‘Dwell not on the xenos,’ said Scout-Sergeant Borakis. He was old and grizzled where the Scouts were young, his voice gravelly thanks to the old wound on his throat, his armour festooned with kill-marks and trophies while the Scouts under his command were not yet permitted to mark their armour. Borakis leaned towards the open ramp, gripping the handhold mounted overhead. ‘It is not your place to seek to understand the enemy. It is enough to know only that he must be killed!’
‘Of course, Scout-sergeant,’ said Orfos, backing away from the ramp.
The Thunderhawk flew down low over a range of hills studded with obelisks and pylons, as if metallic tendrils had forced their way out of the ground to escape the bleak gravity of Selaaca. Patterns of silver like metal roads spiralled around the peaks and valleys, and sparks of power still spat between a few of the pylons.
‘We’re closing in on mark one,’ came the pilot’s voice from the cockpit of the Thunderhawk. The crew were two of the thousands of Chapter staff and crew who inhabited the Phalanx, a vast support network for the Imperial Fists’ campaigns. Using star maps developed by the Adeptus Mechanicus, the strike cruiser Mantle of Wrath had penetrated further into the Veiled Region than any Space Marine craft before it, to follow up the information extracted by the Castellan during his interrogation of a Soul Drinkers captive.
The ground rippled as the Thunderhawk hovered down low to land. The landing gear touched the blasted earth and Borakis led his squad out. Borakis and his four Scouts deployed with the speed and fluidity that years of training had given them, spreading out to cover all angles with bolt pistols. Borakis carried a shotgun as old and scarred as he was, and in his other hand checked the auspex scanner loaded with the coordinates the Castellan had given him.
‘Laokan! Take the point! Orfos, you’re watching our backs. Kalliax, Caius, with me.’ Borakis pointed in the direction the auspex indicated, over the dead earth.
Once, these hills had been forested. Stumps and exposed roots remained, shorn down to ground level. Up close the pylons looked like spinal columns worked in steel, blackened by the haze of pollution that hung overhead. The obelisks were fingers of a substance so black it seemed to drink the light. A faint hum ran up through the ground, the echo of machinery far below.
‘The xenos have not departed this place,’ said Orfos quietly. ‘This world is dead, but these xenos never lived.’
‘It is an ill-omened world,’ agreed Scout Caius. ‘I hope our work here is quick.’
‘Hope,’ said Borakis sternly, ‘is a poisoned gift, given by our weaknesses. Do not follow hope. Follow your duty. If your duty is to fight on this world for a thousand years, Scout-novice, then you will give thanks to the Emperor for it. Move on.’
The squad moved down the hillside into a narrow valley where mist coiled around their ankles and the valley sides rose like walls of torn earth. The auspex blinked a path towards a formation of rocks that would have been completely uninteresting if it had not corresponded to the location given by Brother Kaiyon under interrogation. On closer inspection the rocks formed two pillars and a lintel, a doorway in the valley wall blocked by a tangle of fallen stone.
‘Charges,’ said Borakis.
Brother Kalliax crouched by the rocks, setting up a bundle of explosive charges. The cog symbol on his right pauldron signified his acceptance as an apprentice to the Techmarines of the Imperial Fists.
‘What do you see, Orfos?’ said Borakis.
‘No movement, sergeant,’ replied Orfos, scanning the crests of the valley ridges for signs of hostiles.
The intelligence on Selaaca’s hostiles was sketchy. The Imperial Fists had fought the necrons before, but their inhuman intelligence made the xenos impossible to interrogate and their goals could only be guessed at. Selaaca’s necrons were, according to the interrogated Soul Drinkers, a broken and leaderless force, but there were certainly necrons still on the planet and no telling how they might have organised themselves since the Imperial Fists had captured the Soul Drinkers there.
‘Ready,’ said Kalliax.
The Scout squad backed away from the entrance and Kalliax detonated the charge, blowing the blockage apart in a shower of dirt and stone. The blast echoed across the valley, shuddering the valley walls and starting a dozen tiny rockfalls.
‘Move in,’ said Borakis.
Laokan moved through the falling earth, his bolt pistol trained on the darkness revealed between the lintels. The darkness gave way to dressed stone and carvings inside.
