[Word Bearers 03] - Dark Creed

by Anthony Reynolds - (ebook by Undead)

  From further up the heavily defended corridor—one of three that the Word Bearers were advancing up towards the bridge—a blinding lascannon beam struck, punching a cauterised hole straight through one of his Anointed brethren. Even mighty Terminator armour afforded little protection against such a weapon.

  Waves of bolter fire struck the advancing Terminators, and though few of his warriors fell to the unrelenting swathe of fire, it was slowing their progress. The enemy fell back before them, taking cover behind barricades that rose from the corridor floor. As the Word Bearers advanced, the barriers retracted, denying the XVII Legion their cover. Kol Badar cared not. The thick ceramite and adamantium plating of the Anointed’s Terminator armour could withstand easily as much incoming fire as the barricades themselves.

  Behind the enemy squads up ahead, towards the four-way junction roughly forty metres in front of the advancing Terminators, Kol Badar could see a White Consuls Techmarine at work, setting up a series of Tarantula sentry guns.

  A stabbing lascannon beam struck down one of his warriors, and another lost an arm to a plasma gun. Kol Badar snarled in frustration. A dozen target markers were blinking red before his eyes as the head-up targeting display of his quad-tusked helmet identified threats, and he selected the lascannon-wielding enemy Space Marine with a blink.

  “Suppressing fire,” ordered the Coryphaus, allocating the target to one of his Anointed squads.

  “Target confirmed,” came the growled reply from the squad’s champion.

  A second later a Reaper autocannon began to scream, the heavy underslung cannon swinging towards the allocated target. The twin barrels of the devastating weapon spat a torrent of high-calibre fire towards the enemy squad, and the deck floor around the Terminator was showered with countless hundreds of spent shell casings in seconds.

  A grenade rolled to Kol Badar’s feet but he ignored it and continued his advance. It detonated in a blinding fireball, spraying the area with super-heated shrapnel. He marched on through the fiery conflagration without concern, ignoring the fact that his armour was now alight and riddled with debris. He didn’t even feel the heat of the blaze through the thick insulated layers of his exo-armour.

  Emerging from the flames, he gunned down two Scouts as they ducked back to the next barricade before switching his attention as his auto-senses flashed him a warning. He turned to see a combat squad of power-armoured Astartes advancing up to flank him, using a dimly-lit side-passage filled with cables and pipes. The two enemies in the lead both carried melta guns, potent weapons easily capable of liquefying even Terminator armour. Kol Badar activated the flame unit of his combi-bolter, sending burning promethium down the corridor to meet them. The rolling fire filled the narrow service tunnel, engulfing the enemy Space Marines. The Coryphaus pumped bolts through the inferno. His targeting array revealed that the flamer had only incapacitated two of his enemies.

  With a clipped order to his Anointed to advance, Kol Badar stomped into the service tunnel and unleashed another burst from his flamer. He came upon the first White Consul within the blaze. The Space Marine’s armour was blackened and smoking. Kol Badar’s crackling power talons clenched into a fist and he smashed the warrior backwards, crumpling his thick power-armoured chestplate like foil.

  A melta gun seared a glancing blow across his shoulder, making Kol Badar hiss in sudden pain, and he launched himself forward as the enemy squad frantically back-pedalled. His combi-bolter created gaping craters in the armour of two of the White Consuls, not penetrating but knocking them off-balance, and he grabbed the arm of one of them as the melta gun was turned again in his direction.

  With a sharp twist, Kol Badar ripped the White Consul’s arm off at the shoulder. He kicked the warrior square in the face, shattering the front of his helmet before planting a fatal bolt through the ruptured rebreather grille.

  A chainsword hit him on the arm, its teeth screaming as they sought to shear through his thick armour amid a spray of ceramite chips. Kol Badar backhanded the warrior into the wall and gunned down the last White Consul in the corridor.

  Angry at having been slowed, Kol Badar turned around awkwardly, snarling in frustration as his massive shoulder plates ground against the service tunnel walls. He stormed back out into the main thoroughfare, crushing the corpses of his bested enemies beneath his tread.

