by David Guymer
He was dully aware of the low-calibre hits stinging his armour. System alerts rather than true pain. His adrenal glands were working too hard to let him feel that. His multi-lung had taken over long ago, pumping furiously to purge the acidity from his muscles.
The orks had taken his world from him: he would rather be damned than let the orks take this one too. But, using his battle instinct and survival, he allowed himself to consider that there might be no victory. The orks were too overwhelming, too powerful, their advantages too great even for the Adeptus Astartes to overcome.
A massive fireball rippled over the ruptured skylight.
A burst of fire from a quad-linked heavy bolter cut in from a high angle with a sound like a loose chain being mechanically spun around a crank. The ork’s ’copter peeled open and finally exploded, showering the packed melee with metallic debris. The dull grey wedge of a Thunderhawk gunship banked right and over to skirt the fireball, then descended hard towards the skylight with autocannon fire from some neighbouring building lighting its aerofoil.
Zerberyn’s vox-bead crackled.
‘Leonis, First Captain, piloting Penitence. We picked up something you left behind.’
Gold icons blinked into being on Zerberyn’s visor display as Sergeant Columba led the charge down the Thunderhawk’s troop hatch. The veteran jumped, landing two-footed in a howl of suspensors with his chainsword buried deep into an ork’s shoulder and spraying the contents of its chest over his plastron. He pivoted on the spot. A kick delivered on the underside of his boot sent a fighter in black-and-white jags cannoning through two more. Donbuss, Borhune, Nalis and Tarsus thumped down around him, a hail of hellgun fire clearing space for them to work.
Militarum Tempestus Scions pounded along the upper level catwalks, coming down roof access ladders, pumping round after round of hot-shot las into the charging greenskins. Firing on the move with a hellpistol in each hand, Major Bryce took his own advice, cutting through the Bloody Axes and their human line troops. The expression twisting his burned face was wrathful. Zerberyn understood the man all too well.
Brother Donbuss’ heavy bolter spoke with fury. Not having witnessed what Zerberyn had a moment before, the veteran-brother identified the most prominent threat and opened up on the dreadnought. The air became thunder. Shell casings showered the ground with gold. The ork walker’s void shield rippled and flared, massive force and equally massive counterforce waging full-spectrum warfare across its cylindrical frame. The dreadnought abandoned the Terminators and came about.
It extended its saw arm and, with a sound like a long tube swallowing a grenade, launched a pair of sizzling stick bombs towards Columba’s combat squad.
Donbuss took both blasts full in the chest. His plastron held together but crumpled badly, sealant gel and hypercoagulants mingling in the ruptures. The impact savaged his faceplate, tearing his helm half away. The force lifted him up and slammed him into a machinery stack. The rest of the combat squad were peeled apart and thrown to the ground like toys.
Inarticulate savagery raging from its speakers, the dreadnought stamped about and smashed a Terminator across the manufactorum with a swing of its wrecker arm. The Iron Warrior crashed through the opposite wall. Loosened masonry tumbled in, a pyre licked with promethium flames.
Zerberyn cursed. An ork covered in snake tattoos went down with a headshot. Throat punch. Headbutt. Hammer shock blasted a hole. He strode into it, his armour coated with copper glaze, following his own tracer of automatic fire.
A thick-shouldered ork in Bloody Axe colours shrugged off the bolter fire and ignited the jump pack strapped to its back. It rocketed into the air on an arc of flaming liquid propellant, and landed on a catwalk. The platform juddered under the sudden impact. Tempestus Scions fell away, firing point-blank. The ork laughed it off and set to with its powered axe.
The Scions’ wargear was impressive, but it was not power armour. They were good, but they were not Space Marines.
A second ork, and then a third, fired up jump packs to get in amongst the Scions. Bryce’s increasingly hoarse orders got lost amongst the screams, the crack of bone and power discharge. Several of the armoured troopers broke and risked the four-metre drop to take their chances on the ground.
It was no better.
