Defenders of Mankind - David Annandale & Guy Haley

by Warhammer 40K

  Rothnove crouched and examined the floor. He reached a hand out. Energy crackled between his palm and the surface. ‘There is a current,’ he said.

  ‘Of what kind?’ Vritras asked.

  The Librarian shook his head. ‘I don’t know. There is warp magic here, and it is more ancient than anything I have ever encountered. It is dangerous, but there isn’t the same quality of malignity as I would expect. It is more…’

  ‘Indifferent,’ Setheno said.

  Rothnove straightened. ‘Exactly. We are beneath notice.’

  Under his breath, Massorus began to recite the Liturgy of the Eternal Purge. It was a hymn praising the eradication of all that was not of and for the Emperor.

  ‘If it thinks we are beneath notice, then it should learn it has erred,’ Volos said. He stepped through the doorway and onto the floor. The insect writhing he had felt on the roof was much stronger, and he felt a tug towards the interior of the vault. It was as if he were setting foot into the shallows of a fast-moving river, and in another few steps he would be out of his depth. He looked back at the rest of Second Company massing at the entrance. They weren’t moving. They were statues. Massorus had an arm raised in mid-gesture of anathema. As Volos watched, Massorus’s fist moved a few centimetres down. Volos walked back to the entrance, and he was pressing against a force strong as a focused gale. When he crossed the threshold, Massorus brought his fist down the rest of the way.

  ‘You have never moved that quickly, brother,’ Nithigg said. ‘We could barely see you.’

  ‘There’s a chronal distortion effect,’ Volos said. ‘Time moves much more quickly in there than out here.’

  ‘That is warp space,’ Rothnove pronounced.

  Volos looked back at it. ‘It seems unusually stable.’

  ‘The words “usual” and “unusual” have no meaning in the warp. It is simply what it happens to be.’

  ‘But how am I still alive? There’s no Geller field present.’

  ‘There must be some equivalent. Whatever beings constructed this vault, they had to be able to use it. This structure was not spat out from the warp spontaneously.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter how it arrived here,’ Vritras said. ‘Nor how it works. We have wasted enough time.’ He turned to Urlock. ‘How do we stand?’

  ‘Two of the Claws dead,’ the Apothecary answered. ‘Four more from the spearhead.’

  ‘Injuries.’

  ‘None incapacitating.’

  Vritras nodded, then voxed the Maw . ‘Helmsman, status,’ he said.

  ‘All threats neutralised, captain. We sustained some damage, but all critical ship facilities are intact.’

  ‘Good.’ Vritras looked at his four squads. ‘Brothers,’ he announced, ‘before us lies madness and death. Let it be the enemy’s madness brought on by the fear we bring, and let it be his death.’ He raised his chainsword high. ‘Fire and bone!’ he roared, and his men shouted their answer.

  ‘Bless the curse!’ Massorus called, and the prayer was repeated.

  The squads reformed as they entered the vault. The echoes started up again. Vritras took the point of the spearhead once more. The Dragon Claws advanced just to the right of the main body, waiting for the orders to strike out ahead. The air seemed to thicken as they moved deeper into the chamber. Volos’s helm readouts blinked on and off erratically, but if he could believe them when they were present, the temperature was rising. Second Company made good progress down the massive hall. Volos again thought of a deep river’s dangerous current. The vault was too eager to welcome them inside.

  ‘Brother-sergeant,’ Vritras said over the vox, ‘how much of a lead do the Traitors have?’

  ‘Based on the time dilation I saw,’ Volos answered, ‘several hours.’

  ‘Then they will have prepared for our coming.’

  The Black Dragons reached the drop. The hall curved sharply for another hundred metres. Then the floor fell away while the ceiling, still high above, levelled out. At the lip, they looked out over a vast bowl, at least as big below the ground as the superstructure of the vault was above. Rising from the base of the bowl was a forest of monstrous pipes. Each was about ten metres in diameter, and their heights varied from a few hundred metres to a thousand. They appeared to be made of the same substance as the vault, the same crimson igneous rock that rang like metal. They looked twisted, as if a giant hand had turned them round and round while their stone was still molten, then yanked them to a pained vertical. They were the voices of a titanic pipe organ.