  The Tarantula sentry guns had been deployed and were now online, and the White Consuls were falling back towards the bridge under the cover of the automated turrets. They fired at an incredible rate before falling silent momentarily, turning with mechanised precision to pick a new target as one fell and they unleashed their fury once more. Huge drams of ammunition spooled, and smoke rose from the spinning barrels of the guns as they raked the Terminators of the Anointed with heavy weapon fire.

  One of the turrets was destroyed as Reaper autocannon fire shredded its armour and ignited its ammunition store, sending it catapulting backwards as it exploded. The Anointed’s advance ground to a halt as the White Consuls, having taken up new positions further up the corridor, just outside the armoured entrance to the bridge, began to add their weight of fire to those of the remaining sentry guns. The corridor was filled with tracer fire, gouts of plasma and the contrails of missiles that screamed down its length to explode amongst the warrior brothers of the XVII Legion, and Kol Badar ground his teeth in frustration.

  “We are too slow,” came Marduk’s unnecessary assessment from further back, conveyed in Kol Badar’s earpiece via vox-link. His talons clenched in anger at the implicit rebuke in the Dark Apostle’s voice. “I will not let Ankh-Heloth take the bridge before us.”

  “I am well aware of the situation,” snarled Kol Badar as a line of assault cannon fire stitched across his breastplate.

  A wealth of information bombarded the Coryphaus, scrolling down his irises as reports from elsewhere within the Sword of Truth flooded in. He expertly sent his orders through to all the champions serving under him, coordinating their efforts to achieve the swift control of the enemy vessel, while still advancing and engaging the enemy. His ability to maintain a strategic overview and continue directing the elements of the Host even when engaged in the fiercest conflict was part of what made him such an effective Coryphaus. From the data updates and visual feeds he was receiving from the other members of the Anointed, he could see that the advance up the other corridors too had stalled.

  Another Tarantula sentry gun was silenced, and Kol Badar once again began to stride forward, ordering his Anointed on. A missile spiralled past his shoulder, exploding just metres behind him but he ignored it, pumping bolt shells towards the dug-in White Consuls up ahead. The twin-linked assault cannons of a spider-legged turret ripped across the Anointed, felling one of them and forcing another to his knees, but the remainder came on, combi-bolters bucking in their hands.

  The turret began to walk backwards, its movements stilted and jerky, and Kol Badar knew that it was being remotely operated by the White Consuls Techmarine, who was undoubtedly back with his brethren at the bridge doors. The Tarantula turned and unleashed its cannons into one Anointed brethren who was within metres of it now, the powerful weapon tearing his armour apart at such close range.

  Still, the Terminator-armoured cult-warrior had not died purposelessly, and Kol Badar broke into a heavy run as the turret spun towards another warrior of the Anointed bearing down on it, power axe crackling with energy.

  Kol Badar reached the turret as its smoking assault cannons began firing once again, and he smashed it backwards with a sweep of his talons, knocking the field cannon off its mechanised feet. The turret weighed well over a tonne, yet Kol Badar tossed it aside as if it were nothing, his prodigious strength augmented by the thick servo-bundles and hydraulic amplifiers of his Terminator suit.

  Thirty metres ahead he saw the heavy blast-doors leading to the bridge, and bellowed his orders as he began striding through the enemy fire towards them. Missiles belched from behind barricades, and the intensity of the incom
ing bolter fire was considerable, even to his heavily armoured brethren. Taking the bridge was going to be costly.

  In addition to the enemy foot troops, there was a pair of vehicles parked in front of the thick blast-doors. He knew that service elevators ran from this wide corridor down through the ship. Clearly, these vehicles been raised from the ship’s armoury depot in the lower decks to guard the wide corridor’s approach.

  Kol Badar recognised them as Razorbacks, Rhino APC variants that had come into production in the millennia since the end of the Great War. Atop the boxy white Rhino chassis, replete with blue eagle-head Chapter designs and campaign markers, were twin-linked heavy-bolter turrets. They began to roar, adding to the heavy weight of fire directed towards the Anointed.

  “Burias,” Kol Badar growled into his vox-comm. “I am target-marking a location. I want you there now.”

