‘I will.’ To live, he would have to become a greater monster than Horus. To save the Imperium, he must die.
The booming was louder. It drew Sanguinius’ attention away from the daemon. He twisted his head to the right. The vertical line of the portal was deforming. It shuddered to the rhythm of the thunder. Multicoloured lightning circled it and struck across the gulf of the enginarium. The daemons nearest the portal snarled in alarm.
Madail ignored the sounds of a battering ram smashing at fortress gates.
‘You will let Horus triumph.’
‘I will not.’ Sanguinius cursed his uncertainty. He could not see behind his fall. His sacrifice might be in vain. His death might be empty of meaning. Horus might triumph. The daemon’s long manipulation had weakened Sanguinius’ confidence in everything he had held as true.
Madail leaned closer. The armour-plated monster moved out of its way. ‘Will you die? Will you die? Will you die?’ The daemon repeated the question over and over, as if to a child.
‘I will!’ Sanguinius shouted back.
‘Do you understand?’ It straightened again. It called to the congregation of abominations, its tremendous voice drowning out the intensifying blasts of the portal. ‘Praise to the carnage, praise to the change, praise to gifts of the flesh and the plague!’ The choir shrieked in ecstasy. ‘Feed on the blindness, you children of Ruin. Lap the blood of the unknowing dream. By eight and by four, he chooses his fate. By eight and by four, he will have the consequence.’ Madail paused. It looked down at Sanguinius again. ‘Take the consequence, or take the lesson.’
What consequence? That was the question the daemon wanted him to ask. He burned to ask it. But the hammering from the other side of the warp distracted him. It took him out of the web the daemon’s words wove around his consciousness. Consequence? No consequence could be so momentous that he would swear fealty to Chaos. It was all lies.
Sanguinius heaved against the arms holding him down. He heard the crack of breaking bones as he snapped the fingers of the daemons holding him. Madail turned with a snarl to face the portal. It gestured with its staff. The legions of abominations on the deck turned from Sanguinius and approached the portal. Madail made another gesture, as if parting the veil of the real. The portal opened wide. The daemons poured into its maw. A huge abomination, a construct of flesh and machine, commanded the charge. The daemons leapt from the galleries in an avalanche of monstrosity. An army vanished from the ship, leaving an army behind. As many stayed to worship and to witness Sanguinius’ surrender.
His frame vibrated with anger. The fury was an alloy. It was forged from so many causes, so many crimes of the daemon, so many mistakes Sanguinius had made to bring himself to this pass. There was a darkness too, the darkness he had encountered before. He was wary of it. It had consumed him briefly on the Red Tear when the Veritas Ferrum had struck him. He had no memory of those moments, only impressions of dark and fury. It had made him dangerous to his sons. It had made him a beast. But at this moment, he did not fight it. The dark scraped at the edges of his being, still amorphous, a thing unclear. It could not distract him. His focus was Madail. His fury was concentrated on that single foe. It had annihilated billions. It was the author of his and his brothers’ doubts. It had given him false belief, and treacherous hope.
The roar built in his chest, then escaped, so loud it seemed it would bring down the great dome of the enginarium.
The Spear of Telesto flashed with power. Its crimson light enveloped Sanguinius, igniting the flesh of the daemons. Their limbs turned to ash, and their forms melted. The horned juggernaut howled. It stumbled backwards, its head engulfed with flame. The female abomination’s claws shattered.
The Angel tore his right arm free. He raised the Blade Encarmine. He sliced through the bodies of plague daemons. The monsters fell apart, halved, and the sword shone brightly in the foul air of the enginarium, ichor dripping from its length.
The Angel rose in his terrible wrath. He spread his wings, hurling the monsters back. The blast of the spear haloed him, and they could not touch him.
Temptation could not touch him, for there was no glory he desired. He fought for Terra and for Baal. He fought for the Emperor and the Imperium.
Death could not touch him, for he was the lord of the Blood Angels, and in this heart of the enemy’s domain, it was he who had come as death.
The Angel launched himself into the air. With sword and spear, he fell on Madail. The daemon snarled and raised its bladed staff to counter.
The weapons clashed with the flash of suns.
