely contested than the fight that had just ended.

  Amongst the dismembered and decapitated bodies of the aliens lay the four companions of my guard, slain in the brutal combat, their plate rent apart by jagged axes and cruel power claws. I did not need to check the life signs signal to know that they were all dead. Even Dark Angels cannot survive being ripped apart in such barbaric fashion.

  Everything seemed quiet, still, until a flurry of missiles from a Whirlwind screamed overhead and smashed into a warehouse a few hundred metres further down the roadway, obliterating an ork gun position on the roof. The other sounds of the war raging through Kadillus Harbour were distant, muted by the bank of dust and smoke that had spread across the city. Bolters reduced to a crackle, the roar of gunship engines tinny, the thump of shells no more than faint thuds.

  The beating of my hearts seemed louder.

  The crunch of a heavy tread, stone pulverised beneath a tremendous weight. It drew my attention to a dark gateway leading to one of the harbour administration buildings. Ghazghkull, the Beast, appeared out of the smoke and fire like a monster of myth. He was far larger than the fallen orks, almost twice my height and as broad as a Dreadnought.

  All save his gruesome face was clad in thick plates of metal and wheezing pneumatics. The armour was daubed with thick layers of paint in black, with stripes of red and white check decoration. Smoke billowed from the exhaust stacks of the back-mounted engine powering the enormous exo-suit, black and stinking of burning oil. Joints whined and pistons juddered as Ghazghkull stepped into the light. Each footfall was like the slamming of a cell door in the depths of the Rock.

  His left hand was encased in a huge claw with sword-long talons. The remnants of a Piscinan soldier – head, torso and one arm – dangled on the lower tine. The Beast’s right fist was a mass of gun barrels and ammunition magazines. I thought I saw the magnetic chamber of a plasma gun amongst the mess, looted in some past battle.

  The eyes snared my gaze, or rather eye, for one of the Beast’s was bionic, held within a metal plate that covered half his cranium and face. The remaining eye seemed small, bright red, almost invisible beneath a green brow furrowed deep. I had expected to see hate, or anger, or perhaps surprise that I had survived the onslaught from his strongest minions. There was nothing, just the indifferent coldness of a predator seeing prey. I was nothing to the monster, no threat, as insignificant as an insect beneath an armoured boot, a pesky gnat to be swatted aside without effort.

  I must confess this derision offended me and perhaps affected my judgement. I raised my sword in challenge, pointing the tip towards the huge ork. I wasted no words and opened fire.

  A stream of guided bolts flared from my pistol. I carried seeker ammunition as standard, but my aim was as true as any Space Marine and every round struck the Beast in the chest. Detonations sparked across its breastplate in a shower of metal and paint.

  Ghazghkull stopped with half a step, head cocked to one side, and looked down at the scratches and dents the bolts had made in the armoured plate. The ork returned his gaze to me and slowly shook his head, as if in disappointment.

  Sheathing my sword, I reloaded and fired again as the Beast started towards me once more, every shot aimed for the exposed face and skull. Two rounds glanced from the jagged gorget that protected the Beast’s lower jaw. Another pair clanged from the bionic half of Ghazghkull’s head, leaving blackened welts on the metal but not penetrating. My fifth shot hit flesh, deflected from the bony cheek beneath and exploded beside the ork’s ear rather than beneath skin and muscle.

  He seemed to laugh and grunted something at me in his own language.

  A storm of fire from his gun engulfed me for a second, high calibre bullets whining past my head and slamming into my chest plastron and pauldrons. My displacer field activated, throwing me into the warp for the briefest instant. The world vanished and it seemed that an eternity passed in which the universe was born and died, and I became nothing more than a burning flake of ash in the aftermath of its destruction. Every sense told me I was already dead, blinded and deafened, frozen and yet boiling alive inside my armour.

  It only lasted the tiniest fraction of a second in truth, but the transition saved my life, depositing me more than a dozen metres to the left and a few metres further from Ghazghkull. My head spun and my stomach felt like it had been turned inside out, but I had been delivered from the torrent of gunfire.

  I emptied the rest of my pistol rounds at the Beast while he laboriously turned towards my new position. The bolts caught the ork around the head and face again, but inflicted little more damage than my first salvo. A lone scratch dribbled just beneath the Be
ast’s good eye but at last the glare that turned on me showed some emotion: anger.

  Anger that I could use.

  Something clanked and rattled inside the arm-mounted cannon while I reloaded again. I did not shoot. It would have been a waste of ammunition.

  The Beast’s gun shrieked, spitting blasts of purple light at me. My displacer field activated again, throwing me a couple of metres directly forward with a wrench, still in the path of the ork’s fusillade. A blast tore through my left arm, scorching through the ceramite outer armour. Another struck the side of my helm with a blinding burst of light. I lost my vision and was reduced to relying on the input of my armour, reducing my sight to a monochrome series of vague blotches.

  I holstered my bolt pistol as the warlord came at me and drew the plasma pistol from my belt. I waited for the whine of the generator to descend to the hum of a stable magnetic field, and fired. The ork was only three metres away, and the plasma ball slashed into the creature’s chest. It melted through the armour in an instant and punched into flesh beneath, a burst of cobalt fire that rippled out the neatly punctured breastplate. I have seen such shots kill Traitor legionaries outright.

  The Beast bellowed as he staggered back, swaying violently from side to side. The scene cleared as my eyes recovered. The ork was hunched over, looking like he was retching.

  I kept the pistol pointed at the warlord, waiting patiently for the ticking of the recharger to end and the power build-up to start again. The warlord heaved and shuddered, shoulders moving beneath the heavy armour. I have to admit that when I realised what was happening, my aim wandered for a millisecond.

  The Beast really was laughing, harder than ever.