[Battlefleet Gothic 01] - Execution Hour

by Gordon Rennie - (ebook by Undead)

  But again came the heavy drumming of the autocannon as it blasted a deadly accurate burst of fire into the pinned-down Arbitrators sheltering in cover at the end of the street, adamantium-tipped shells cutting indiscriminately through flesh and mud-brick cover alike.

  There was a fiery blast as a lucky or well-aimed shell found the engine of one of the Arbites Rhino transports, quickly followed by voices screaming in terror and pain as the vehicle’s fuel cells exploded, immolating the Arbites squad sheltering inside. From the lee of the building wall where he was sheltering, Byzantane could see the autocannon firing from an open doorway beside the one where the tox-bomb booby trap had been planted. From this well-protected position it had a clear field of fire right down the street. Byzantane ripped off his rebreather mask, cursing in fury as he activated his vox-cast link.

  “Korte, we’re being massacred! Bring up your grenade launcher teams to deal with that autocannon.”

  “A difficult target, marshal. They’re well dug in, and you’re too close. There’s as much chance we’ll hit you as destroy them.”

  “Then cover me instead,” Byzantane spat, getting to his feet and reaching for one of the heavy frag grenades held in one of the pouches of his harness belt.

  “Understood, marshal. Stand by,” came his deputy’s calm-voiced reply over the vox-cast.

  Byzantane launched himself forward on cue, hearing the reassuring blast-roar of Arbites’ shotguns from behind him as Korte and his squad opened fire at the rooftop snipers. Byzantane ran through the hail of sniper fire, spotting a flurry of movement at the periphery of his vision, and looked to see dark-cloaked figures moving around inside the cover of a nearby alley mouth. He ducked, just as a volley of gunfire erupted from the alley, stitching the mudbrick wall behind him with bullet holes and smoking las-blast marks. He fired back, keeping his finger on the trigger of the stuttering pistol and sending a burst of lethal bolter shells into the darkness of the alleyway. Two of the figures crouching there vanished in a sudden red spray.

  He kept running towards the coven-guarded doorway, seeing one of the Chaos cultists manning the autocannon point to him in sudden alarm. The barrel of the autocannon swung round towards him as its operator started to draw a bead on him. A hidden sniper’s las-shot scored a burn line across the plasti-steel of one of his armoured shoulder pads, cutting through the layers of woven poly-silicate, impact-resistant material of his uniform to sear the flesh underneath.

  Ignoring the pain, aware only of the deadly threat of the autocannon barrel now gaping straight at him, Byzantane hurled the grenade through the mouth of the doorway, where it detonated scant seconds later, killing the Chaos cultists clustered inside.

  Byzantane jumped past the wreckage of the autocannon and its crew, unsure whether the twisted limbs and gruesome, bloody redesigns of human flesh that he glimpsed there were a result of Chaos mutation or merely the work of heat blast and razor-sharp shrapnel burst. Warily, the Arbites commander stepped into the darkened room beyond the doorway, bolt pistol in one hand and power maul in the other. His fingers touched the sequence of activation runes on the haft of the maul, and the energy weapon crackled into life as he brought it up to near full strength setting, its energy aura bathing the abattoir scene inside the room with a flickering blue light and revealing vile-looking sigils and runes daubed on the walls of the place. The painted marks seemed to actually writhe and retreat along the rough surface of the walls as the light touched them, and with a lurch of revulsion Byzantane understood them to be blasphemous symbols in praise of the dark gods of Chaos.

  A number of doorways opened off from the room, one of them leading to a crude, downwards-sloping passage. A faint current, shockingly cold compared to the heat outside, drifted up from the darkness there, carrying with it the scent of something rotten and foul. Byzantane instinctively notched the crackling power maul up to a higher energy setting, just as a crowd of black-cloaked figures exploded out at him from the other doorways, screaming sounds of animal hatred at the Arbiter as they attacked.

  The bolt pistol in his right hand sounded loud in the confined space of the room. Bolter shells shredded open the chest of one cultist, tore off another one’s legs at a point just above the knees. They fell to the ground, still screaming as they died. The bolt pistol clicked empty and, with a feral curse, he threw it into the snarling face of the next Chaos cultist.