  No reply was forthcoming, but that did not concern the Coryphaus. He could see from his trackers that Burias and his possessed kindred were responding to his order, and the Icon Bearer clearly did not wish to risk giving away his position by sending a vox response.

  Kol Badar fired towards one of the enemy squads, his shots blowing chunks out of the barricades, forcing them to duck. A red target-laser appeared on his chest plate and he saw the White Consuls Techmarine with his ornate bolter a fraction of a second before he fired. Kol Badar snarled as he was knocked back a step, warning signals announcing a breach in his exo-skeleton’s integrity. The Techmarine was using non-standard anti-armour shells, their explosive tips replaced with melta-charges.

  He fired in return, grimacing in pain, but his shots went wide, missing their target.

  “Anytime, Burias…”

  In the wake of the Anointed vanguard, Marduk moved up more cautiously. Ducking behind cover, he slammed a fresh sickle clip into his Mars-pattern bolt pistol. The White Consuls had wrapped around behind the advancing strike force, threatening them from the rear as they plunged deeper into the battle-barge. A sniper round impacted with the wall scant centimetres from his head, gouging a heart-sized crater out of the smooth plascrete surface.

  “Get down, you fool,” he snapped at the Black Legion sorcerer accompanying him.

  Inshabael Kharesh strolled calmly through the mayhem. Trailing white smoke, a missile screamed towards the sorcerer but he merely flicked a hand dismissively as it neared him and it was deflected into the ceiling.

  Marduk scowled and broke cover, snapping off a shot and taking down a White Consul who was dashing towards a better firing position.

  The Coteries accompanying Marduk fell in around him, bolters roaring as they kept the White Consuls dogging their progress at bay.

  Behind them a combat squad with a pair of heavy bolters hustled into position under the covering fire of their brethren, falling in behind a barricade to bring the heavy weapons to bear up the corridor.

  Inshabael Kharesh turned towards them, mouthing his infernal magicks, and Marduk saw his eyes flickering with violet electricity. The Dark Apostle could feel the power growing within the sorcerer, the sensation tingling at the base of his neck. The sorcerer continued mouthing his incantation, flexing the fingers of his hands. Marduk shook his head, but then Kharesh took a step forwards, bracing his legs as the power surging within him was unleashed.

  It leapt from his fingertips in a crackling violet arc that struck one of the distant heavy bolter-armed Space Marines as he readied his weapon, cooking his flesh within his power armour. More arcs leapt from the White Consul’s convulsing form to strike his companions, and Kharesh sent a further purple lightning bolt slamming into them as he thrust his other hand towards them, lifting one of them off his feet and slamming him back against the wall behind. The sorcerer hurled three more bolts into the enemy, relishing their pain as they collapsed to the ground, twitching and jerking as the last vestiges of warp energy sparked across their bodies. The sorcerer then turned away, flashing Marduk an arrogant glance.

  “Cheap tricks,” muttered First Acolyte Ashkanez. Marduk grunted.

  Turning, he saw the Anointed’s advance slowed by the weight of fire they were drawing, and he snarled in impatience.

  “Kol Badar,” he growled, opening a vox-link to his Coryphaus.

  “I know,” came the snarled reply before he could say any more.

  Burias slithered along the vent, worming his way forward. His arms were by his sides and he squirmed through the tight confines by relaxing and flexing his genetically enhanced muscles. He came to a junction and turned to the right, continuing another hundred metres through the lightless pipe before coming to a halt. He could hear his kindred coming up behind him. The sound seemed deafeningly loud to his ears. Still, the enemy was unlikely to hear a thing over the gunfire.

  Burias exhaled a long breath as he released the shackles that bound the ravaging daemon Drak’shal, and the change came over him. His modified power armour expanded as his musculature bulged and swelled, his arms thickening and his fingers fusing into broad talons. The air-recycling pipe groaned in protest as his body expanded, the metal wrenching out of shape. Curving horns extended up from his now bestial face, and drool ran from lips that were pulled back to expose a maw heavy with fangs and tusks.

  He sniffed, hatred growing, as he tasted the unmistakeable scent of loyalist Astartes on the air. His talons extended and he punched them through the constricting embrace of the pipe. With a wrench, he tore the pipe apart and launched himself down onto the grilled sheeting below. He crashed down through the metal roofing as his brethren emerged behind him, dropping down into the midst of the enemy position.