  ‘Can you feel it?’ Vritras asked.

  Volos could. There was movement in the air. It was slow, and shouldn’t have been detectable through power armour, but it was also strong, suggesting the motion of something vast. There were also distinct, conflicting, alternating flows. The thick breeze pushed towards the mouths of the pipes for the space of about five seconds. There was a pause, and then air would be expelled from the pipes for about the same span of time. The organ was breathing.

  Linking the pipes was a network of scaffolding and catwalks that criss-crossed all the way down to the ground. The lattice was a delicate tracery of crimson, a spiderweb of stone. From this height, the thin, woven bridges didn’t look strong enough to support any weight at all.

  ‘Auspex?’ Vritras asked.

  ‘Multiple readings starting at the edge of range,’ Toharan reported. ‘About a third of the way down. They’re using the pipes as cover.’

  ‘Mark them,’ Vritras ordered, and Toharan’s auspex results flashed to the company. Volos noted the positions as they appeared in his lenses. ‘There are the first ambushes,’ Vritras continued. ‘Neutralise them. Expand and contract the talon. Show no mercy, brothers. I expect total extermination.’

  Expand the talon: spread out and encircle the enemy. Contract the talon: concentrate fire from multiple sides and regroup, obliterating the surrounded foe. The spearhead formation on this network was pointless, little more than an inviting target for a knock-out blow from the Swords.

  The squads split into five-man teams as they dropped onto the bridges. They fanned out into the network. Then they began the descent. They were three levels down when the Swords began to fire.

  Toharan used the pipes as cover, sprinting from one to the next with the rest of the command team. The bridges had no railings, no defensive potential at all, and they were only a couple of metres wide. To move in the open, between the pipes, was to be completely exposed. The Dragons placed their faith in speed and armour. Glancing shots smacked Toharan’s ceramite, but the damage was minor and his momentum kept him running in a straight line. The assailant continued to fire, compounding his mistake. He was remaining in one place. He was giving away his position to every Dragon team, and they were all on the move, a fluid, adaptive doom descending on the traitors.

  At the next pipe, a ramp led the Space Marines down another level. They were closing on the nearest Swords. Vritras pointed at the span ahead of them, and Toharan saw the opportunity. All of the squad did. Vritras didn’t even have to signal his intent. His brothers had fought so many battles together, they responded to the battlefield as a single entity. Toharan exulted in the precision and art of the war machine he had joined. His elevation to Nychus was still fresh, but he found his instincts and actions meshing with the collective will of the squad as smoothly as if he had been there for a century. How do you like your second choice, captain? he thought as they paused, waiting for their moment.

  Halfway across the bowl and one level up, a team from Squad Pythios, now led by Melus, rained bolter-rounds on the Swords’ position. The traitors fired back. Their attention was drawn away from Nychus. The Swords had no choice, and they had no chance. They could not ignore Pythios’s threat. If they did, Melus and his brothers would cut them to pieces. Instead, that honour fell to the command team. That was the perfection of the Dragon talons: lethal claws on both sides, no possible defence.

  Vritras charged down the bridge, Toharan and the rest of the te
am at his heels. Midway across, the span passed over another directly below. They leaped. As he fell, Toharan had a split-second view straight down into the bowl. The structure of the lattice wasn’t random. The intersecting lines and angles formed runes, and they stabbed at his eyes. He landed and kept moving as he blinked away the seared image.

  The Swords were next to a pipe three metres from where the Dragons landed. The traitors had their backs to them. Nychus tore into them. It was ugly, brutal, satisfying. Toharan two-handed his chainsword and stabbed it down into the throat and chest of his target as the Chaos Space Marine turned around. The teeth chewed through ceramite and flesh. The sword caught, whining, on the reinforced shell of the traitor’s ribcage. The Sword of Epiphany struck at Toharan, but the impact of the attack had made him drop his weapons, and his fists were uncoordinated, his wounds already disabling him. Toharan leaned on his blade, and the weapon cracked through the bone, chewing up the hearts beneath.

