‘Stories,’ she replies with a shrug. ‘Old, old stories. Almost forgotten.’
‘What sort of stories?’ I look up. The drop pods are like three new suns, the glow of entry panels yellow against the lightening red sky. ‘Happy tales to distract us from impending death, I hope.’
‘Stories of blood,’ she says. ‘The eaters of worlds.’
‘Great. Never heard any of them.’
‘Was a time when the daemias came to Armageddon. Before. Generations ago.’
‘Daemons?’ I keep my voice quiet, keenly aware of the Battle Sisters all around us. It’s obvious that the warpborn are here, we just fought them, but it’s strange how nobody ever talks about them directly, not even now. Everyone accepts that it’s not something to discuss openly, that it’s a sin to spread such gossip. ‘What stories?’
‘Time of blood. My ancestors flee into deep wastes. Hivers fight themselves. Soldiers arrive and fight hivers.’
‘A rebellion?’
‘Yes. Rebellion. And daemias come, called by evil hivers.’ She gestures upwards. ‘And falling suns, hundreds of them!’
‘Space Marines came to Armageddon before, to fight daemons,’ I whisper, leaning closer. ‘Don’t you mean the first invasion of the Beast?’
‘No,’ she snaps. ‘Know orks, and not orks. Older stories. You listen better! Big armies of Space Marines, fighting with daemias.’
‘I never heard of any war here against warpborn. I would have, I’m sure. An army of Space Marines is something people don’t just forget. Or a battle against… against the walking nightmares.’
‘Not against,’ she says, banging her fists together. She locks her fingers through each other. ‘Fighting with.’
I look up again. Space Marines on the same side as warpborn, in a war that took place years ago that nobody has ever heard of. Sounds like campfire entertainment to me and I guess Orskya sees something in my face that gives me away.
‘They kill everyone,’ she says. ‘All not Space Marines, Emperor’s guardians kill them. Bring new hivers. Millions.’
‘The Emperor’s guardians killed everyone?’ I’m really not following her now. ‘Why would they do that? Who would be allowed to do that?’
She shrugs, a haunted look in her eyes.
‘Everyone gone.’ She makes a chopping motion with her hand. ‘Only wasters remember.’
Who would have the authority to replace an entire planetary population? Or have the resources to do it? It’s insane, moving hundreds of millions of people across the warp. It’d take a generation just to get them here. And for what?
A further thought answers my own question.
‘The Inquisition…’ I barely breathe the word. Like talking about the abyssal ones, even mentioning the shadowy left hand of the God-Emperor feels like it’ll bring them down on top of us. ‘Wiped everyone out for seeing daemons.’
She nods and gives me a knowing look.
‘Even if we live, we die, I think,’ Orskya says, casting glances at the Battle Sisters. ‘Maybe not first time. Maybe not last time…’
All I need to brighten my mood is the thought that even if we somehow survive the plague-bearers and blood-warriors and Emperor knows what else, then the agents of the Inquisition are going to slaughter us all for seeing something we’re not supposed to.
I add that to the list of other shitty fates awaiting me, and at least it’s near the bottom in terms of likelihood. There’s far more chance I’m going to get killed by the superhuman, power-armoured madmen in those falling drop pods, or succumb to their abyssal allies, long before an inquisitor decides I’m surplus to requirements.
Twelve
WORLD EATERS
I’ve been up and down from orbit to surface a good number of times and I suppose I’d not really appreciated how long it actually takes. It’s a long way, even when you’re plummeting down at several hundred kilometres per hour. It’s been more than ten minutes since we first sighted the traitor drop pods and they’re still coming.
But it’s not going to be much longer. An air defence cannon booms out its greeting to the falling pods, lighting the sky with blossoms of hot shrapnel. Within a minute the area around the enemy assault craft is a litter of black puffs and glittering shards, but the pods keep falling all the same.
‘Is it always like this?’ I turn, surprised to hear Olesh. ‘The waiting, I mean.’
‘What are you doing here?’ I snap. I grab the lasgun out of his hands. ‘You should be inside with the others. It’s dangerous out here!’