Seventeen
The Reaping
The Sthenelus came in from below towards the Veritas Ferrum. Helmsman Kiriktas guided the frigate towards the belly of the monster. On Khalybus’ orders, he had taken the Sthenelus far beneath the plane of the ecliptic even as he had begun to turn the ship for the attack run. The Sthenelus rose now in a steep diagonal with respect to the Veritas. A cloud of daemonic ships was approaching, some of them in line with the Sthenelus. Beyond them was another cloud, the billowing thunderhead of the contracting necrosphere.
The Veritas’ escort was almost in range. ‘We have time for one attack before we are destroyed,’ Khalybus said. ‘Let it be our most ferocious. For Ferrus Manus and the Tenth Legion, for Durun Atticus and One Hundred and Eleventh Clan-Company, we will strike against the corruption of the machine.’ He paused, watching the Veritas Ferrum grow larger in the oculus. Already it was so huge, the bottom of the hull covered the stars. The Sthenelus was rushing towards a ceiling in the void. The ceiling had eyes and mouths. It slavered with hunger.
At least it had no guns.
‘Helmsman,’ Khalybus said. ‘We fire, and then we withdraw.’ The command left a foul taste in his mouth. It was contrary to the design and the spirit of the Sthenelus; it was not made for a darting attack. He had no choice. The scale of war had changed. In head-on confrontation with the colossus the Veritas Ferrum had become, the Sthenelus would not last long.
The machine is adaptable, Khalybus thought. The tool is shaped for the task, or else it fails. He had adapted since Isstvan V. He had sacrificed his strike cruiser Bane of Asirnoth in a run that had only appeared to be a retreat, but had been a trap to destroy an entire fleet of the Emperor’s Children. This time, the flight would be genuine.
One strike. I will gut you if I can, he thought.
The Sthenelus rose higher. The Veritas Ferrum filled the oculus. The auspex screens in the strategium flashed red as the first of the escorts came in range.
‘Fire,’ Khalybus said. Fire everything, he thought. And burn, you foul thing. Burn, for defiling your name and the memory of the heroes you have betrayed.
All banks of torpedoes launched. Every battery of cannons opened up. The entire forwards armament of the Sthenelus fired. A swarm of projectiles streaked towards the behemoth. The plasma batteries discharged moments later, their fury timed so their blasts would hit the Veritas at the same time as the ordnance. Khalybus counted the seconds of the barrage. The moment of the first pause came. He shouted, ‘Hard to port and down!’
‘Port and down,’ Kiriktas confirmed.
The view in the oculus changed slowly. The shells and torpedoes and focused plasma blasts hit the Veritas Ferrum before the turn was well underway. The explosions flared in the upper left of the oculus. The flash overwhelmed the view. For several beautiful seconds, the daemon ship vanished, hidden by the incandescence of the barrage. Khalybus watched, willing the attack to have opened a gaping wound in the enemy’s hull.
The flames boiled away. A giant eye in the hull was punctured. It oozed a sea of ichor over the hull, spreading armour. The surface of the Veritas swirled at the impact sites. Storms formed in the daemonic substance of the ship, then passed. There was no breach. There was no damage.
Khalybus witnessed his opening salvo in the void war turn into an empty ges
ture.
The Sthenelus turned from the site of futility. It angled down and away from the Veritas. It was prey now, and it began the race away from the predators.
‘Captain,’ said Seterikus, ‘auspex readings of the Veritas are changing. There’s a deformation in the lower hull.’
Khalybus turned to the pict screens in the strategium. The rear sensors assembled a hololithic rendering of the enemy. Below the snarling bow, a new spike protruded.
Levannas said, ‘It’s growing a gun.’
‘Hard to starboard,’ Khalybus ordered. ‘All power to the engines. Kiriktas, get us out of its line of fire.’
The deck vibrated with the sudden strain on the engines. Kiriktas, silent now with his entire consciousness melded to the machine-spirit of the Sthenelus, pushed the ship to its limit. The hull groaned with the turn. The manoeuvre threatened to break the frigate’s spine. Klaxons sounded as stress damage spread the length of the ship.
Khalybus exchanged a look with Levannas. The Raven Guard nodded. They braced for the inevitable.
The run had been a long one since Isstvan V. The fight has been a worthy one, Khalybus thought.