  At the same time he swung the power maul in his left hand, its energy-haloed mace head cutting a fiery arc through the air. At its lower, normal settings, the weapon’s energy field could knock out an opponent with one blow; at the higher settings, it pulverized flesh and bone into bloody jelly. Byzantane’s first blow struck one of the Chaos cultists across the head, shattering it in a spray of bone and brain matter. His second blow came down on the next opponent’s shoulder, cleaving down through his ribcage and destroying his chest cavity. Byzantane hauled on the weapon, pulling it free of the dead cultist’s body just as another screaming maniac threw himself at the Arbiter. This one’s mouth gaped horribly open, his mutant jaws distending wide to reveal a mouthful of needle-fanged teeth even more deadly than the serrated knife blade in his hand.

  Byzantane smashed the fist of his now empty right hand into the cultist’s mouth, feeling the mutant thing’s fangs break under the impact. Unable to bring his power maul to bear, he swung out clumsily with his other arm, partially blocking his enemy’s knife thrust, deflecting the lighting-quick attack away from his exposed throat and into the armoured gorget collar round his neck. The creature bucked wildly on top of him, its strength inhuman. It gnashed its broken-toothed, blood-foamed jaws, trying to chew through the tough material of the gauntlet and into the meat of Byzantane’s hand. At the same time its other hand locked round Byzantane’s throat and it pressed forward, using its body weight to pin him down as it began to saw its knife blade through the armoured collar and into the flesh of his neck.

  A heavy booted foot crashed into the creature’s face, sending it sprawling. A shotgun blast lifted the thing up from where it fell, two more dumping it in the corner in a ragged, bleeding heap.

  “Help the marshal primus,” commanded Korte, his combat shotgun spitting scatter shell shots with deadly accuracy into the remainder of the Chaos things as they retreated back into the darkness and away from the Arbitrator squad now crowding through the doorway from the street outside.

  Byzantane shrugged off the gauntleted hands that helped him to his feet, and bent to retrieve and reload his bolt pistol. He looked questioningly at his deputy.

  “Twelve dead so far. The worst of it was in the street outside,” said Korte, looking round the chamber and glancing with distaste at the sigils daubed on the walls. “They caught us by surprise at first, but after that we soon got the measure of them. Nothing but heretic rabble and scum. Mahan, Scheer, Bartolemeo and their squads are chasing down what’s left of them now.”

  Korte kicked with disgust at one of the dead mutant things lying at his feet. “It would seem that the marshal primus has found what he was looking for.”

  “A whole nest of them,” Byzantane nodded grimly, indicating the entrance to the subterranean passage. “Bring up lux-lamps, flamers and power shields. Grenades too, as many as each man can carry. And find Truthseeker Shaulo. We’ll need his help if we are going to flush out the rest of these abominations.”

  THREE

  Cornered and with nowhere to ran, the servants of Chaos made the Arbitrator squad fight for every step of their long and bloody descent into the dark. Heedless of their own survival, they threw themselves forward into the face of the Arbites’ guns. Flechette scatter rounds and solid shot shells from the Arbites’ shotguns ripped them apart as they charged forward, but those that followed on behind clambered over the bodies of the dead and dying to get at their enemies. At other times, they held back, firing incessantly up the passageway at Byzantane and his squad as the Arbites troops crept forward behind hand-held power shields, the Imperium troops depending o
n the shields’ humming energy fields to protect them from the withering hail of fire coming at them from out of the darkness.

  Five times they came to junctions or sudden turnings in the passage. Forewarned by Truthseeker Shaulo’s psychic senses, they were able to avoid the ambushes waiting for them at these dangerous juncture points. Flamer bursts and hurled handfuls of frag and choke grenades cleared out side passages, flushing burning and asphyxiating figures out of hiding and into the gun-sights of the waiting Arbiters. Shotgun-launched salvoes of the special heat-seeking shells—called “executioners” amongst the Adeptus Arbites—were fired whenever they came to a corner, the tiny Adeptus Mechanicus devices buzzing off into the darkness in search of their targets, followed split seconds later by screams of pain and the sound of multiple detonations into human tissue. Quickly advancing round the corner, Byzantane and his men soon finished off any who had survived the executioner shells’ deadly bite.