‘Really?’ He laughs, a slightly manic look in his eye for a few seconds before his focus settles on me. ‘The boys are safe. Being looked after.’
He makes a grab for the lasgun but I pull it away.
‘No! I didn’t haul your arse all the way across the wastes and almost drown in ghost ash to save you just for you to get ripped apart by some traitor’s bolt-round.’
‘But that’s why I’m here,’ he says, making another lunge for the weapon. I spin away and he overbalances, almost falling over. Straightening, he fixes me with a stern look. ‘It’s my right to protect my family.’
‘Fine, I don’t disagree,’ I tell him. ‘But as a last resort. Take your gun and stay with your son, for all that’s holy. I’m serious. It’s going to be a slaughter up here in a few minutes. It’s not brave, it’s not heroic or noble to stand here and get torn to shreds by an explosive warhead.’
‘Then why are you still here, Burned Man?’
It’s always the simplest questions that hide the most complicated answers, and for a heartbeat I consider ignoring him and just getting some of the others to drag him back to the shelter of the abbey. His earnestness persuades me I owe him something, and I figure it’d be quicker to get rid of him if I answer.
‘I ain’t choosing to be here,’ I say, waving a hand at the wall, the Battle Sisters, the whole damned abbey and all of Emperor-forsaken Armageddon. ‘This is just where I happen to be right now. I’m a soldier of the Emperor. One that did bad things and gave up a comfortable life for a never-ending parade of shitty missions that I’m not supposed to come back from. This is just the latest shithole I happen to have landed in, on a growing list of shitholes.’
He looks at me, mouth agape, but I press on.
‘You want to fight for your family? Great! Listen to me, survive long enough to maybe make a difference, and when the time comes, you don’t go down easy and you don’t go down with any regrets. Me? I’m not fightin’ for you. I ain’t fightin’ for your kid or the memory of a dead wife, or to see the golden sparkle of the sunrise over Lake Frag-me just one last time.’
I take a breath and he looks like he’s going to argue so I press on before he has a chance.
‘I ain’t fightin’ for the glory of the aquila or to preserve the sanctity of Armageddon for the Imperium, and I sure as shit ain’t fightin’ for him any more,’ I snap, jabbing a finger towards the Colonel, whose attention has been drawn by my rant as have a good number of the others manning the wall. ‘So, you know what? You feel good about making a choice, yeah? You can choose to stand up here and feel like it’s important, and maybe you’ll survive and have a story to tell that stupid nephew of yours, and that son you almost got killed.’
My stare is like a laser sight, fixed on him, pinning his gaze to mine.
‘Or an explosive bolt hits you in the gut, detonates inside your intestines and rips out the lower half of your body, spatterin’ me with your last meal and pieces of your flesh, your bone fragments tearing more holes in my coat. And guess what? It makes no difference to me! I ain’t got that choice. I can’t just head down there and maybe hope somebody else wins before I have to fight. You can do that. You don’t have to die to prove to your son that you’re a hero. You can live and raise him good and teach him to say his prayers and maybe tell him the time that the Burned
Man dragged him out of the throat of an ash ghost. And I want you to do that because he’s not old enough to remember you yet, and that explosive bolt that’s going to tear you into bits doesn’t leave memories, and if you takin’ that bolt means I live, it still doesn’t mean I’m going to be your son’s dad.’
I’m getting hoarse but I can’t stop, the words just keep coming and coming, because deep down I know that my time is up. I dodged it once but not again, and this is my confession and I can’t keep it inside any more – all the things I should have said before I went over into the fires, the things I can say now because the Emperor gave me a Last Chance just one more time.
And I feel the Colonel watching and listening as I try to make him understand why we saved the prisoners and why I waded into the ash ghost and did all of the other stupid things.