The Veritas Ferrum fired. Lightning blacker than the void flashed from the spike and struck the stern of the Sthenelus. It cut the ship open. Warp flame erupted, a firestorm of night and green enveloping every deck of the rear third of the hull. The spine snapped. The frigate broke in two. A greater blast came. The material and the immaterial destroyed each other, and the explosion hurled the two portions of the ship away from one another. The blackened shell of the rear tumbled down, guttering and disintegrating, into the dark below the plane of the engagement. The blast sent the forwards section into a spin. Uncontrolled, helpless, the Sthenelus turned and turned, drifting, as the giant predator closed in.
The jaws of the Veritas Ferrum gaped wide.
Khalybus and Cruax yanked Kiriktas from the throne. The helmsman’s limbs spasmed. Neural feedback from the mortally wounded machine-spirit shook through his body. They pulled the mechadendrites from his spine. They made for the stairs to the main deck of the bridge, supporting him between them until he could walk again. Levannas was one step behind.
There was light on the bridge from the pict screens and emergency lumen strips. Some secondary generators were running yet. In its dying moments, the Sthenelus fought to remain on duty. Smoke poured into the bridge through the main doors. The wavering glow of flames came from the main hall.
‘Abandon ship,’ Khalybus ordered. His battle-brothers were already on the move. ‘We make for the gunships.’
‘We fight still,’ Cruax growled.
Or so we will tell ourselves, Khalybus thought. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘We fight still.’
Levannas echoed him, and so did the legionaries of the 85th Clan-Company as they abandoned the bridge.
When three Thunderhawks left the only functioning launch bay, Khalybus muttered the words to himself again. He looked through the viewing block of the Karaashi’s Fire at the end of the Sthenelus, and the defiance felt hollow. The frigate turned and turned, a broken femur, as the Veritas Ferrum bore down on it. Ignited gases flickered at the edges of the stump of the hull. Minute flashes were larger chunks of wreckage. The bodies of lost legionaries and hundreds of serfs were falling through the void too. They were invisible. The Thunderhawks were specks in the void, beneath the notice of the daemon ship.
Khalybus waited for the jaws of the monster to crush the remains of the ship. The Veritas Ferrum snarled, closing in. Then it clamped its jaws above the frigate. It passed over the Sthenelus. The last of the frigate’s lights went out.
The immensity of the Veritas was above the Thunderhawks now. Mile after mile of horror sped on, seeking the larger prey of the fleets. It glowed with a putrescent light. The blackness of its hull was broken by the red shine of the eyes and maws. The barrels of the huge cannons were bright with infernal fire. It moved through the system like a diseased sun, bringing its own light. It was the bearer of terrible revelation.
Khalybus looked up at the Pilgrim, and understood the superstitious awe it had created on the worlds it had visited and transformed.
A large mass rose through the dark to meet the ruin of the Sthenelus. Strapped into the grav-harness next to Khalybus, Cruax uttered a guttural cry when he saw what was happening. Khalybus felt the cold touch of anticipated horror. He was not surprised by what he saw. Now that it was happening, it seemed inevitable.
The mass was the stern of the Sthenelus. It matched the spin of the forwards half of the ship. Metallic tendrils reached across the space between the two portions of frigate. They met, fused, multiplied. The Sthenelus reformed itself. With unity came corruption. The hull bubbled. Its plating squirmed. Foul light blazed from the superstructure, silhouetting the transformations of the statuary into grotesquery. Eyes opened on the flanks. The frigate became a pitted, gnawed-bone reflection of the Veritas Ferrum. Dwarfed by the bleak majesty of the great monster, the Sthenelus was a ghoul, a thing to feast on the leavings of its master. The engines flared to life, slowing the spin, then stopping it.
The Sthenelus moved forwards again. It bore down on the escaping Thunderhawks.
The port cannons fired. Green energy flashed. It vaporised the Forge of Will.
There was no point in flight now.
‘Kiriktas,’ Khalybus voxed. The helmsman was piloting the Karaashi’s Fire.
‘Captain.’
‘Turn us around. Open fire on the Sthenelus.’
‘So ordered, captain. It has been an honour.’
‘The honour has been mine.’
The two remaining Thunderhawks reversed course. Guns blazing, they hurled themselves at the revenant Sthenelus.
