‘Get behind us,’ the Sister Superior commands, waving us towards the further end of the cloister. I think that’s noble of her for a second until I realise she doesn’t want us blocking her Sisters’ fire corridors.
Wasters and hivers come together as a group, following me and the Colonel as we run for the cover of the doorways and pillars further along the courtyard. Another boom draws our eyes back to the gate, in time to see it shuddering on massive hinges, its timbers splitting further apart.
‘What’s the plan?’ someone asks. I’m not sure who’s hiver and who’s waster any more, with everybody wearing waster gear, lots of them with their masks up. Maybe it’s Kulain, or Harrin? Precious seconds trickle past before I realise it doesn’t matter one bit.
‘Whatever comes through there,’ I wave a hand at the gate as another thunderous impact cracks several timbers, ‘just shoot. A lot.’
Spreading out into whatever cover we can find, everyone points a rifle or pistol at the gate. I spare a glance up to the rampart just as a knot of Battle Sisters fall back, driven from the rampart by something closer by. A heartbeat later something large and red heaves over the battlement, a flashing chainaxe in hand, surrounded by a hail of bolt detonations like a fiery aura.
Landing on the rampart, the heretic Space Marine towers over the Battle Sisters, not simply in height but sheer bulk. I’ve seen Space Marines once before, on the Brightsword mission, but the thing that raises its chainaxe over its head with an inhuman roar seems even bigger. Its armour is a dark red, scarred and cratered by bolter fire. Bronze and golden chains hang like epaulettes, though each link is thicker than my wrist, from which skulls and severed hands hang as grisly trophies. The vents of its power backpack stream with black smoke, like the exhausts of a transport, the snarl of the chainaxe adding to the grinding and hissing of the armour as it turns, surveying its surroundings.
The sight of the traitor is all the more shocking because I know that once this warrior used to be a loyal servant of the Emperor. I shudder to think what dark thoughts drive such a fall. I’ve done my share of questionable things, but to turn on the God-Emperor would be the height of madness.
With another bellow, the Space Marine hurls himself with astounding speed at the Battle Sisters, axe sweeping out to hew the arm and head from the closest with one churning blow. Spinning chain teeth fountain blood across the rampart as the dead Battle Sister falls. Ignoring the fire of the Sisters, the Traitor Space Marine ploughs into them, bolt pistol firing a stream of rounds, each shot hitting a masked helm, turning helmets and skulls to bloody ruin.
Some of the others have seen what’s coming and break from cover, their fear overcoming sense. The gate explodes open amid spinning timbers and flame, the splinters and smoke parted a heartbeat later by more onrushing monsters clad in powered war-plate. The daemons were scary, but it’s their sheer impossibility that breaks the mind and sows that dread into your heart. Seeing the Traitor Space Marines pounding through the broken gate is a far more visceral, real experience. Their size alone is overwhelming, the sudden roar of bolt pistols and the flare of plasma as they open fire.
The way they move seems not unnatural but hyper-natural. Beings that armoured, that bulky, should not move with that kind of pace and balance. Even running at speed they move to snap off shots with all the precision of a stabilised gun platform, explosive bolts finding silver targets with unerring accuracy. Blue plasma blasts tear through columns and armour alike, detonating like miniature suns to turn their targets into expanding clouds of vapour and ash, the charred remains hurled into the other Sisters.
Thirteen
ANGELS OF DEATH
I don’t want to open fire. The thought of attracting the attention of one of these inhuman killers freezes my finger on the trigger. What’s a las-bolt going to do, when hails of bolts ring from their armour without effect?
Across the other side of the courtyard a Battle Sister lines up her multi-melta. The air distorts with lethal energy, the hiss of its firing becoming a roar as the blast engulfs the nearest traitor. If the plasma detonations are spectacular, a melta kill is almost impossible to believe. One moment a half-ton of savage heretic is bearing down on us, the next there’s a few scraps of falling armour and a cloud of red vapour swathing his companions.
Another bestial roar draws my eye back to the rampart, where I expect to see the traitor cutting down the last of the Battle Sisters. I’m not too wrong. Piles of silver-armoured bodies lie around the monstrous warrior as it hews left and right with its chainaxe, its blows deflected by the gleaming sword of a Sister Superior.
A Battle Sister rises behind the Space Marine, one arm hanging useless at her side, a reclaimed bolt pistol in her other hand, aimed at the back of the traitor’s head. The Space Marine turns and fires in one fluid motion, but doing so leaves it open to the falling blade of the Sister Superior. The blue-edged sword cuts deep into the pauldron of the Space Marine, slicing through bonded ceramite and into flesh. The heretic’s shot hits the Battle Sister in the chest, causing her to fall to one knee.
