by Various
It had been nothing. He had been nothing. He could see that more clearly than ever now, as he felt himself, his blackened soul, becoming elevated in the eyes of his approving god, at last becoming something… something more…
That burning smell was growing stronger, more pungent.
The Scourge of the Skies had its stabilisers planted, but its engine was still idling. Corbin had said that if he turned it off and they had to move in a hurry, he couldn’t guarantee being able to start it again. Arkelius had ordered Iunus to target the enemy’s well-armed and well-armoured Vindicators and to fire at will. For now, there wasn’t much else he could do.
Around him, three dozen metal leviathans jostled ponderously for the best offensive positions. Their tactical options, however, were severely limited. The battle would be decided primarily by the relative strengths of the participants’ weapons and their armour plating; factors over which Arkelius had no control.
He couldn’t see what was happening ahead of him any longer. The Chaos tanks were pumping out thick clouds of poisonous smoke, forcing most of the Ultramarines on the ground into a tactical withdrawal.
Arkelius found even the vox-chatter difficult to follow. Breathless reports were cut off or contradicted in mid-flow. He heard that a Predator Destructor had been blown apart, then, immediately afterwards, that it hadn’t, then, finally, that it had been, after all.
Iunus fired at another Vindicator. Arkelius’s rune panels reported a direct hit; however, they couldn’t tell him what the damage to the enemy tank had been. He told Iunus to fire again, but then belayed the order as he struggled to filter one voice out of many in his earpieces: the commander of a Predator up ahead of them.
‘It sounds like… Yes, we did it. We destroyed their main turret. They’re helpless.’ Iunus acknowledged the sergeant’s information, and adjusted his sights in search of another target.
In the meantime, more reports of damaged and destroyed Vindicators were coming in. The Imperial Stalkers, it seemed, were the most effective against them, with their armour-piercing stormcannons. Along with the Hunters, they could hang back, out of range of those powerful Demolishers. That was about to change, however.
Arkelius relayed the news to his crew, ‘They’re starting to pull forwards, four of them, two Vindicators from each of the enemy’s flanks.’
‘I have them, sergeant,’ said Iunus. ‘Should I–?’
Arkelius nodded. ‘Make them our primary targets.’
‘We have a couple of Predators,’ said Iunus, with a glance at his auspex, ‘intercepting the Vindicators on the left. I’ll target the ones on the right.’
Barely had he finished speaking when there was a blinding flash of light through Arkelius’s vision slits. The Scourge of the Skies was lifted off its tracks – its stabilisers were torn out of the ground – and almost overturned. Alarms screamed and the tank commander’s compartment filled up with choking black smoke.
The tank landed with another hefty jolt. Arkelius was slammed sideways into one of his instrument banks, and something exploded inside it.
‘What in the warp was that?’ he spluttered as he righted himself. A readout in his helmet informed him that his armour had been breached. A twisted shard of adamantium had buried itself in his forearm, drawing blood.
‘Felt like a Demolisher shell,’ replied Iunus, holding on to a grab rail behind him. ‘A lascannon would have had more heat and far less concussive force.’
‘Damage report,’ Arkelius demanded. ‘Brother Corbin?’ The console he had hit was on fire. He yanked an extinguisher from a hull-mounted bracket above him, and doused the flames.
His driver’s answer was long seconds in coming, and when it did come his voice was strained. He had been hurt. ‘They punched a hole right through our armour plating, sergeant,’ explained Corbin. ‘I took some shrapnel.’
Only one question mattered, ‘Can you still drive?’
‘I just pulled a shard of ceramite out of my face, sergeant,’ said Corbin, ‘right by the eye socket. I can’t seem to staunch the bleeding. I can drive, but you might have to point me in the right direction.’
It would have to be good enough. Arkelius’s only other option was to climb up onto the Scourge’s roof again, haul Corbin out through the driver’s hatch and take his place, and that would probably have been the death of both of them.