The walls of the passageway were carved with repeating chalices, intertwined with eagles and skulls. The squad shadowed Laokan’s movement as he crossed the threshold into the passageway.
The floor shifted under his feet. Laokan dropped instinctively to one knee. A line of green light shimmered over him and a camera lens winked in the ceiling as it focussed on him.
‘Bleed,’ said an artificial voice.
Laokan backed away slowly. The lens stayed focussed on him.
‘Bleed,’ repeated the voice.
‘Stand down, Scout,’ said Borakis. He walked past Laokan and drew his combat knife. The blade was as long as the sergeant’s forearm, serrated and etched with lines of Imperial scripture. Borakis’s Scout armour, much less bulky than a full suit of power armour, had an armoured wrist guard that Borakis unbuckled from his left arm. He drew the knife along his left wrist and a bright scarlet trail ran down his hand.
Borakis flicked the blood off his hand into the passageway. It spattered across the walls and floor.
‘Astartes haemotypes detected,’ said the voice again, the lens this time roving over the sergeant.
Light flickered on along the passage way, lighting the way deep into the hillside.
‘We’re in the right place,’ said Borakis. ‘Follow me.’
Borakis and the Scouts entered the hillside, pistols trained on every shadow.
The Mantle of Wrath had two missions over Selaaca. The first was to deliver the Scout squad to follow up the Castellan’s intelligence. The other was to begin the destruction of the Soul Drinkers.
The Mantle was one of the better-armed ships in the Imperial Fists fleet, but for this mission its torpedo bays had been stripped out and replaced with high-yield charges normally used for orbital demolitions. The Mantle did not have long to wait in orbit over Selaaca before its target drifted into view, its massive bulk darkening the glare of Selaaca’s sun.
Few Imperial Fists would ever need more proof of the Soul Drinkers’ corruption than the Brokenback. Many a Fist had fought on a space hulk, one of the cursed ships lost in the warp and regurgitated back into realspace teeming with xenos or worse. The Brokenback was as huge and ugly a space hulk as any had seen, hundreds of smaller ships welded into a single lumbering mass by the tides of the warp. Imperial warships ten thousand years old jostled with xenos ships, vast cargo freighters and masses of twisted metal that bore no resemblance to anything that had ever crossed the void.
Thousands of crew on the Mantle prepared the torpedo arrays as the strike cruiser manoeuvred into position. Damage control crews were called to battle stations, for while the Brokenback was unmanned no one could be sure of what automated defences the hulk might have. As the Mantle approached firing position, the Imperial Fists officers and the unaugmented crewmen waited for the space hulk to leap into life and rain destruction from a dozen warships onto the Mantle of Wrath.
The hulk’s weapons stayed silent. A spread of torpedoes glittered against the void as they launched from the Mantle, leaving ripples of silvery fire in their wake. Defensive turrets, which would normally have shot down every one of the torpedoes, stayed silent as the first spread impacted into the space hulk amidships.
Bright explosions blossomed against the void, flashes of energy robbed of power an instant later by the vacuum. Shattered chunks of hulls floated outwards in clouds of debris, leaving open wounds of torn metal in the side of the Brokenback.
The space hulk was too big for a single volley,
even of the high-yield demolition charges, to destroy. The Mantle of Wrath pumped out wave after wave of torpedoes. One volley blew an Imperial warship free of the space hulk’s mass and the ship span away from its parent, trailing coils of burning plasma and revealing the twisted steel honeycomb inside. Ruined orbital yachts and xenos fighter craft tumbled out of the rents opened up in the hull.
Moment by moment, the whole Brokenback came apart. Selaaca’s gravity drew the fragments down and the whole hulk rotated. The volley had opened up a weak point in the depths of the hulk’s mass and an enormous section of the stern bent away from it, dragged down towards the greyish disc of Selaaca.
The Brokenback could not resist orbital decay any longer. Its idling engines, which did the bare minimum of work to keep it in orbit, failed as plasma reactors collapsed and power systems were severed. Over the course of the next few hours the stern of the hulk was scoured by the upper atmosphere and broke away entirely, followed by millions of chunks of debris raining down onto the planet. Like a dying whale the rest of the Brokenback lolled over and fell into the gravity well of Selaaca, gathering speed as it fell, its lower edges glowing cherry-red, then white, with friction.