Backhanding the Sister Superior away, her sword left sticking from his wounded shoulder, the Space Marine lifts the chainaxe, ready to receive the next assault. Its teeth a blur, the weapon sweeps out, slashing towards the Sister Superior’s head. She barely ducks the blow, but snatches the sword out of her enemy’s body and drives herself forward again. The blade buries itself into the chest plastron, the force of the blow cracking open the ceramite.
The momentum of the attack carries both of them over the edge of the wall, down into the cloister, where they crash into the ground amid a thunder of armour hitting ferrocrete.
There’s no time to see what happens next. Promethium streams out from heavy flamers, setting two of the heretics alight. They charge onwards, armour aflame, chainaxes hewing and pistols spitting death.
Fire from above rips into the Space Marines from behind, now that the Battle Sisters on the rampart are unengaged. There’s probably about half of them still able to fight, bolter shells raking down in a blaze of flame.
I see a brutish warrior stumble, head and shoulders engulfed in detonations. Pieces of armour fly away, exposing a flat-featured face, more scar tissue than skin, contorted with disturbing tattoos of symbols that gleam with their own light.
Another salvo tears flesh from bone, the mass-reactive rounds detonating inside his skull, blowing it apart from within.
I stare in disbelief as the smoking ruin of the heretic tumbles to the ground with a crash.
They can be killed.
I finally open fire with the laspistol, directing my shots towards the faces of the monstrous warriors as best I can – maybe I’ll hit the throat guard or an eye-lens or something. I miss more than I hit, and those shots that find their mark are pitiful beams of red that glance from war-plate as if it were tank armour.
From around me and behind me the others fire too. One bullet isn’t much, and nor is one las-bolt. Ten shots don’t amount to a threat to these armoured behemoths, but when that number creeps up to thirty, forty, fifty shots, it all starts to count.
It’s like stripping a fortification down to its foundations with a blunt spoon. Chipping away, every piece of dust lifted, every scratch and small pockmark one step closer to the impossible goal.
One of the Space Marines turns away from the Battle Sisters, paying attention to our fire for the first time. Amid a converging tempest of bullets and multicoloured las-bolts, the traitor raises his pistol and opens fire. I see the flare of propellant disappear into the chest of the waster next to me, a second before the bolt explodes, blasting open her ribcage.
For an instant I think the heretic will adjust aim towards me, but the muzzle of the pistol slides the other way, filling with the flame of a bolt’s launch a second before another waster fires, head turned to pulp that’s thrown against the wall behind us.
The r
ed-armoured brute advances more steadily. He fires with every pace. Every shot is a kill. Against this we have no choice but to hunker back, our fire lessening to snapped shots every few seconds.
The Battle Sisters gather around their Sister Superior as three of the traitors reach them, a red battering ram against a silver wall. The first of the Space Marines crashes straight over the first Battle Sister, crushing her beneath his bulk, armoured boots cracking open armour as the warrior ploughs onwards into the others. Chainaxes roaring, the trio plunge through the silver line like one of their bolts punching through flesh.
The gunfire above stops abruptly, which is not a good sign. The next time I poke my head around the column I dare a look to see what’s happening.
The Battle Sisters have moved to the outer wall again and are firing outside the abbey.
The third drop pod.
The Space Marines’ advance has driven me around the pillar and I can’t see the gate from this side. I turn around and look the other way, out through the ruin of the gates. Past a couple of large red-armoured bodies something even bigger than a Space Marine approaches, looming through the smoke.
It’s the size of a battle tank nearly, but a walker, its armoured form advancing with steady strides. Through wisps of smog, I see more chains and grisly ornaments, and a fist the size of a man that crackles with artificial lightning, each clawlike finger tipped with a spinning blade like the teeth of a tunnelling engine. In place of the other arm is a multi-barrelled cannon, three lines of ammunition hanging from it to a massive armoured hopper in the shoulder.
I swallow hard as I remember the destruction of the Immolators. If two armoured vehicles with inferno cannons couldn’t stop this thing, then what chance for a man with a thick coat and – I check – twelve laspistol shots?
Spikes adorned with skulls jut from slabs of armoured plate and I see a symbol blazoned on the side, next to a central cluster of bones and skulls like an open sarcophagus – a fanged maw closing on the image of a planet.
The walker is about ten metres from the gate and its gun turns towards me, barrels starting to spin into life.
There’s only so much a mind can take, only so many times it can be thwarted in the simple endeavour of staying alive, before something breaks. I passed that line a long time ago and kept moving. I became used to the idea that I would die, but never to the point that I wanted it. Not until that moment of decision at the top of the fire chasm, when I embraced the death that was due to me. I wanted it then, I deserved the peace at that moment, I thought.