No matter how badly wounded Corbin was – and Arkelius suspected that his injuries were worse than he would admit to – so long as he was stuck inside his cramped compartment, all he could do was soldier on. It was all any of them could do.
‘Another problem, sergeant,’ said Iunus. ‘A blockage in the missile tube. I’m trying to clear it, but–’
‘Keep trying,’ Arkelius grunted. He pressed his eye to his forward vision slit. He could make out several hazy shapes through the smoke – the Imperial Predator Destructors – and beyond them, the persistent dull flashes of enemy cannon and missile fire.
He had half-expected to be met by the glare of the daemon tank he had seen earlier, the one that, he imagined, must have fired the shell that had hit them. However, he could see no sign of it. No one seemed to be targeting the Scourge of the Skies, for that matter. It was likely that the Death Guard’s tank commanders had written it off, believing it crippled.
Arkelius was determined to prove them wrong.
He could hear Corbin shifting in his compartment, which was a good sign. He ordered him to restart the stalled engine, but Corbin reported that the ignition panel had burned out. He was trying to patch it up, half-blind though he was, at least enough for the Hunter’s self-repair systems to kick in and do the rest.
Arkelius helped too, by offering up a prayer to the Machine-God. He prayed that they would be on the move again soon. He knew that one more missile strike like the last one, in the meantime, would leave the Scourge of the Skies in pieces, and its crew almost certainly dead.
‘This is taking too long!’
Galenus swung his chainsword at a zombie’s neck. He had hoped to decapitate it, but his blade choked on its sinew and he had to yank it free.
He had, at least, left a sizeable ichor-spewing gash. The zombie’s head was flapping about like a banner in the breeze. Still, it fought on, clawing at the captain’s throat.
Terserus’s voice boomed in his ear; only he had heard Galenus’s frustrated outburst. ‘We are doing the Emperor’s work. Be glad of that and have the faith to be patient.’
The Dreadnought switched vox-channels to address the other Ultramarines too. ‘Aim for their heads. That’s where they’re most vulnerable.’ He had already broadcast the same advice twice, as knowledge gained in old campaigns had drifted in and out of his memory.
As Terserus spoke, he backhanded a zombie with his gun arm and staved in its face. The zombie stayed upright for a second, as if it were too dim-witted to know that it ought to fall. Fall it did, however; it lost control of every muscle in its body at once and crumpled, brain matter leaking out of its nasal cavity.
The last of the Plague Marines was finally down. It had taken three Ultramarines to slice open his power armour and to hack apart the festering, putrid organs that had all but spilled out of it. Even then, Sergeant Thalorus had lain down his life in the process.
Five of Galenus’s ten-strong team, however – himself and Terserus included – were on their feet, with only the zombies now standing between them and their ultimate goal, and their numbers were being whittled down, slowly but surely. Too slowly.
The zombies’ haggard faces were blank; they betrayed no hint of emotion. Galenus was coming to loathe that more than anything else about them. He had always told his men that with faith, passion and sheer bloody willpower, they could overcome overwhelming odds. The zombies had none of those traits, and yet they were as relentless as any Space Marine.
Had the Death Guard only employed smarter t
actics – had they pulled the zombies away from their all-important excavations and sent them up against the Ultramarines earlier – then this battle might have ended very differently.
‘Try to draw them out, away from the fort,’ the captain hollered.
He matched his actions to his words, falling back a few steps and letting two zombies follow him, snapping and clawing and spitting at him. He had half-thought they might take the chance to disengage and resume their digging, but evidently not.
He kicked the nearest of them and sent it reeling into the other, which bought him time to raise his sword high over his shoulder. He brought it down again in a powerful, two-handed chopping motion. As the first zombie lunged at him, he split its head neatly in two.
The second zombie was right behind it. Galenus deliberately gave a few more steps as he parried its clumsy attack with his armoured forearm. His hope was to get out from underneath the warp rift, to be able to contact the Quintillus again.
Too late, he heard the debris from the collapsed fort shifting behind him.