The Brokenback disappeared into Selaaca’s cloudy sky. Most of it, the Mantle’s augurs divined, would come down in one of Selaaca’s stagnant oceans, the rest scattered over a coastline.
The Mantle of Wrath had fulfilled one of its duties. The space hulk Brokenback was gone, and no renegade would ever use it to resurrect the Soul Drinkers’ heresies.
The only duties keeping the ship over Selaaca was the Scout squad currently deployed on their service. Soon they would return, and the Mantle would leave this forsaken place behind forever.
BROTHER CIAUS DIED first.
The walls folded in on themselves, revealing rows of teeth lining the inside of a vast bristling throat. Caius had been the slowest to react. The rest of the squad threw themselves into the alcoves along the tunnel, which each contained statues of Space Marines with their armour covered in the ornate chalice of the Soul Drinkers. Caius’s leg had snagged on the spikes and he had been dragged down the throat as it rippled and constricted, the sound of grinding stone competing with the tearing muscle and bone.
Caius did not scream. Perhaps he did not want to show weakness in his final moments. Perhaps he did not have time. When the corridor reformed, Caius’s vermillion blood ran down the carvings and no other trace of his body remained.
Borakis hissed with frustration as Caius’s lifesigns winked out on his retinal display.
‘Caius!’ shouted Orfos. ‘Brother! Speak to us!’
‘He is gone, Scout,’ said Borakis.
Kalliax held his bolt pistol close to his face, his lips almost touching the top of the weapon’s housing. He crouched in the alcove opposite Borakis. ‘Repaid in blood shall every drop be,’ he said, face set.
‘First, your duty,’ said Borakis. ‘Then let your thoughts turn to revenge.’
‘This place was a trap!’ replied Kalliax. ‘I should have seen it. By the hands of Dorn, why did I not see it? Some mechanism, something that should not be here, it should have been obvious to me!’
‘If you think you killed our brother,’ said Borakis sternly, ‘then take that pistol and administer your vengeance to yourself. If not, focus on your duty. This place was a trap, but it was not placed here in isolation. It protects something. That is what we have come here to find.’
The sound of breaking stone came from the alcove in which Brother Laokan had taken cover. The remnants of the alcove’s statue toppled into the tunnel and smashed on the floor.
‘Speak, novice!’ ordered Borakis.
‘Through here,’ said Laokan. ‘This is a false tunnel. Behind this wall is another way.’
Borakis braced his arms against the alcove walls and kicked hard against the statue. The wall behind gave way and the statue fell into the void beyond, revealing long, low space lit by yellowish, muted glow-globes set into the walls.
‘Follow, brothers!’ said Borakis.
Kalliax and Orfos kicked their way through the false wall and followed the sergeant into the hidden space. They had not yet completed their transition into full Space Marines but their strength was already far beyond that of a normal man.
Up ahead of Borakis was a chapel with an altar, at the far end of the long room. The ceiling loomed down low, hung with stalactites that had formed from water dripping down. The altar was a solid block of grey stone topped with a gilded triptych depicting Rogal Dorn standing in the centre of a battle scene.
Borakis took the point himself this time. Now he knew there was danger here, he had a duty to place himself in its way, for part of his duty was to see his young charges safely back to the Chapter.
On the altar stood a chalice cut from black stone, studded with emeralds. Borakis kept his shotgun levelled on the altar as he approached it. The Scouts spread out behind him.
The altarpiece’s rendition of Rogal Dorn was in gold with diamond eyes. Dorn was twice as tall as the gilded Astartes battling alongside him. The enemy were aliens, or perhaps mutants, humanoid but with gills and talons. Dorn was crushing them beneath his feet. It was a passable work. Dozens of higher quality could be found in the chapels and shrines of the Phalanx.
‘Sergeant?’ said Orfos. ‘Anything?’
Borakis leant closer to the altar. The chalice was not empty. Something shimmered darkly inside it. In the dim light it was impossible to tell, but it looked like blood.
