by C. S. Goto
Dawn of War
( Warhammer 40000:Dawn of War - 1 )
C. S. Goto
C. S. Goto
Dawn of War
It is the 41st millennium. For more than a hundred centuries the Emperor has sat immobile on the Golden Throne of Earth. He is the master of mankind by the will of the gods, and master of a million worlds by the might of his inexhaustible armies. He is a rotting carcass writhing invisibly with power from the Dark Age of Technology. He is the Carrion Lord of the Imperium for whom a thousand souls are sacrificed every day, so that he may never truly die.
Yet even in his deathless state, the Emperor continues his eternal vigilance. Mighty battlefleets cross the daemon-infested miasma of the warp, the only route between distant stars, their way lit by the Astronomican, the psychic manifestation of the Emperor’s will. Vast armies give battle in his name on uncounted worlds. Greatest amongst His soldiers are the Adeptus Astartes, the Space Marines, bio-engineered super-warriors. Their comrades in arms are legion: the Imperial Guard and countless planetary defence forces, the ever-vigilant Inquisition and the tech-priests of the Adeptus Mechanicus to name only a few. But for all their multitudes, they are barely enough to hold off the ever-present threat from aliens, heretics, mutants-and worse.
To be a man in such times is to be one amongst untold billions. It is to live in the cruellest and most bloody regime imaginable. These are the tales of those times. Forget the power of technology and science, for so much has been forgotten, never to be re-learned. Forget the promise of progress and understanding, for in the grim dark future there is only war. There is no peace amongst the stars, only an eternity of carnage and slaughter, and the laughter of thirsting gods.
PROLOGUE
Tartarus: 999. M38
Sheets of warp energy cracked through the night, bathing the mountain top in dark, purpling light. Clouds roiled and rolled across the sky, spiralling around the peak as though being drawn into an immense tornado. Lightning flashed through the barrage of rain, silhouetting monstrous forms against the heavens. The discharge of force weapons crackled brightly, sending sparks of blue spraying through the rain. In the strobes of visibility, blades shimmered and combat was joined in an odd, staccato rhythm.
The sky was weeping with energy, spilling oceans of unearthly fluid from one dimension into another, ripping the fabric of the atmosphere into serrations through which the immaterium could drip, ooze, and flow. The unclean energies sizzled and hissed as they broke through into the air, as though celebrating their liberty. Unaccustomed to the viscosity of air and the strictures of gravity, the sickly flows congealed quickly into pods and droplets, falling from the sky like mutant rain, lashing into the mountain top with toxic ferocity.
Macha stood on the second summit of the mountain, just lower than the main peak. Her arms were outstretched, as though trying to embrace the rage of the storm, her head held high, her eyes closed delicately in concentration. The wind whipped her long hair into a torrent behind her and, in the sudden flashes of lightning, she was deathly beautiful. Power radiated from her body, glowing with a faint blue like a holy aura. The intensity grew, focussed on a point just in front of her chest, where the light condensed into a brilliant ball of blue fire.
With a sudden flick, Macha’s eyes were open and the ball of energy erupted into life, blasting through the air towards the eye of the storm. The light hissed and crackled as it scorched through the hellish rain, before it was finally swallowed whole by the spiralling clouds. It was gone. Vanished. And, for a moment, it seemed that it was lost.
A tremendous explosion shook the mountain top, sending avalanches of rock and slides of blood-drenched earth cascading down its crumbling sides. The sky was lit with blast-rings of blue fire, rippling out from the eye of the storm and incinerating the droplets of warp rain, which sparked with moments of death in the concentric bands of flame.
In the sudden flood of light, Macha could see the scene around her and she shivered. Looking back towards the base of the mountain, there was a bed of corpses, like rocks in the river of bloody soil that gushed down towards the valley. Some of her eldar warriors were still on their feet, battling desperately against foes that seemed to flicker in and out of existence. Towards the peak of the mountain were even more corpses, piles of them where entire squads had been annihilated with single blasts from the daemon. But there was the craftworld’s avatar, towering over his brethren and locked in combat with the daemon on the crest of the mountain. His ancient weapon, the Wailing Doom, flashed in his hands with incredible speed, smashing great chunks out of the daemon’s form while the rest of the dwindling eldar forces struggled to keep the daemon host at bay.