The surviving Terminators had hurt the dreadnought. It flailed, tangling its arms in chain pulls and surrounding itself with a swinging flock of lift cradles and pallets, crying molten iron. A Terminator stove in the dreadnought’s mid-section with a blow from his power fist. Even as he tore the crackling gauntlet free, an ork grappled him from behind. The brute dug its claws into the gorget softseals and hauled back on the Iron Warrior’s helmet. Fire sprayed from his gauntlet-mount as he was drawn down and under.
Brother Galen traversed back out of the melee, slumped, riding the juddering conveyer deeper into the manufactory like a corpse into the crematoria. Reoch was crouched over him. His binoptics were a fell green in the fyceline haze, his bolt pistol an unwavering source of white light.
From above, the roar of the Thunderhawk’s turbofans momentarily muted the din. Glass fragments and shell casings blew out in ripples, tied to the cycling of its engine fans as it pulled away. A squadron of single-prop biplanes buzzed after it with flak spitting from their painted muzzles.
Zerberyn raised his hammer high, mentally dialling his gorget vox-booster to maximum. Iron Warriors and Fists Exemplar together. They had held long enough.
‘Fall back. Everyone. Back to the gunship.’
A feral roar threatened to drown him out, and he looked back to the breached wall. An ork of truly monstrous scale, dark skin powdered with gold, crashed through the breached wall recently vacated by the dreadnought. Its muscular frame was bolted into an electric-shock yellow fighting suit half again Zerberyn’s size. Pistons wheezed. Valves screeched. Black smoke pumped the air. At first glance it was a typical ork build. Closer inspection, however, revealed a powered suit of surpassing artisanship. The plates were glossy and smooth, lines straight, edges perfect. Alternating power fields surrounded the ork with a sharp ozone burn. It flexed the arm-width digits of a three-clawed power fist, auto-loaders churning ammo belts through a massive ten-barrelled combi-weapon.
‘You die. Now.’
Its bastardised Low Gothic was kicked out of its chest, like air from a dead man’s lungs, and Zerberyn was too stunned to respond.
It had spoken. Orks did not speak.
It started to run, beating aside a steel drum that then punched straight through a support stanchion and brought an empty section of crawlway crashing down. Zerberyn ran to meet it. The ground between them trembled. He drew back his thunder hammer and roared his hatred.
They clashed like bolt-rounds hitting each other in mid-air.
Zerberyn’s thunder hammer came down on the ork’s thigh brace. The local power field blew out and the metal squealed under the stress. The ork steam-rollered through him, snatching him up in its power claw and driving him through the light metal casing of a machine stack.
With a roar like laughter, the ork dragged him from the wreckage and swung him about as though he were promethium jelly on the monster’s claws.
Even for his transhuman physiology, the g-force was tremendous. Black spots appeared in front of his eyes. He unloaded his pistol into the ork’s upper torso power field until the hammer struck an empty chamber. He had no more. Screaming, he hawked up acid from his Betcher’s gland and spat it into the ork’s face. Green smoke sizzled from its jaw, but it did not feel it.
The ork tightened its grip. The power fist’s disruption field burned off his armour layer by layer. Ceramite creaked, crunched, split. He may have screamed again. He was no longer sure. He lashed out with his thunder hammer.
He did not know what it hit, but it hit something.
The ork bellowed in pain, and the next he knew he was flying with all the power of that immense b
attlesuit behind him.
He passed through something metal-lined and hollow, hit the ground in a mangle of limbs and bounced once, twice, then skidded. His battleplate tore up sparks from the ferrocrete surface. He slammed up against a wall and flopped down. He saw Reoch, Antille and a number of helmed Scions, but the anonymously-armoured humans swam together.
Then the ten-centimetre-thick plasteel doors that he had just slid though clamped onto his trailing greave.
‘Reverse it,’ growled Reoch.
‘I’m trying!’ came Antille’s voice.
Zerberyn grunted, willing his mind to stop spinning, and pulled on his trapped leg. It did not move. Dirty smoke was beginning to pour out of the door’s pneumatics.
From the other side of the door, there was a bellow of fury. The ground began to shake as something massive took a run-up. Reoch inserted the fierce muzzle of his Umbra-pattern pistol into the gap between the doors. The Apothecary fired on full-auto, bolt pistol beating against the metal frames like a hammer drill.