Brother Filion yelled out a warning too; but the zombie was still up in Galenus’s face and he couldn’t afford to take his eyes off it. He just needed a second – a half-second, less than that – to deal with the immediate threat. He didn’t get it.
One of the Plague Marines had clung to a vestige of life.
It was one that Galenus had encountered briefly earlier: the one that had summoned the cloud of filth. He had fallen to Terserus’s storm bolter, but dragged himself back up from the rubble: through faith, through passion, through sheer bloody willpower, perhaps even just through the sorcery of his foul deity.
He plunged a knife into Galenus’s back, with enough strength to penetrate his armour.
The blade tore through arteries and muscles before puncturing a kidney; then, the Death Guard gave the haft an additional sadistic twist. Galenus gasped. He would have screamed if only he had had the breath, but one of his lungs had collapsed.
His system was immediately flooded with painkillers, which rushed to his head and left him dizzy – too dizzy to defend himself from his other opponent, the zombie in front of him. With a swipe of a supernaturally strong claw, it slashed through his armour’s gorget; with a second swipe, it opened up his throat.
He thought he heard Terserus’s voice.
Indeed he had. The Dreadnought had released an ear-shattering bellow of defiance. He palmed off two zombies and came thundering towards his stricken captain, pulverising rockcrete beneath his footsteps.
His storm bolter blazed, even though Galenus was between him and his target, acting as a living shield. A few bolts pinged off the captain’s pauldrons, but, somehow, a lot more of them found the Plague Marine’s head.
As it happened, he would probably have fallen anyway. His dishonourable attack must have used up the last of his strength, because he held onto Galenus like a stanchion to keep himself upright. It was gratifying, all the same, to feel his body jerking, his frantic grip releasing and to feel the Death Guard sliding – once more – to the dusty ground, to know that the Emperor’s bullets had finally sent him to an overdue grave.
Too late, of course, to spare his final victim.
Warning runes flashed across Galenus’s blurry vision. He didn’t need his power armour’s life signs monitor, however, to tell him what he could feel for himself.
His wounds were mortal.
In a sickly-looking grain field to the north-west of the ruined fort, the tanks of two powerful armies continued their slow-motion dance around each other.
An Imperial Stalker was baited into a trap. As it wheeled around to strike at a Chaos Vindicator from the side – where its armour plating was weaker – another Death Guard tank came up behind it, guns blazing. The Stalker was immobilised, one of its tracks destroyed. The Vindicator’s turret spun around and pumped a Demolisher shell into its stricken enemy.
The Ultramarines had lost a Hunter too: the Vengeance of Daedalus. Arkelius was unclear on the details of its demise. He only knew that the crew had, praise the Emperor, escaped with their lives.
The terrain for quite some away around was flat, offering no natural cover. Now, however, the battlefield was becoming littered with burned-out tank corpses, which the remaining drivers scrambled to use to their best advantage. Through his vision slit, Arkelius could make out the remaining Stalker, sheltering behind its dead twin. It edged out to fire off a rapid salvo from its stormcannons, then reversed back into hiding while its gunner reloaded.
In the midst of all this activity, the Scourge of the Skies was paralysed. Its gun was silent. To the other combatants, it must have appeared to be a corpse itself. With so many gunners trying to shoot around it, however, it was far from safe.
Arkelius heard Corbin cursing loudly as the engine failed to start again.
‘Try increasing the throttle pressure,’ he suggested.
‘I already did, sergeant,’ Corbin grunted, his tone suggesting that he didn’t like being told how to do his job, even injured as he was. He must have done something right, anyway, because the engine wheezed and turned over and almost caught. It was certainly an improvement, thought Arkelius. The downside was that they had undoubtedly just flared red on the auspexes of every enemy tank around them.
‘How’s that blockage in the missile tube coming along?’ he asked.
‘Cleared, sergeant,’ said Iunus. ‘I think.’
‘You think?’