Then the light died and the scene was plunged into darkness once again.
Something shifted in her mind, and the eldar farseer strained her eyes into the night, struggling to fit images to the gyring confusion of thoughts that jostled for her attention. There was something else out there on the mountain, something moving with a hidden purpose. Macha could see flickering pictures in her head, a collage of past, present and future all blurred into one curdling image-pool. There were dark figures in those pictures-giant, pseudo-human warriors-and her heart shuddered each time her thoughts lingered on them. These clumsy humans were more fearsome than any daemon, in their own way, and Macha’s soul was filled with dread by their sudden addition to the mix.
She could feel their presence on the mountain, but there was no sign of them. Even her perfect eldar eyes could not pierce the enveloping shroud of warp energy and driving darkness, and the constant discharge of weapons riddled the mountainside with squirming shadows and pushed the unknown deeper into invisibility.
Kaerial, we are not alone on this planet. Look to the blind-side of the ascent. Macha’s thoughts wove their way through the tortuous eddies of psychic energy that swirled around the mountain, and she guided them home-into the soul of Kaerial, the wraithguard commander who was holding the rear line of defences at the bottom of the slope.
Understood, farseer, came the simple reply, and the wraithguard loped off in search of prey. Towering over the battlefield in their psycho-plastic armour, the wraithguard were unliving warriors: artificial constructs housing the spirit stone of once mighty eldar warriors, giving their eternal souls the chance to wreak vengeance on those who slew them.
The shaft of las-fire lanced through the air and Jaerielle slid to his knees just in time, skidding a trough into the blood-slicked earth as the blast seared over his head. Without a moment of hesitation, he clicked the trigger of his shuriken catapult, loosing a hail of tiny projectiles into the bank of advancing Chaos cultists, felling four or five at once. As he sprang back to his feet, the rest of the Guardian Storm squad were already around him, braced into firing positions to protect their commander.
But the cultists kept coming, undaunted by the efficiency of the eldar defence, pressing on with sheer weight of numbers, even as hundreds fell and were trampled under foot. Their weapons were crude and increasingly scarce, but a spear will kill as well as a lasgun from close range, and the cultists were closing in on the eldar from all sides. The intervening air was alive with shuriken, flicking and flashing through the night with unerring precision, each one burying its monomolecular shock deep into the mutated flesh of the advancing hordes. Line upon line of cultists fell, but the crowd was edging gradually closer.
Jaerielle checked behind him. Nothing had yet breached his defensive line, and the farseer stood on the crest of the rise behind them, haloed in a glorious phosphorescence, untouched by the dirty business of close-range combat. Sizzling jets of blue flame burst from her body at regular intervals, plunging into the eye of the storm that raged above them. She needed more time to seal the tear in th
e immaterium, and the Storm squad would make sure that she got it. And beyond her, on the very summit of the mountain, Jaerielle could see the avatar of Biel-Tan locked into combat with the daemon prince; lightning and warp-tears flashed around the two figures, framing their magnificence for all the world to see. As he watched, a fire grew in the soul of Jaerielle and a thirst for blood doused his thoughts.
Snapping his head back round to the advancing cultists, Jaerielle licked his lips and leapt forward into the fray.
“For Khaine, the Bloody-Handed God!” he cried as he drew his long power sword and pushed its impossibly sharp blade through the abdomens of three humanoid cultists.