Blood could not remain liquid down here for the length of time the chapel had evidently been sealed. Borakis knew the smell of blood well enough. He put his face close to the chalice and sniffed, knowing his Astartes’ senses would confirm what the liquid was.
Borakis’s breath misted against the polished stone. He noticed for the first time the thin silvery wires covering the chalice in a network of circuitry.
The warmth and moistness of a human breath made filaments move. Expanding, they completed a circuit, wired through the base of the chalice to the mechanism behind the triptych.
Rogal Dorn’s diamond eyes flashed red. A pencil-thin beam glittered across the chamber.
Sergeant Borakis fell, twin holes bored through his skull by the pulse of laser.
‘Back!’ shouted Laokan. ‘Fall back!’
Kalliax darted forwards to grab Borakis’s body by the collar of his armour and drag him away from the altar. The panels of the triptych slid aside, each revealing the veiny flesh of a gun-servitor supporting double-barrelled autoguns. Green and red lights flashed over Kalliax as he tried to scramble away, hauling Borakis’s corpse with him.
The autoguns opened up, the gunfire filling the chamber to bursting. Kalliax almost made it to the hole leading to the tunnel. His armour almost held for the extra second he needed. Bursts of torn ceramite, then blood and meat, spattered from his back as bullets hit home. Kalliax fell to the floor as a shot blew his thigh open, revealing a wet red mess tangled around his shattered femur. Kalliax dropped Borakis’s body and returned fire with his bolt pistol. His face and upper chest disappeared in a cloud of red.
Laokan and Orfos broke back into the tunnel, its walls still wet with Caius’s blood. Orfos saw Kalliax die, and he felt that same instinct that must have seized Kalliax – grab the body of his fallen battle-brother, carry him back to the Chapter, see him interred with honour alongside the rest of the Chapter’s venerated dead. But Orfos choked down the thought. That was what had killed Kalliax. Orfos would leave him to be entombed in this place. That was the way it had to be.
The back wall was falling in, showering the altar with rubble. The gun-servitors, one with a gun arm hanging limp thanks to Kalliax’s bolter fire, lumbered out of their hiding place towards the surviving Scouts.
‘Don’t look back!’ shouted Laokan above the gunfire, and pushed Orfos into the carved corridor.
The walls shifted again. Orfos made a decision with the quickness of mind that years of hypno-doctri
nation and battle training had given him. He could go for the entrance of the tunnel, to escape back into the valley. But Caius had died in that stretch of tunnel – Orfos knew that way was certainly trapped. That certainty did not exist for the other direction, deeper into the structure built into the hillside. It was not particularly compelling logic, but it was all he had.
Orfos broke into a sprint towards the darkness at the far end of the tunnel. Laokan was on his heels, and the racket of the gunfire was joined by the grinding of stone and stone. The tunnel was closing up again, the ripple of shifting panels accelerating towards them from the tunnel entrance. Chunks of Caius’s body were revealed, tumbling around the vortex of stone. A severed hand, a battered and featureless head, Caius’s bolt pistol warped out of shape.
Orfos was fast. In the tests after each surgical procedure, he had always been. The sergeants of the Tenth Company had suggested his aptitude was for the Doctrines of Assault due to his speed and decisiveness of action.
Laokan was not so fast. He was a marksman. A trailing arm was caught between spiked panels and Laokan was yanked back off his feet. Orfos heard Laokan yell in shock and pain, and turned long enough to grab Laokan’s boot, pulling his fellow Scout free of the chewing throat.
Laokan’s arm came off, bone and sinew chewed through. Laokan collapsed onto Orfos and tried to propel himself forwards, buying time for them both. Orfos grabbed Laokan’s remaining arm and dragged him behind him as he carried on running.
Laokan snagged on something. Orfos hauled harder and dragged Laokan along with him, every nerve straining to keep his battle-brother free of the fate that had claimed Caius.
There was no light now. Even the Scout’s augmented vision, almost the equal of a full Space Marine’s, could make out nothing but dense shadow.
The floor gave way beneath Orfos’s feet. The lip of a stone pit slammed into the side of his head as he fell, and teeth cracked in his jaw. He was aware, on the edge of consciousness, of his body battering against the carved sides of the pit as he and Laokan fell.
Hammer and Bolter - Issue 1 Page 15
