Under his left eye, a jagged hunk of shrapnel the size of his palm was still embedded in his cheekbone. He tore it free and dropped it to the deck floor. The hyper-coagulants in his genhanced bloodstream would seal the wound within minutes.
‘You are back with us, captain?’ said Khârn.
Dreagher’s gaze returned to Khârn, seated opposite him.
‘I am back,’ he said, his voice a hoarse growl.
As his eyes grew accustomed to the gloom, he saw Khârn’s armour bore fresh scars and promethium burns, as did his own.
‘Good,’ said Khârn.
The shuttle lurched beneath them. From the sound of the engine, he knew they were in the void.
Dreagher looked around him, taking in the details of the shuttle’s interior.
‘This is not one of ours,’ he said in a low voice.
‘No,’ said Khârn.
‘We are within a Third Legion shuttle?’
‘Yes.’
Dreagher’s memories were starting to come back to him, though trying to regain them too fast was pointless – akin to struggling to remember one’s dreams upon waking. Or at least so it was before Nuceria. Ever since then – ever since the primarch’s change – all he dreamed of was blood.
‘Where are we?’ said Dreagher.
‘About to dock with the Golden Absolute.’
‘The Emperor’s Children battle cruiser?’ said Dreagher.
A hint of what might have been humour gleamed in Khârn’s eyes.
‘The same,’ he said.
‘This is…’ hissed Dreagher.
‘Insanity?’ suggested Khârn. He smiled. There was no warmth in it. ‘Some would say the same of your actions in killing the Third Legion envoy. I am impressed. I did not think you had it in you. You may well have united the Legion. Either that, or you have destroyed it.’
A red hazard light began to strobe, and a voice that Dreagher recognised crackled through on the internal vox.
‘Docking in thirty seconds,’ said the voice. ‘The Third Legion has shown no sign that they are yet aware of our presence.’
‘Baruda?’ said Dreagher.
‘He came looking for you,’ said Khârn. ‘Now, prepare yourself. It is time.’
Dreagher threw off his locking restraint and rose to his feet, maglocks ensuring he did not stumble. One of his warriors handed him a bolt pistol – his own was nowhere to be seen – and he nodded in thanks. He checked its clip; full. The weapon bore the emblem of the Emperor’s Children, but he didn’t care. It was a weapon. Who it had been made for mattered not.
The Storm Eagle’s stabiliser engines roared and its acceleration bled off. A shudder ran through the length of the shuttle’s fuselage. They were passing through the integrity shielding of the Emperor’s Children battle cruiser, Dreagher knew. Gravity and a breathable atmosphere crashed in around them. The gunship groaned and creaked alarmingly, its armoured flanks flexing and expanding as the vacuum of the void was left behind.
The engines roared again, and hydraulics groaned and shuddered as the Storm Eagle’s landing gear was deployed.
The internal vox-grilles crackled with Baruda’s voice once again.
‘Ten seconds,’ he said.
Khârn had his helmet on and he rose from his seat, Gorechild growling in his grasp.
‘We hit them hard, before they know we are here,’ he said. His voice was an angry growl. Indeed, his whole persona seemed changed now that his helmet was in place. Aggression radiated from him like a heat shimmer. ‘We slow and we die.’
‘Five seconds,’ said Baruda. There were some loud bangs on the exterior of the gunship. Impact detonations.
‘They are onto us,’ came Baruda’s crackling vox. ‘Expect heavy resistance. Clearing the landing zone now.’
Baruda unleashed the fury of the Storm Eagle’s nose-mounted heavy bolters, the deep bass-boom of the weapon fire making the whole ship shudder.
The gunship touched down hard, landing gear screeching as it slid upon the embarkation deck plating.
‘Warriors of the Twelfth!’ roared Khârn.
The assault ramps blasted open, slamming down hard. The sound of the Storm Eagle’s bolters became instantly louder, their echo booming across the open deck. Gas propellant filled the air as Baruda unleashed the fury of the Storm Eagle’s vengeance launchers, sending a flurry of rockets stabbing across the open deck. Explosions erupted, sending great orange fireballs and oily black smoke curling up to the hangar’s ceiling.