The call was returned by the rest of the Storm squad, but it was no dissonant cacophony of battle-cries. The Guardian eldar summoned their call from the depths of their souls, chanting it out in tones both too high and too low for human ears to make out. In an exquisite and rumbling harmony, the name of their god of war flooded out across the battlefield, energising each of the eldar warriors who heard it, rallying them into a renewed quest: blood for the blood god. Soon, the call was reverberating around the whole mountain, pulsing through the rock itself, making the earth move with its sonorous power. On the peak of the mountain, acting like a conduit for the chants of the Biel-Tan eldar, Khaine’s avatar threw back its head and let out a scream of power, repulsing the warp clouds above it as though they were feathers in the wind, staggering the daemon prince in a moment of awe. The name was thrown up to the shrouded stars: “Kaela Mensha Khaine!”
And the eldar god smiled back at his precious children.
The power sword swung and arced with grace and accuracy, defining a spiral of death around the spinning and dancing figure of Jaerielle. He had discarded his shuriken weapon and now clutched his blade in both hands as he flittered his way through the crowd of Chaos cultists, separating limbs from bodies as though it were an art. From around the perimeter of his elongated helmet spat tiny toxic shards, peppering the faces and necks of cultists who strayed too close, melting them from within-the mandiblaster helmet, still edged in a deep red, was all that Jaerielle had kept from his time as an Aspect Warrior of the Striking Scorpions. It was a mark of unusual and great honour to be permitted to keep it, and he was glad of it now.
All of the Guardians of the Storm squad had served their warrior cycle in one of the close combat temples, making them perfectly suited for this kind of battle. Jaerielle could see his sister, Skrekrea, slipping elegantly through the forest of primitive blades and random smatterings of fire, dispatching cultists with splendorous ease. She had been a Howling Banshee once, and her elaborate mask was still fitted with the sonic amplifiers employed by Aspect Warriors of that temple. Like her brother, she had served her Aspect with such devotion that the Exarch had made her a gift of the mask when she left the temple, hopeful that one day she would return.
The terrible, shrill howl, from which the Banshee aspect drew its name, was beginning to rise in volume, emanating from the lithe form of Skrekrea as she swooped and lashed with her sword. The cultists nearest to her were beginning to feel the effects of the sound: their movements were slowing into confusion. Some had already come to a halt, shaking their heads in pathetic attempts to rid their ears of the invasive noise.
Suddenly, Skrekrea spun to a halt, raising her sword before her face, pointing into the stars. The screech from her helmet reached its crescendo and all around her the cultists fell to the ground clutching at their heads, blood coursing from their ears and oozing over their desperate fingers.
Jaerielle did not even pause to watch the impressive sight-he had seen Skrekrea in battle hundreds of times before and well knew what she was capable of. In truth, she was not an exceptional warrior. Frqual was a different story. A former Fire Dragon, he was a blur of motion, spilling great jets of fire from his flamer and incinerating swathes of cultists with rapid bursts from his fusion gun. Grenades sprayed out from unseen holsters around his legs, scattering into the oncoming horde and blasting great craters out of the mountain itself.
Frqual was an eldar Guardian on the edge, slipping in and out of the service of the Fire Dragon temple so frequently that it was difficult to keep track of when he was formally an Aspect warrior and when merely a Guardian. Never parted from his weapons, he lived to fight and relished the blood that soaked his long memory. He teetered on the edge of damnation, constantly questing for battles and contests. Jaerielle was sure that he would become an exarch one day, completely lost to himself but honed as the perfect embodiment of eldar warcraft. In general, the eldar could not afford such recklessness-they were once the dominant force in the galaxy, but now they were a dwindling race. They had to pick their battles carefully.
Tartarus was not a battle that they could avoid-the farseer had been preparing for it for centuries. Guardian squads had been formed specially, and the Aspect temples had even consented to arm some of their most exalted former members, as well as dispatching their own Aspect warriors into the fray.
The ancient tomes in the Black Library told of the return of the daemon prince, and it fell to the eldar to vanquish him every three thousand years. They could trust nobody else with this task, especially not the short-sighted humans who had bungled into space so very recently.