‘So why not frag off, let me take that bolt for you instead, eh? If the enemy get through me, you can try your best, but give me the first shot at them, right? Nobody’s gonna miss me when I die. They won’t toll the Bell of Lost Souls for Lieutenant Kage. And I’ll tell you why. I deserve to be here. I wronged the God-Emperor and He’s punishin’ me, that’s why I’m here. Through all of it the Master of Mankind has seen fit to put me, a broken-down miscreant, blasphemer and deserter, on the walls of a damned battle abbey of the Adepta Sororitas so that you don’t have to fraggin’ be here!’
I thrust the lasgun into Olesh’s hands, pushing him back to the steps. He gives me another look, mouth hanging wide, and then hurries off. Turning back towards the rampart I’m confronted by a crowd of faces, a mixture of disbelief, amazement and even some adoration. Silence reigns except for the crack of anti-air shells above us. I catch the Colonel looking at me with calculating eyes before he turns away, heading back to the far end of the wall.
Orskya breaks from the clutch of wasters but before she can say anything a heavier thud in the skies draws everyone’s attention up again. A brighter fire lights the airbursts of the tower gun, drawing a ragged cheer from some of the hivers and wasters. They think the anti-air has hit one of the drop pods.
I don’t feel like celebrating. Something doesn’t scan right as I squint up at the blossoming explosion.
‘Get to cover!’ I shout, not even sure why, throwing myself along the wall towards the door of the gate tower to my left. ‘Incoming!’
My brain catches up with everything else, translating what my instincts saw straight away. The fireball was too regular to be a flak hit. It had to be a controlled detonation.
A keening whistle fills the air as some folks respond to my shout, others milling about for a precious, deadly few seconds, marvelling at the pyrotechnics a few hundred metres up. The Battle Sisters throw themselves into the rampart, hivers and wasters following me or trying to push themselves up against the wall, some of them hurling themselves to the floor with hands over their heads, as if that’s going to protect them from aerial attack.
In the last few seconds before the hail of shards hits the abbey I see that it’s worse than I thought. Not razor-rain, but a shower of glinting bolts.
Hundreds of them.
The first explodes on the western wall behind us, heralding a few seconds filled with a gathering roar of impact detonations. The air fills with fire and screams, flesh ripping open, bones cracking and splintering as mass-reactive warheads carpet the defences. Pressing myself into the arch of the doorway, dragging a couple of wasters in with me, I feel hot shrapnel hitting the back of my neck, plucking at the sleeves of the heavy coat. As the wave of detonations passes, the boom of explosives is replaced by weeping and shrieking.
I turn, fighting the desire to stay with my head buried against the pitted wooden planks of the door.
It’s carnage, the wall top slicked with blood and body parts. I see the broken remains of ten or more Battle Sisters, armour ruptured, the red of their capes and tabards indistinguishable from the blood-slicked rags that cover the dead hivers and wasters.
The dead are the lucky ones. In just a glance I see men and women with missing limbs, skulls torn, faces ripped, bodies opened up by the murderous hail. Some pull themselves through the gore of their companions, moaning incoherently. A Battle Sister with half her helmet and head missing stands looking at me, her expression one of dazed confusion while brain and blood leaks down the ornate scrollwork of her breastplate.
The screech of jets gives me no time to comprehend the slaughter beyond a sketch of maimed corpses broken by glimpses of faces twisted in horror and agony.
Retros burning blue, the first drop pod slams into the ground about thirty metres in front of the main gate. An armoured, angle-sided egg big enough to carry ten giants sits amid a smoking crater on the metalled road leading to the abbey. Vortices of heat twirl from stabilising fins, distorting the air around it. From its summit an assault bolt system fires, launching another salvo of deadly projectiles in every direction. I drop the moment I see the flash, lethal thumb-sized rockets spraying over the rampart, cutting down another handful of Battle Sisters that had raised their weapons in defence of their abbey. I hear rather than see the assault ramps opening, the crash of ceramite and metal on the ground and the thunder of heavy footfalls.
The towers light up with bolt impacts even as their weapons return fire, pulsing flame bursts and heavy bolter rounds into the newly arrived foe.