  The Arbites’ own progress down into the depths was not without loss. Arbitrator of the Second Rank Corna, who had served by Byzantane’s side since the marshal’s quelling of the inmates’ rebellion aboard the prison-hulk Charon, had his throat torn out by an autogun bullet that had pierced an overloaded and failing power shield. Minutes later, during the clearing of a side passage, a mutated female cultist, ablaze with flamer-ignited promethium, had ran straight into their midst through a hail of bullets, her burning and bullet-riddled body propelled onwards by hatred and insane devotion to her daemon-lord masters. She threw herself at Proctor-Sergeant Tylen, enfolding herself around him in a deadly embrace and wrapping him in the blanket of flames that covered her own body. Nothing could break her furious hold on the screaming, burning Arbiter, and so the two of them had died together in another hail of shotgun fire as Tylen’s comrades sought to spare him a slow, agonising death amongst the flames.

  It was another fifteen brutal and bloody minutes—minutes filled with the roar of Arbites shotguns and the shrieking screams of the Chaos cultists—before the Imperium law-keepers fought their way down to the passageway’s terminus. Byzantane kicked aside the corpse of the last Chaos cultist—some kind of priest-leader, judging by his robes and the horribly intricate tattoo markings on the diseased and rotting skin of his face—who only seconds ago had tried to eviscerate him with a wild chainsword swing, and stepped forward to enter the chamber beyond.

  “Beware, marshal,” warned Shaulo, the albino truthseeker’s face looking haggard and eerily ghost-like in the flickering light of the lux-lamps. “I sense the presence of the powers of the warp in this place.”

  Byzantane motioned to the Arbitrators flanking him, indicating for them to spread out and cover the entire chamber with shotguns and flamers. He repressed a shiver of superstitious dread that rose up from the depths of his barbarian soul. He feared no enemy of the Emperor, but the warp-born horrors of Chaos made him feel like one of his primitive feral world ancestors, crouching together for mutual protection round their cave-mouth fires and listening in fear to the cries and screams of unknown beasts prowling the darkness beyond.

  Powerful lux-beams scanned the walls of the chamber, revealing more of the blasphemous daubings on the rough stone walls; walls that had been carved out of the living rock long ago. The place was perhaps some kind of ancient smugglers’ hideaway or outlaw bolt-hole, thought Byzantane, not wanting to dwell on the alternative possibility that Chaos cults may have been thriving here on Belatis since the time when this place was secretly excavated centuries ago.

  “Throne of Earth!” exclaimed Arbitrator of the Third Rank Mainz as the beam from his lux-lamp revealed the thing hanging in chains on the far wall.

  It was human, Byzantane realized, although it was only through his understanding of the savage and terrible new shapes that combat in all its forms could reduce the human body to, that he was able to recognise it as such. Byzantane had taken part in his share of interrogations, but torture at the hands of the Adeptus Arbites was a simple and brutal affair, designed to break the body and will of the prisoner as quickly and efficiently as possible. In contrast, Byzantane knew that the Inquisition employed specialists who had been versed from childhood in the countless methods of inflicting pain and suffering, and who considered torture to be almost an art form. Perhaps these madmen, in their wildest fantasies, could have imagined the thing that now hung before the Arbites squad.

  It was the human form re-sculpted: a body turned inside out but still somehow following a semblance of its original shape. Reformed flesh flowed over reshaped bones; sinews, veins and musculature twisted in complex new patterns over the skin that had once covered them. It was an abomination in flesh, no doubt left hanging here by the cult either as a sacrificial leftover or as some kind of gruesome altarpiece before which they performed the obscene rites and ceremonies demanded by their daemonic masters.

  Shaulo suddenly staggered back. Byzantane caught the truthseeker just as he started to collapse, seeing the blood—shockingly red against his chalk-white skin—pouring from the albino’s nose, sensing the sudden oppressive change in the atmosphere within the chamber, feeling the first droplets of blood drip down his own face and onto his lips.

  “Marshal…” choked the psyker, his face contorted in pain.

  “Marshal, beware,” echoed a voice from nearby, its tone thick with mocking irony.