A spear thrust straight at Jaerielle’s stomach, and he rolled easily outside it, drawing his own blade almost casually back along its path, slicing the cultist neatly in two at the waist. These humans are quite pathetic, thought Jaerielle, as he thwarted their futile attacks as though they were in slow motion. Their minds are weak, he added in a haughty internal narrative, for they have fallen to the paltry temptations of this daemon prince. And their bodies are weaker, he noted as another head was parted from its shoulders. The comparison with his Storm squad spoke for itself. Humans-if only there weren’t so many of them.
“Hold,” whispered Trythos, as he held up a giant, armoured fist, signalling to his kill team in case the vox beads in their helmets had failed. “There is movement ahead.” He pointed sharply at two of the massive Space Marines, enshrined in ancient black power armour, indicating that they should go on ahead to scout. The auto-reactive shoulder plates of the Space Marines glinted against the distant lightning, and the insignia of the Undying Emperor shimmered in the darkness.
“You’d better be right about this, inquisitor. This planet is crawling with filthy xenos creatures, and the forces of Chaos are strong here. The local population have lost their minds to this daemon-”
“-not to mention their souls, captain,” interrupted Inquisitor Jhordine as a noise behind them made her turn. “I am right about this, captain, as we are about to see.” The inquisitor was dwarfed by the huge Space Marine, who stood over two metres in height, and she did not wear the impressive power armour of the Space Marines, but the Deathwatch kill team were the militant arm of the Ordo Xenos, the branch of the Imperial Inquisition charged with combating the alien, and her authority over these Marines was unquestioned.
A stutter of fire erupted from behind the team, further down the slope towards the valley floor. Out of the mists and the darkness emerged a group of loping figures. Tall and slender, with massively elongated heads, they appeared to have no faces, but bright jewels inset into their armoured forms seemed to glow with life. Taking giant strides in smooth, soundless movements, they were rapidly closing the gap between them and the Space Marines.
“Eldar wraithguard!” called Trythos, turning to face the new threat as his team brought their weapons to bear in instantaneous reflex.
A volley of bolter fire punched out of the line of Deathwatch Space Marines, smashing into the advancing line of wraithguard. Great chunks of psycho-plastic splintered away into the darkness, but the strange creatures just kept coming, as though they couldn’t feel the impacts. Their weapons flared with life, returning fire with a hail of projectiles that hissed smoothly through the air, ricocheting off the power amour of the Marines.
“Go for the jewels,” called Jho
rdine, drawing her own plasma gun and taking aim. “The jewels are their heart stones.”
The inquisitor squeezed off a pulse of plasma that burst against the glowing gem stone on the chest of the leading wraithguard. The creature stopped short and a keening cry erupted from its mouthless head, before it suddenly broke into a run, spraying projectiles from its weapon as it charged towards the team.
Trythos matched the giant creature stride for stride, pounding out into the space that separated the two groups and intercepting the charge. As he ran, Trythos swung his power axe above his head, circling it in crescents of coruscating power. From behind him came the chatter of bolter fire and shells flashed past his head, peppering the charging wraithguard with impacts.
Then they were upon each other, but the wraithguard was not equipped for combat at this range. It was an uneven match. Trythos turned his charge into a dive, swinging his axe into an arc as he cleared the last few metres that separated him from the creature. The wraithguard tried to turn the Deathwatch captain aside with his long elegant limbs, but Trythos smashed through them with the servo-assisted power of his armour, shattering the psycho-plastics like wax, driving his power axe towards the gem stone on the wraithguard’s chest.
The axe cracked into the jewel with a metallic ring that echoed with an incredible volume. The force weapon sputtered and sparked with power as the pressure against the gem increased, but the stone would not break. Trythos drove the head of the axe forward with all of his strength until a huge explosion threw him back from the shattered wraithguard.
As he hit the ground, Trythos saw another blast of energy smash into his kill team, this time coming from further up the mountain. His squad had split, with half of it continuing the assault against the wraithguard, and the other half turning to face the new threat.