Khârn led the charge, sprinting out onto the embarkation deck, weapons roaring, even as return fire pinged off the deck around them.
‘Blood for the Legion!’ roared Khârn. ‘Blood for the primarch!’
‘So what happens now?’
Maven was scrolling down ship manifests on his data-slate, scanning the lists as new information was in-loaded.
The deck was filled with launch crews, servitors and indentured serfs. Those whose frontal lobes had not been seared out through Mechanicum-sanctioned lobotomisation waited in tense expectation for the inbound shuttles; the others simply drooled, staring vacantly as they awaited a directive.
‘I don’t see him,’ Maven said without looking up. ‘He’s not here. He’s not here.’
‘That doesn’t answer my question.’
‘What?’ said Maven, looking up.
Skoral stood with her arms folded across her chest, glaring at him. Behind her was her contingent of medicae-assigned servitors, alongside a small flotilla of hovering stretcher-pallets.
‘What happens now?’ Skoral said again.
‘What happens now is that we do our jobs,’ said Maven, returning his attention to the data-slate. ‘Your job is about to get a lot busier. And mine… Well, it would seem that my workload has just been halved. Khârn is not on any of the inbound shuttles.’
‘He’s not dead,’ said Skoral. ‘He can’t be dead.’
‘He is not immortal,’ said Maven. ‘He can be killed as easily as any other member of the Legion. Well, maybe not as easily, and he’s been known to come back from the brink of death before, but… a bolt in the brainpan would end him as it would any other legionary. There is no coming back from that.’
Maven continued scanning.
‘Dreagher is not here either,’ he added in a quieter tone, glancing sideways at Skoral.
‘You could be reading it wrong,’ she said.
He wasn’t, but he didn’t say that. He didn’t need to. It was likely that Dreagher was dead – early estimates suggested that more than seventy per cent of the deputation that had gone down to meet the Emperor’s Children had perished. Nevertheless, there was always the chance the captain still lived. They were not immortal, the World Eaters, but it took a hell of a lot to kill them.
The colour had drained from Skoral’s face, and Maven put a hand on her shoulder, giving it a comforting squeeze. It was a strained and difficult relationship that the mortal servants of the XII Legion had with their masters, yet Maven could understand Skoral’s reaction. Dreagher was as unpredictable and dangerous as any of the Legion, but he was one of the good ones, as was his own master.
As much as Maven pushed the boundaries and mouthed off more than was probably necessary, he was incredibly loyal to Brond. Even that was as nothing next to the pedestal that Skoral placed Dreagher on. She was utterly devoted to him, practically venerating the ground he walked on.
The heavy blast shutters – each as high as a Titan and half a hundred metres wide – groaned as they began to open. The harsh, red-tinged glare of the system’s twin suns began to advance across the deck as the vast thermo-shielding plates rolled aside. It made the whole deck look as if it was on fire. The line of light reached Maven and Skoral and began to climb. They shielded their eyes as it climbed up their bodies and reached their faces. With the blast shutt
er lowered, all that separated them from the void was the invisible skin of the bay’s integrity field. Beyond, immense, building-sized cannon turrets turned towards the incoming ships.
The first of the Legion Stormbirds pierced the integrity field, sending out great ripples across its surface. It passed through, filling the deck with the roar of its engines and the stink of cordite, promethium and exhaust fumes. Its armour was scorched black, and battle damage tracked across its fuselage. Its massive engines rotated downwards as it came in, guided by flashing beacons and serfs waving lumen wands. It lowered to the deck, engines roaring, and its clawed landing gear locked it down.
Assault ramps dropped, and legionaries covered in blood emerged from within, shouting and gesturing.
‘You’re up,’ said Maven.
Skoral was already moving, directing her medicae teams forward. She looked back at Maven as another Stormbird penetrated the integrity shield.
‘Find Dreagher,’ she said. ‘He has to be there.’
They roared through the enemy like a hot wind, barely slowing as they hacked a bloody path towards the bridge.