  Toharan sensed a blur of motion at his back. He dropped with the Sword’s corpse as it fell. A power whip snapped the air where his head had been with a flash of blue energy. Toharan spun, prone, pulled the bolt pistol from his side and fired up. He emptied the magazine into the traitor’s face. The helmet shattered and the Sword jerked backwards. He stumbled one step too many and plummeted off the edge of the bridge. He disappeared without a sound.

  Toharan stood. The ambush point had been purged. Vritras gave his men a nod and they took off again, already taking fire from another Sword position. They had their next target.

  Justice, Volos thought, must taste like blood. He knew that was what it smelt like. He was covered in justice. It had jetted over his armour again and again as he and his team of five Claws massacred their way down into the depths of the bowl. This was an arena made to order for their style of war.

  The Dragon Claws flew from level to level. Manoeuvring with the jump packs was tight in the cat’s cradle of bridges, but they knew the force of the engines and the arc of their trajectories as they knew their own bodies, and they had flown through narrower webs than this. They waited for a group of Swords to open fire, then streaked in. They landed on top of each target like a Titan’s wrecking ball. Volos sensed an unspoken contest developing to see how many traitors each Claw could smash and knock from their perches on initial contact.

  He had missed his mark with the enemy he fought now. Volos’s blow threw the Sword against the pipe, hard enough to jar his helmet loose. The traitor bounced back and recovered instantly, swinging his chainaxe on the return. Volos dodged, but took a ringing blow to the head from the side of the blade. He snarled and thrust with his bone-blades. The traitor impaled himself on them. The blades plunged through the armour and into his body as if they were power swords. There were implications that Volos didn’t like, but he suppressed all thought of them, and redirected his worry into a killing rage. He yanked his arms wide, tearing the Sword apart. Justice splattered him. He wiped it from his lenses. ‘Next!’ he yelled.

  ‘There,’ Nithigg pointed. Two levels down, towards the north side of the bowl, behind a pipe: a stream of las-fire streaking up at one of the Squad Neidris teams.

  ‘On me,’ Volos said, and jumped. He heard the other packs fire a second behind his as the team followed. They flew straight for the target pipe, whipped around it and came down on the catwalk.

  There was no fire team of Swords. There was only an auto-turret. Volos kicked it over the edge and looked around. ‘Where–?’ he began.

  The thing came down on top of him. It must have been clinging to the underside of the bridge one level up. It had once been a Sword of Epiphany. Perhaps it thought it still was. It still wore the armour, though there were huge chunks missing, as if the thing had burst through the plate. It wore no helmet, and its face was lit by the beatific smile of a being who knows a great truth and would be happy to share. Its skin was the same gold as its armour. It was huge, half again as big as Volos, and its features had been twisted by the warp into a grotesque patchwork. One eye was twice the size of the other and perched halfway up the forehead. The nose was long and tapered, like a snout. Even its arms were mismatched. The hand that held a chainaxe was normal in size, ridiculous compared to the rest of him. The other arm ended in a gigantic, chitinous claw. It was as if the creature had been holding an entire colony of daemons in its body, and now they were all bursting out, a hellish metastasis.

  The monster yelled something at him. Perhaps it made sense in the thing’s language. All Volos heard was inarticulate nonsense. But he also heard the joy, and knew he had been told something the monster thought was wonderful. Then it struck. The pincer locked around Volos’s head and began to squeeze. Warning runes flashed as the pressure increased. The chainaxe came down on his helm. The runes went red, then died in static. He tried to knock the creature off, but it held him fast. Its tail was wrapped around his legs. Braxas brought his bone-blades, jutting forward from just below his elbow, down at the monster’s head, but its reflexes were warp-honed. Its tail yanked itself from Volos’s legs and whipped across Braxas’s chest, knocking him off-balance. He tumbled from the catwalk.

  The possessed Space Marine hit Volos again, and his helmet snapped in half. The two sections fell away, exposing his face. He spat acid into the monster’s eyes. It howled and dropped its axe, clawing at its eyes. The grip of the pincer loosened. Volos jerked free, twisted, and brought his arm down, blade extended, severing the claw limb at the elbow. Blind and howling, the monster stumbled and flailed, its blood spraying in a wide arc. Volos took the thing’s head off.

  Braxas had stopped his fall with a burst of his jump pack and landed back on the bridge. The whole team was present. Volos scanned for their next target. He happened to look up first, and so he saw the disaster happen.