The doors continued to try and close.
Zerberyn gave one last roar, then spasmed back to the floor in agony as the heavy plasteel cracked bonded ceramite and armaplas like steel pliers on a nut, and snapped his strengthened tibia roughly in two. His genhanced neurochemistry prevented the pain from disabling him, but it was still as close to intolerable as he had ever known. His conscious brain protectively shut itself down for a moment, his twin hearts racing to pump an endorphin rush of pain-suppressing hormones into his bloodstream.
The doors stalled about half a leg-width apart.
Zerberyn looked up, saw the sheathed chainsword hanging from Major Bryce’s hip.
The Scion read his look, unhitching the blade and thumbing the power. Adamantium teeth revved hungrily.
‘Forgive me, lord.’
‘Hurry up and do it.’
Bryce hacked down. Zerberyn roared as the motored blade ate through armour and flesh and from there into bone. Arterial spray turned his battleplate red. Chipped bone rattled everyone’s armour, flying through a pall of bitter ceramite dust. Vibrations tore through his bones. Tears welled up in the Scion’s eyes. The dust.
The human lacked the strength to finish it.
With a growl, Reoch pulled the man aside and stamped down on the back of the chainsword, driving it through Zerberyn’s leg until it stalled in the ferrocrete.
Zerberyn panted in release. His eyes blurred. His skin tingled with the effects of pain-suppressants. The Apothecary kicked Zerberyn’s severed foot out from between the jammed doors. They slammed together, just as something huge bent them out of shape from the other side.
Reoch dropped down beside him and bent immediately to work, using his narthecium’s plasma cutter to cauterise the amputation. Zerberyn grunted. His physiology was adjusted to the higher pain threshold now, and he barely felt it.
Brother Antille and the handful of Scions crowded around them. That was all.
‘Sergeant Columba, and the others?’
‘Through the back wall, following Penitence’s locater beacon,’ said Antille. ‘We were cut off from them, and so intended to follow…’ he glanced sideways at Bryce, ‘our cousins.’
Zerberyn nodded. He would have come to the same conclusion in his brother’s place. It was reassuring.
The door shuddered as something hit it. The discharging power of a disruption field caused it to fold in.
Zerberyn reached for his bolt pistol before remembering that it was empty.
‘Faster, Apothecary.’
Twenty-One
Prax – Princus Praxa
Zerberyn limped down the unlit manufactorum hallway, leaning into Brother Antille’s shoulder to support himself on his remaining foot. The darkness was near absolute, leavened only by the green beams of the Scions’ visual augmenters. It was enough to make out the old blood and las-burns on the walls. The Praxians here had fought. Bestial cries and gunfire echoed through the abandoned rooms. He tried to inject some haste into his stride, but he had yet to adapt to his altered anatomy. A human would have been killed by blood loss or systemic shock by now, but his superiority over human norms was scant consolation.
After several minutes, the rattle of orkish fire growing nearer, the corridor took a ninety-degree turn.
In place of the wall that should have been in front of them, however, was a brick pile. There had been a false wall here. Behind it, illuminated now by the six Scions’ targeting beams, was a blast door that clearly had no due place in an agri-processing facility, large enough to admit a Space Marine in Tactical Dreadnought Armour. It looked like solid adamantium.
And the Iron Warriors had left it locked behind them. Reoch stepped forward and laid his gauntlets on the door. He turned back. His augmeticised face was a glowing skull in the gloom. He shook his head.
Unbreakable.
‘What now?’ Antille murmured.
Swallowing a curse that he could not afford to let the Scions hear, Zerberyn looked away from the door, manoeuvering himself towards the rune-numeric console mounted just inside the frame. Set into the terminal alongside the keypad was a palm scanner.
Kalkator had said that the base’s concealed entrances were secured by a genetic lock. There was genetic variation enough between the IV and their hated cousins of the VII to differentiate them with a fine enough scan, but Kalkator had also said that this fortress was built early in the Great Crusade. And that had been a different time, a time when his gene-ancestors and Kalkator might without rancour have called one another friend and brother.