Speed was essential. Any World Eaters who succumbed to the Nails and stopped to satiate their blood-lust were left behind. They’d reap a bloody toll before they were brought down.
In the main, those ranged against them were unaugmented naval armsmen, and they had as little chance of halting the World Eaters as they did of trying to hold back an incoming tide with their hands.
They were armoured in baroque cream and gold suits of environmentally sealed carapace plate. Only their eyes could be seen beyond the thick glass of their heavy helmets, peering out through a glowing, purple fog. By their lack of fear and apparent disdain for their own lives, Dreagher judged that mist to be some kind of soporific.
They bore weapons designed to repel boarders while minimising the risk of a hull breach: assault shotguns, electro-prods, heavy-bore slug guns, shock-shields, energised halberds.
Against a regular boarding force, they would have been a significant threat. Against legionaries – especially those of the XII Legion – they were chaff.
Dreagher carved the legs out from beneath one of them, severing them above the knees with one sweep of his roaring chainaxe before spinning and ramming his gladius through the glass faceplate of another, impaling his head. Pale, sickly smelling musk wafted from the helmet breach as Dreagher wrenched his gladius free.
He glimpsed another of the defence crew lower a shotgun in his direction and he turned his shoulder into it, leaning into the blast as the weapon boomed. He was kicked back half a step, but he recovered quickly, hurling himself forward. The shotgun boomed again, and he felt displaced air rush by his face. Then he slammed into the armsman, shoulder first, and rammed him back into the wall. The force of the blow made the wall buckle, but the armsman came off the worse. His ribcage was crushed like a cage of twigs, pulping the organs within. It was a death sentence. Internal injuries would have seen him bleed out within minutes. Nevertheless, Dreagher rammed his blade into the armsman’s gut, once, twice. On the third thrust, the armsman’s spine was severed.
‘Move!’ he shouted, rising. A shotgun blast took him in the side, scarcely making him rock. He glared up at his assailant. An armsman was backing away, shotgun lowered. Before he could fire another shot, the skull-helmed figure of Baruda hit him from the side with a swinging arm to the neck. The human was felled instantly, his throat crushed, and he slammed to the deck with a bone-jarring crash.
Blood covered the deck floor and splashed up the walls. Armsmen lay strewn across the corridor like discarded toys, severed limbs and headless torsos lying in bloodied heaps. The World Eaters were butchering their way onwards, unstoppable, unrelenting, unforgiving.
Khârn was at their fore, a simple hand axe in each fist and a pile of bodies spread around him. Gorechild was slung across his back. He would not sully its teeth with the likes of these weaklings.
More of the enemy appeared further up the corridor, rounding a corner with shock-shields raised. Behind the shield wall, armsmen with shotguns and grenade tubes pushed forward, raising their weapons.
Without waiting to see if anyone was with him, Khârn was up and running, sprinting towards them.
‘With Khârn!’ roared Dreagher, breaking into a run.
Baruda knelt upon the armsman who had fired upon Dreagher, hacking with his cleaver. His ivory skull helm was sprayed with blood with every strike. Dreagher dragged him to his feet as he ran past.
‘Enough!’ he shouted. ‘We need to keep moving!’
Baruda fell in beside his captain, shaking the blood from his cleaver as he ran. Dreagher could imagine the savage grin on his narrow, predatory face.
‘It feels good to fight with Khârn once more,’ he said. ‘Will it be enough?’
‘We shall see,’ said Dreagher.
With a dull thump, the first of the armsmen’s grenade launchers fired. Trailing an arc of vapour, the frag grenade ricocheted once off the deck before detonating amongst them in a ball of flame and shrapnel. Dreagher and Baruda sprinted through the maelstrom, their armour peppered with superheated metal fragments.
Two more grenades were launched, and the shorter-ranged shotguns began to boom. Then Khârn was on them.
They were bracing for his impact, the armsmen leaning into their shock-shields, which crackled with arcs of energy. Not slowing his charge, Khârn stepped up onto the face of one of those shields and pushed off, launching himself over the front ranks. He turned in the air as he came down, one hand axe slamming down into the back of an enemy’s skull, opening the throat of another as he landed, bowling several more off their feet.