‘I’m getting some odd readings. Damage reports. I think the fault is probably in the cogitators themselves. I think the launcher is cleared and ready for loading. But there’s a chance, a small chance that, when I squeeze that trigger…’
‘What?’ Arkelius barked, impatiently. ‘A chance of what?’
It was Corbin who answered him; doubtless, he had been in similar situations before. ‘There’s a chance of the missile detonating in the chamber,’ he said, ‘and blowing the Scourge – and all three of us – sky-high.’
Arkelius took a breath. ‘Iunus, pick a target. Your choice – I can’t see a damn thing out there. Be ready to fire on my mark, which I’ll give as soon as Corbin can get–’
‘I’m trying, sergeant,’ Corbin interrupted.
‘–this Emperor-forsaken, son-of-a-warp-spawn scrapheap–’
‘Can’t see to read the status display, but it sounds to me like–’
‘–moving again!’ Hours’ worth of pent-up frustration bubbled up from Arkelius’s chest, and he punched the unyielding bulkhead between himself and his driver.
At exactly the moment that he did so, the engine caught with a belligerent roar. The Machine-God had finally answered his prayers.
Iunus loosed off a Skyspear missile on cue. A moment later, he boasted of a palpable hit to the port flank of an unsuspecting Vindicator.
‘Corbin, reverse us out of here, one-ninety degree bearing,’ barked Arkelius. ‘Iunus, reload and fire again. Same target, if you can. Don’t give them a chance to–’
He had almost forgotten about the Scourge’s damaged steering.
As they picked up speed, Iunus yelled a warning that they were about to back into a friendly Predator Destructor. Corbin managed to regain control in time, and Arkelius guided him with an eye on his monitors, ‘Adjust course, fifteen… no, eighteen degrees counter-clockwise. Steady on the accelerator pedal, and bring her to rest in three, two, one… now.’
Corbin stepped on the brake. As he did so, Arkelius saw two lights like glaring eyes bearing down on the Scourge through the smoke. The same searchlights as before? Almost certainly, they belonged to the Vindicator they had just hit, seeking deadly retribution.
The Chaos tank had them firmly in its sights. Arkelius, however, had guided Corbin into a narrow gap between two Predator Destructors. They ground forward at that moment, to protect the Hunter, its crew and, most importantly, its
powerful weapon.
The Vindicator tried to manoeuvre around the Imperial tanks. When that failed, it tried to blast its way through them instead. ‘They’ve bought us some time,’ said Arkelius. ‘Let’s make it count.’ He told Corbin to lower the stabilisers, and, the instant he had completed that task, Iunus fired again.
He aimed his next missile into the air, safely over the friendly Predator Destructors’ heads. It soared over the Chaos Vindicator too, before it reached the apex of its arc. But then, the mummified brain inside it took over and brought the missile around for a second pass.
It swooped in low and struck its target from behind.
Arkelius had to avert his eyes from the fierce explosion. His auto-senses detected a small, brief increase in temperature, even inside his armoured compartment. Iunus confirmed that the Vindicator had been obliterated. Its icon on his targeting auspex had blinked out.
‘Looks like that made a big difference too,’ he remarked. ‘We punched a hole through the enemy’s line, and our Predators have slipped behind their defences. They just destroyed another Vindicator, and two more have been cut off from the others.’
He was probably exaggerating – about the Scourge’s contribution to the turnaround, if nothing else – but Arkelius was happy to believe him.
The vox-net alerted him to another threat. The crews of the stricken and destroyed enemy tanks were coming out fighting. Some of them were Plague Marines, some of them hideous mutant aberrations. Few of them lasted long. They were cut down by the Imperial tanks’ autocannons, or by Space Marine marksmen stationed at the edge of the battlefield.
Iunus reported that he had reloaded and had another target lock.
Arkelius felt a grin contorting his concealed face. Of course, he knew better than to ever become complacent – more than most, he knew how suddenly the fortunes of war could change – but still, this war was going very well for his side.
‘Next stop,’ he muttered, just loudly enough for his crewmates to hear him over their shared vox-channel, ‘Fort Kerberos.’