The second pod screams down a few seconds later, also outside the wall. I thank the Emperor for this small mercy, shaking with the thought of what would have happened if one of the drop pods had hit its target inside the compound. There’s destruction enough as it is and I crawl towards the rampart, elbows and knees reddened with the spreading lifeblood of my former followers.
I am so glad I told Olesh to get out of here.
The third pod, the one that sprayed the explosive hail, screeches down further out. In the blur of its passing it looks a bit different, like it’s reinforced or something. There’s definitely a brighter gleam of retro-jets than with the others as its plummeting descent is arrested just a couple of hundred metres up, falling out of view a couple of seconds later.
I see others looking at me from among the mounds of dead and nearly-dead. Orskya is among them, half buried beneath her waster kin, blood splashed across her face, coat matted with more crimson, though whether from her or someone else I can’t tell. She pulls a long-barrelled arquebus from the gory ruin and drags her leg from under the shredded cadaver of a young man, wrenching it free as her heel hooks in the folds of his torn flesh.
I rise just a little, enough to peer through the haze of bolt propellant settling on the carnage, through which I see the Colonel at the far end of the wall, about twenty metres away huddled in the other doorway. There’s a cluster of seven or eight people with him, some of them wounded, others with lasguns and autoguns gripped ready to fight.
As one, responding to some command over the vox I can’t hear, the surviving Battle Sisters rise. A line of silver steps to the rampart in a heartbeat, bolter retorts ringing along the gore-stained ferrocrete, the flare of their weapons shining on armour, glistening from the splashed blood of their companions.
The singing resumes but is met almost immediately by amplified bestial roars from beyond the wall. I can guess at the range to their targets by the angle of their fire, from about twenty metres out, fifteen, ten. The traitors cover the ground in seconds, at the base of the wall in just four quick heartbeats.
Firing straight down now, the Battle Sisters start to take return shots. Bolts scream up at them, crashing into their armour, showering splinters of ceramite. Shrapnel from the wall and the Battle Sisters scratches at my face and the back of my hands, the air fills with silver slivers and flying chunks of ferrocrete. The roar of bolt detonations is overwhelming, throbbing in my ears as Battle Sister after Battle Sister staggers back from the rampart, each driven away by the force of bolts exploding around and on them, each the centre of a p
ersonal storm of metal fragments and fire.
Any trooper standing up there would be lumps of dead meat by now.
A boom announces the first assault against the gate below us. Through the din of bolt impacts I hear the rev of chain weapons, swiftly followed by the screech of whirring teeth on stone and the deeper rasp of blades cutting timbers.
Movement from the Colonel draws my eye. He’s mouthing something, perhaps even speaking, but the words are lost in the smoke of battle and the clamour of fire. He points to himself and then to me, and then back to the steps.
I take his meaning. Someone needs to defend the inside of the gate.
‘We need to hold the cloister,’ I tell Orskya.
‘What?’ she shouts back.
‘Down the steps,’ I yell, jabbing a finger towards the back of the wall. ‘They’re cutting through the gate!’
I crawl away from her, calling for anyone else that can listen to follow me. She takes my meaning and a small knot of wasters follow, dragging themselves on their bellies, some daring to rise to their hands and knees as they haul themselves through the scattered remains of family and friends. Around them Battle Sisters are driven back by more fire, some of them sent spinning down, helms broken open, armour pierced. Others recover, reloading their bolters, priming fresh promethium flasks for their flamers before stepping back into the hail of enemy fire.
Reaching the top of the steps I flop from the wall top and almost fall down them, gaining my feet about halfway to the ground. I glance across to the other stair and see the Colonel and about a dozen others descending.
A huge detonation beyond the wall shakes the ground. A plume of fire and smoke rises into the air and I figure it must have been one of the Immolators, which were still outside when the drop pods hit. A second massive explosion – promethium tanks of the heavy flamers, I guess – follows a few seconds after the first.
Reaching the ground, I find there’s a squad of Battle Sisters already waiting, taking up positions behind the pillars that line the courtyard.
Armageddon Saint - Gav Thorpe Page 17