He began laying around him with his two axes, hacking, cutting, breaking, and blood sprayed high with every strike.
The spike of a halberd was thrust at Dreagher as he charged into the fray, its tip wreathed in power. He batted it aside with his gladius and slammed his chainaxe down into the top edge of a shock-shield. The madly whirring teeth ripped at the metal, shearing it apart. The shield was locked to the armsman’s left arm. With a sharp yank, Dreagher ripped the shield from him, taking off his arm at the shoulder in the process.
Before the enemy could move in to close the breach in the shield wall, Dreagher stepped through, striking left and right, killing with every strike.
Baruda pushed in beside him, his bolt pistol barking.
Half the armsmen were dead in seconds. The deck was soon slick with their blood.
The head of the World Eater standing next to Dreagher exploded in a red mist. Blood, pieces of brain matter and skull fragments bespattered Dreagher’s faceplate.
‘Third Legion, right flank!’ roared Baruda.
Through the press of bodies, Dreagher could see Emperor’s Children advancing on their position, bolters, plasma guns and graviton rifles pressed to their shoulders.
He saw Khârn embed his two axes in the head of an enemy and unsling Gorechild from his back.
This was an enemy worthy of the primarch’s blade.
They lost five of the Legion before they closed the distance and begin to redress the kill-ratio.
Another two died in close – the III Legion were not averse to close combat, not by any degree. They were skilful warriors, of that there was no doubt; more skilful, truth be told, than the World Eaters, at least once the Nails kicked in.
Obsessed with the pursuit of perfection, and forever emulating the blade-skills of their primarch and their most exalted champions – Lucius, Cyrius and Klydel among them – they trained obsessively, perfecting their kill-strokes, their technique, and their form.
They lacked the pure aggression and unrelenting fury of the World Eaters, however. Form and technique were difficult to maintain against an enemy that came at you again and again, uncaring of the wounds it sustained, uncaring about anything other than getting the
kill; an enemy that would willingly push itself onto your blade if that was what was needed to win. One by one they were ripped apart, hacked down by chainaxe, blade and fury.
The Emperor’s Children killed with precision, their fatal blows delivered with studied poise and perfect balance. Their kills were neat. Those delivered by the World Eaters were anything but.
The last of the Emperor’s Children was choking on blood, lying on his back with Gorechild embedded in his chest. The chainaxe’s motors idled – an angry, guttural growl. The warrior – of centurion rank – tried to speak, perhaps attempting to curse his killer or deliver some final insult. He didn’t get a chance to finish his words.
Without ceremony, Khârn revved Gorechild and its mica-dragon teeth turned into a blur, ripping maniacally at flesh and armour. The Emperor’s Children officer juddered and shook as Gorechild tore him apart, the pitch of its fury escalating as it began to bite into the deck floor.
Khârn cut Gorechild’s motor. He looked up at Dreagher, his snarling, Sarum-pattern helm dripping in blood.
Dreagher fought the urge to drop into a defensive posture.
‘Time to move,’ said Khârn. ‘We take the bridge.’
Dreagher nodded, and the World Eaters broke into a loping run once more.
Argus Brond stepped from the Stormbird. He was immediately surrounded by a scrum of menials and fussing Legion serfs. He waved them away. His armour was battle damaged and sparking, and his expression was as hard as granite. A crust of rust-brown blood was streaked across his face.
The deck was alive with activity. Deck menials clustered around the arriving shuttles and gunships, refuelling empty tanks, reloading ammunition hops, and rolling in grav-trolleys bearing fresh missiles. The dead and wounded were being borne from the dozen shuttles lined up on the deck. Battle-worn legionaries stomped across the grilled deck, heading to the arming bays to replenish ammunition and replace damaged armour plates. None of them was uninjured.
He saw Dreagher’s human medicae officer, Skoral Wroth, directing the operations as the dead and wounded were unloaded by tracked servitors and menials. Plenty of fresh gene-seed to be harvested for Dreagher’s gene-banks, Brond thought darkly.
Khârn: Eater of Worlds Page 18