‘We fight still,’ Cruax said.
‘We do,’ Khalybus said. ‘To the end.’ He detached his grav-harness and stood. So did the other legionaries. They would meet the end on their feet.
At his side, Levannas said, ‘We have made a good war.’
‘We have,’ Khalybus said. The end had not come at Isstvan V. They had fought long. They had bled the enemy. They had taught the traitors that the Iron Hands and the Raven Guard were not extinct.
Levannas extended his hand. ‘The flesh is weak,’ he said. He and Khalybus clasped forearms.
‘Victorus aut mortis,’ said Khalybus.
Levannas’ smile was grim. ‘That is certain,’ he said.
Khalybus raised his bolter. When the end came, he would fire.
He did not wait long. The forwards section of the Thunderhawk peeled back for him. He had time to pull the trigger before the flames of night engulfed him.
The fleets of the three Legions fired first. The capital ships trained their biggest guns on the Veritas Ferrum. A third of the other vessels did as well. The rest of the fleet hammered the resurrected ship’s escort. The barrage was simultaneous, coordinated between the flagships. The daemonic fleet sailed directly into explosive hell. The salvo vaporised four of the Veritas’ cloud of escorts in an instant. The ghoul ships returned to oblivion, skeletons shattered into fragments. A curtain of blasts spread out behind the enemy fleet as lance fire reaching past the ships smashed approaching fragments of the necrosphere.
On the bridge of the Samothrace, Shipmaster Altuzer said, ‘They can be destroyed.’ Carminus shouted the same words on the Red Tear. Across the fleets, in hundreds of ships, a roar of defiance met the success of the bombardment. The great barrage at the gate over Pyrrhan had led to nothing, but here, enemy vessels vanished. Others limped on, broken, on the edge of falling back into the tomb that had spat them out.
The triumphant refrain lasted as long as the Veritas Ferrum was obscured by the star-death brilliance of scores of plasma blasts and multiple nova cannon hits. An angry dawn bathed the void. Then the abomination emerged from the fire. Streams of flame ran along its length and wrea
thed the huge, moving gargoyles. The silhouettes jerked in anger. The skull of the prow gaped wide, its roar raging across the psychic aether and resounding in the minds of every soul in the Imperium’s ships. There were craters on the hull. Portions of superstructure slumped like candle wax.
But the craters vanished, filled in by the flowing excrescences of disease. New pillars of brass and bone shot up around the superstructure, reinforcing it, rebuilding the massive fortress of clustered, jagged towers. It weathered the barrage and drove on towards the fleet, its speed undiminished, its hunger growing with its wrath.
The daemon fleet returned fire. A storm of warp energy scythed through the Legions. The barrage took the form of entwined lightning and flame. The void tore open at the passage of the blasts, filling the space between the closing formations with clouds of blood. The storm hammered void shields and triggered emergency activations of Geller fields. Where the defences fell, metal burst into unnatural fire and hulls warped into carnivorous life. The huge jaws of the Veritas Ferrum vomited black flame against the Samothrace. The Ultramarines battleship ploughed into a burning maelstrom that swept over the entire hull. The void shields shrieked with strain, flaring like suns. A chain-reaction collapse began as the Samothrace came out of the fire. Its prow turned up gradually, and the ship, trailing smoke and burning gas, began to rise above the direct line of fire of the skull.
The flagships took the brunt of the first daemonic salvo. There were losses in the fleets, mostly frigates, a first culling of the smaller ships. But the numbers of the Legions were vast. The ships of the Imperium outnumbered the daemonic several times over. The formations were undiminished. They tightened up as the moment of collision approached. Unscathed vessels drew up beside the damaged ones, ready to draw fire and support their comrades.
The Veritas Ferrum appeared to lunge forwards. It came at the Legions with the speed of nightmare. Its path was a straight line, as if the ship was too massive to manoeuvre, or too powerful to divert. It battered through the lance beams and cannon fire. Wounds opened and closed on its hull. The mouths on its flanks chanted a psychic chorus that came ahead of the ship like a bow wave. The choir shouted in triumphant wrath as the Veritas plunged into the heart of the Ultramarines wedge, its guns firing to port and starboard.
Ruinstorm Page 26