For long seconds he hesitated, then removed his gauntlet and pushed his palm to the reader.
A red bar backlit the panel and scanned upwards. The light disappeared. Zerberyn tensed. There was a rumble of magnetic seals decoupling and the metal-on-metal scrape of disengaging locks. Zerberyn let out a breath as the blast door slid open.
‘From honour cometh iron. Have admittance, son of my brother.’
The voice was a scratchy, ancient recording, but retained some of the power it must once have held in flesh. It was strength, indomitable iron, something that time and worse than time could never fully corrupt. Zerberyn shivered, uncertain whether he had just been given a rare gift or the darkest curse.
‘Was that…?’
‘To what circle of damnation has he led us?’ said Reoch, his voice a whispered, almost reverential growl.
Visual augmenter beams painted the wall behind the blast door with green bands. It was a circular chamber about the same size as the interior of a drop pod, large enough to accommodate twelve Space Marines in full battleplate. Controls blinked in a variety of different colours. Diodes indicated up and down. Only the ‘down’ was illuminated, a soft white. It was an elevator.
With a nod to Antille, Zerberyn led them in.
Bryce and the Scions flowed in behind him, with Reoch entering last. The Apothecary examined the selector panel. The different levels of the complex were each indicated by an ivory button marked, from top to bottom, with an incrementally decreasing numeral. Reoch shrugged and punched the lowest button.
Zerberyn would have made the same choice.
Exemplars in action and in intent. Exemplars in forethought.
The blast doors whined shut and the elevator plunged into a descent. It was practically freefall. An atmospheric insertion by drop pod could not have been quicker, and the elevator’s depth indicators flashed down in a matter of seconds. Deceleration was equally drastic. The Fists Exemplar had been engineered for high-velocity strikes, and even Zerberyn, with pain pulsing from his severed nerves, remained standing. The Scions, however, were thrown to the ground and scattered to the four walls.
Through force of willpower, Bryce managed to crawl out as the doors hissed open, threw up on the panel-steel floor and rolled onto his back. Reoch plucked him from the ground by his
webbing. Zerberyn and Antille shuffled out together.
They were on a wall-bracketed companionway at the equatorial line of a vast, spherical chamber. Vermillion alert lights strobed cyclically over the polished steel walls like the daylight terminator of a planet spinning out of control around a harsh red star. He looked down over the handrail. Far, far below, contained within concentric rings of adamantium and brass, was a tank of water so cold that Zerberyn felt moisture crystallising on his face even from where he was stood. Gas bubbled through it, but the water moved strangely, sluggishly.
‘Heavy water,’ murmured Antille, the acoustics lending themselves to the soft-spoken. ‘Used in atomic weaponry.’
Turning up, Zerberyn saw pistons as wide as the legs of a Reaver Titan slide in and out of solid metal jackets with a rhythmic, grinding thunder. Cabling hung from everything like cargo webbing.
‘Three minutes to mark,’ came a dolorous warning from all around.
With Antille a willing crutch, Zerberyn hurried around the companionway to the nearest of several catwalks that projected out over the water tank. He limped down it. Reoch and Bryce followed a short distance behind.
Suspended at the chamber’s core was an instrumentation platform of some kind. Banks of cogitators and command compilers filled it, tangling into the descending mess of cables with more wires of their own. There was Kalkator, unarmed, helm mag-locked to his thigh, his face dully illuminated with code projected by the surrounding screens. A pair of Iron Warriors Chosen were there with him, similarly unarmed and occupied with operating their systems. The rest must have been engaged elsewhere in the facility.
‘What is this?’ said Zerberyn, a gauntlet finger pointed accusingly at Kalkator.
‘You know what it is, little cousin.’
‘Two minutes to mark.’
‘Exterminatus…’
Kalkator smiled thinly. ‘Nothing so incomplete. Perturabo always believed in complete solutions and he raised his sons in his image.’ He indicated the interface in front of him. Lines of unintelligible green code filled the display, surrounded by a mass of coloured wires, switches and dials. There were prominent features, however, that Zerberyn instinctively recognised as a firing sequence. ‘Nothing will remain of Prax but an asteroid field.’