  Another nest cleared. They were better than halfway down the bowl now, and the purge had momentum. Toharan had seen three more identification runes turn red, three more brothers killed. He had seen Brother Bumalin’s body plummet past, head missing. But the tally was heavily in the Dragons’ favour. They were scouring the Swords of Epiphany from Flebis. A wave of burning purity was descending the bowl of the vault. This felt right. This was what he was made for: tracking down whatever was tainted and extinguishing it.

  The Nychus team descended another ramp. The bridge skirted a pipe immediately ahead, and then soared out into the middle of the bowl, leaving a gap dozens of metres wide on both sides between it and the nearest pipes. Zero cover, zero interest. There was a staircase twisting back and forth next to the pipe and down to the next level. There the bridge spans were short and cut from pipe to pipe. But the auspex said there was an enemy on this level, just on the other side of the pipe. A stupid position. Toharan would be happy to explain the error to the Sword.

  The Sword didn’t wait. He left his position and sprinted down the bridge. Vritras, out in front, followed, Toharan a breath behind. The others were a second slower. ‘There’s something wrong,’ Rothnove said.

  As he spoke, his words became truth. The Sword stopped running in the middle of the bridge. Toharan’s instincts screamed a warning, and he and Vritras slowed down. The Sword’s armour collapsed as the creature inside poured itself out. If it had ever been even partly human, it was no longer. It was a pink, boneless pool of flowing muscle. Its many mouths giggled.

  ‘A trap,’ Vritras said. ‘Back! ’

  Toharan turned, but he had known from the daemon’s laughter that it was already too late.

  Melta charges went off at either end of the bridge. Outside the vault, where subjects of the materium had hammered pointlessly at a construction based in the warp, they would have had no effect. But inside the vault, the melta bombs were of the same realm as the bridge’s stone, and things were different. The terrible flash happened. In that split second, half-formed thoughts tumbled through Toharan’s mind. He saw the fall of the bridge to Lexica. There was a bitter taste of symmetry and fate. Then there was nothing beneath his feet bu
t air.

  Squad Nychus fell.

  Setheno didn’t head back when Vritras yelled. Instead, she jumped. It wasn’t quite a leap of faith. The last of those was well in her past. She was at the rear of the team, closest to the pipe. Down and to her left was another span. She leaped for it.

  The explosion was a scorching hurricane blast. It buffeted her, shoving her through the air with a giant’s incandescent hand. Her armour smoked, its purity seals ignited, and she careened, out of control, not to the bridge but to the pipe. She felt ribs shatter on impact. Her right shoulder popped out of its joint. Beneath her, as she fell, the bridge came up. She was going to miss it. She threw out her right arm and hooked it through the web of the bridge surface as she passed. The yank was agonising. Setheno dangled, a broken doll, as the worst happened below.

  Volos saw them drop. The entire command team, plummeting past him into the crimson glow below. He shot after them, using the jump pack to accelerate his descent, ignoring the fire from the remaining Sword emplacements. He decelerated at the last moment. Toharan had smashed into scaffolding half a dozen metres up from the floor of the bowl. He was writhing, impaled on the wreckage. The rest of the team lay broken on the ground, at the mercy of the group of traitors who stood there. Volos descended on the renegades with a roar, but a ball of Chaos energy hit him in the chest and took him down.

  Makaiel lowered his hand, the vibrations of the spell still travelling up and down his arm. The enormous Dragon fell to earth with a crash. The rest of his assault team was right behind, and engaged with Makaiel’s brothers. They would be busy. He had the time to do what was necessary. He turned to the object that stood in the centre of the floor. He wished his father was here to see this. Nessun would have been delighted by the impossibility. All of the pipes narrowed at their base and joined together in a tube barely a centimetre wide. The tube ran into a plinth twice Makaiel’s height. The plinth was the same crimson rock as the rest of the vault, but in the centre was a clear, crystalline block. He had been hammering at it with his force staff since arriving, and he had almost reached the prize within. He struck another two blows, channelling all of his psychic force to the end of the staff, where the serpentine symbol of Tzeentch glowed. The block shattered. The prize was his.