  Byzantane heard a clink of chains, and when he looked up the thing on the wall raised its twisted head to grin back at him with malicious pleasure.

  “Yes, beware,” it said, from a mouth that should form no words, from a body that could hold no life. “Beware, little lackey. Faithful little servant of the false weakling emperor. The gaze of the Despoiler has fallen upon this world and all it contains. Pray to your weakling emperor for salvation. Seek protection behind your fleets of warships. It will do you no good. Better to kill yourselves now, better to kill each other, than face the fate that descends on you from out of the warp!”

  The Chaos oracle-thing’s voice was rising to a gleeful shriek, ectoplasmic slime spraying from its malformed lips. Byzantane found he could not move, could only stand and stare at it in horrified fascination as it thrashed wildly against the confines of the chains pinning it to the wall.

  “Kill yourselves! Kill your comrades! Kill your children! Better to die now than wait for the shadow of the executioner to fall upon you all!”

  Korte was the first to act, raising and firing his combat shotgun. The weapon’s harsh roar was a catalyst to the others, breaking the spell the daemon-thing’s presence had cast over everyone within the chamber, and they too raised and fired their weapons. The thing hanging from the wall shrieked in perverse pleasure as its body was torn apart by the volley of shotgun blasts, thrashing madly and cackling in daemonic joy even as Byzantane took hold of one of the flamers and enveloped it in an all-consuming wave of fire. He continued to play the jet of flame over the oracle-thing’s body long after its flesh had melted from its bones and the last echoes of its insane laughter had faded away.

  The remains of the thing lay smouldering on the ground, fused and unrecognisable. Despite its destruction, none of the Arbitrators dared go near it. Korte looked to his commander.

  “Marshal, what orders?”

  Byzantane handed the flamer to one of the Arbitrator troopers, seeing another one reach down to attend to the unconscious figure of Shaulo. “Burn it,” he ordered. “Burn it all. Use melta-charges. We’ll collapse the passageway behind us when we leave. Nothing must remain of this place when we are gone.”

  “And after that?” asked Korte, the big hiveworlder trying to subdue the note of uncertainty in his voice. Byzantane laid a reassuring hand on his second-in-command’s shoulder.

  “After that, old friend, we prepare to face whatever it was that thing was speaking of.”

  FOUR

  Adept Veneratus Parcelus Sobek awoke from his meditative trance, greatly troubled by the changes he sensed in the shifting currents of the great empyrean. It was dark w
ithin the small, windowless chamber he occupied in the southern wing of Madina’s main Ecclesiarchy citadel-cathedral, but he had been blind for almost eighty years, ever since he had willingly sacrificed his sight during the ritual of binding his soul with that of the Divine Emperor, and, as an astropath psyker, he now had little need of anything as crude as mere visual sight.

  He had served the Emperor well, linking his mind in the warp with those of his brother astropaths as they communicated with each other over the vast interstellar distances, but in recent years he had started to realise that his abilities were now slowly changing. All astropaths were occasionally gifted and cursed with fleeting images of the future, but the elusive talent of true precognition lay not only in understanding the meaning of such shadowy images as they flickered across the face of the warp, but also in being able to distinguish those that were real from those that were the misleading work of the deceitful daemon-things that inhabited the furthest reaches of the immaterium.

  Sobek reached out, unerringly finding and picking up the small box that he already knew to be there. In his mind’s eye, his psychic senses saw him performing each action just before he did it, enabling him to move and operate in the physical world with far greater care and precision that any normal sighted human. He ran his index finger down the seal on top of the box, the container recognising the genetic signature of its owner and opening itself to allow him to remove its precious contents. A series of thinly-cut cards made from a substance that felt like, but was not, delicate bone, slid out into his hand.

  The Imperial tarot.

  Sobek laid the first of the blank-faced cards out before him on the prayer mat he was kneeling on. His lips silently intoned the words of the Invocation of Blessed Prophecy. He concentrated, focussing his inner sight, as he reached out with his mind into the warp again, searching through its dark depths for the bright, pure radiance that was the overpowering psychic presence of the Master of Mankind. It would be through this mystic commune with the Emperor that Sobek would know the meaning of the troubling thoughts that had disturbed his meditations.