  Burias-Drak’shal landed on all fours atop the armoured hull of a Razorback, and he let out a blood-curdling roar, throwing his head back like an unfettered beast howling at the moon.

  The White Consuls spun, turning their bolters towards this new threat without panic or fear, and bolts sliced through the air around Burias-Drak’shal. One took him in the side, gouging a deep wound in his daemonic flesh, but he ignored the injury. Bounding across the top of the armoured vehicle, talons ripping into its hull plating, he tore the twin-linked heavy bolter turret from its housing with a surge of warp-fuelled strength. He hurled the sparking turret aside and leapt from the tank.

  He landed amongst the White Consuls, roaring his hatred, and bore one of them to the ground beneath his talons. His jaw distending unnaturally, Burias-Drak’shal clamped his teeth around the warrior’s helmet. With a wrench, he tore helmet and head from the warrior’s shoulders. Blood spurted like a fountain.

  His possessed kindred dropped down among the enemy, their forms altering as they allowed the daemons lurking within them to surge to the fore, inviting them to sate their hatred upon the foe. Astartes were ripped apart, torn limb from limb by the brute force exhibited by these monsters.

  One of the possessed was lifted into the air by the clamping jaws of the White Consuls Techmarine’s servo arm, kicking and screaming in rabid fury, before the Techmarine tore it in two with a burst of fire from his master-crafted bolter. Its lower body continued to kick as it dropped to the deck in a shower of blood, while its upper half was hurled away.

  Marduk broke into a run as the weight of fire dropped. First Acolyte Ashkanez ran at his side, immense power maul clasped in both hands. The rest of the Coterie members accompanying the Dark Apostle were only a step behind, quickly overtaking the slower Anointed brethren. While Terminator armour turned an Astartes into a living tank, able to shrug off incoming fire and march staunchly on enemy positions, it slowed a warrior down considerably—an acceptable compromise in situations such as boarding actions and close-quarter fire-fights.

  The possessed carved a bloody swathe through the White Consuls, and their roars and bellows echoed sharply up the corridor. Still, there were only a handful of the daemonically infused warriors, and the Consuls were reacting quickly to their presence, squads falling back into disciplined fire channels that hammered them with bolter fire. Another two possessed were torn
to shreds by the concentrated weight of fire. Their forms mutated wildly as they perished, the daemons within seeking desperately to maintain control over their dying host-bodies.

  Nevertheless, the possessed had done their job and cracked the enemy formation, allowing the Word Bearers to close the distance.

  Marduk bolstered his pistol and drew his chainsword. Barbed thorns set into the daemon weapon’s hilt pushed through the perforations drilled into the palm of his gauntlets, and a tingle ran though him as they pierced his flesh. His blood mingled with the daemon-blade, and he felt a surge of fury and power as he and the daemon Borhg’ash bound within the roaring blade became one. Borhg’ash’s anger and desire to feed flooded through him, and he revelled in the sensation, more powerful than any hyper-stimm or combat drug.

  “Death to the False Emperor!” Marduk roared, and wielding the daemon weapon in one hand and his humming crozius in the other, he leapt a barricade, hurling himself amongst the White Consuls. His chainsword roared, carving power armour and flesh, and his blessed crozius was wreathed in dark energy as he laid about him with it.

  Ashkanez was only a step behind, and a powerful blow of his power maul took a White Consul under the chin, lifting the Space Marine off his feet and sending him flying backwards. The weapon’s power source surged on impact with a sharp crack of discharging energy, splitting the warrior’s power armour and shattering his jaw.

  A White Consul deflected Marduk’s next strike with his bolter, the teeth of his daemon-blade ripping chunks out of the gun’s casing. The Dark Apostle slammed his crozius into the warrior’s side, puncturing power armour and lungs with its spikes and hurling the Consul into the wall. Before he could finish the warrior, a bolt pistol wielded by another Consul boomed, the shot taking Marduk in his shoulder, spinning him half around. His own blood sprayed out around him for a moment before the potent hyper-coagulants of his bloodstream sealed the wound, and he growled in pain and outrage.