As I watch those gun barrels becoming a blur, waiting for the instant of explosive reaction when the first shell fires, I realise that I have to struggle up that hill one more time and I can’t take it. Being reborn, it’s like starting over. A second chance for a Last Chancer. An impossibility made reality, and now it’s all going to end anyway.
What a pointless day full of misery and stress and people dying.
I open fire with the laspistol, shooting half blind at the armoured walker. The las-bolts look like sparks against the bulk of its armoured hide, lost against the red of its livery, bouncing uselessly from angled plates.
The pistol whines in my hand, the powercell emptied. With a shout that comes from the very bottom of my gut and picks up every bit of my frustration and rage, I throw the stupid thing at the heretic walker. The laspistol bounces harmlessly off a spiked greave as the machine’s boxy torso continues to turn in my direction, the snarl of the gun motor cutting through the other noise of battle.
A flash of blue light stabs from the chest of the walker, blinding me for an instant. My vision swims back into focus just as I hear the detonation of its power plant, broken limbs and twisted frame scattering into the air, the remnants of a mangled pilot’s body tossed through the gateway by the explosion.
My thoughts are a jumble.
From where?
Lascannon.
Behind it.
Destroyed.
As sight and sense coalesce like a gun being reassembled after a maintenance strip, I piece together what happened, in time to see the dark blur of the gunship roaring down over the abbey. The downthrust of jets almost throws me sideways, scattering grit, kicking up a spray of fresh blood.
Heavy weapons set into the wings open fire, chewing chunks out of the traitors’ armour, cutting down the four still crossing the courtyard. I blink back the dust cloud, shielding my eyes against the glare of plasma jets to focus on the gunship. Long, flat-sided with blunt nose and triangular wings, seemingly too big and heavy to hover in the sky like it does. The nose opens, a ramp descending like a beast’s jaw, spilling red light and armoured giants.
More Space Marines.
From about fifteen metres up they fall, landing on the wall of the gate tower amid a crash of boots and crack of bones and ceramite under them. Their armour is ornate, vibrant green chased with gold and silver, hung with what look like lizardskin cloaks and loincloths. I count five at first, bolters finishing what the gunship’s weapons began, snarling rounds flaring down into the cloister to rip apart the wounded traitors.
The gunship moves on, another six Space Marines leaping from its assault ramp as it dips, ferrocrete cracking under the impact of their landing as they hit the cloister floor among the ruin of the dead traitors’ armoured corpses. The heretics react without hesitation, breaking away from the bloodied squads of Battle Sisters to charge headlong at the new arrivals. Distorted battle cries bellow from voxmitters in their armour, echoing back from the abbey walls.
‘Blood for the Blood God!’
I don’t really understand what that means, but it sends a chill coursing through me all the same as I watch the knot of red-armoured brutes closing on the new arrivals.
One of the Space Marines steps forward from the others, his armour blue rather than green but for the pauldrons and helm. He carries a long sword and a staff tipped with what looks like the horned head of a reptile. From this a flare of lightning erupts, lancing across the gap between him and the charging traitors to strike the closest. Red-daubed ceramite shatters like glass, the blue lightning bolt eating its way into the exposed flesh beneath, peeling superhuman muscle apart like foliage burnt away by an anti-plant missile.
In two heartbeats the heretic warrior is nothing more than clattering bones and broken pieces of armour spinning forwards from the momentum of the charge. The two others race past the collapsing remains, bolt pistols firing, chainaxes lifted to the attack.
The thrum of a plasma chamber heralds a sun-hot blast of energy. The chest and arm of a traitor become a cloud of splashing vapour, the ravaged remains falling to one knee. Still alive, the traitor pushes up with his remaining arm, chainaxe used as a prop. There’s no helm, instead a face that seems made of bronze, except that it moves, dagger-like teeth exposed as the warrior snarls hate at the Space Marines. Missing an arm and half his chest, the traitor pushes to his feet, lips drawn back in a snarl, the teeth of his chainaxe shrieking into life once more.
The blue-armoured warrior steps up to meet the charge of the third, the blazing edge of the sword meeting the downward arc of a chainaxe in a shower of black sparks, bolt-shells exploding point-blank from the loyalist’s chest. The Space Marine turns, deflecting another blow as he spins around the traitor, letting the monster’s momentum carry him towards the others. They open fire, joined by those on the wall above, a hail of bolts shredding damaged war-plate while the blue-armoured leader meets the injured traitor with the point of his blade, lancing him through the grimacing face.
Like hounds tearing apart larger prey, the bolt detonations rip the last traitor apart piece by piece, broken armour becoming spinning fragments, body, head and limbs shattered and snapped by internal detonations from the pinpoint-accurate fusillade. With a death rattle the bestial warrior slumps forward, chainaxe growling a last time as it falls from spasming fingers to skitter acro
ss the blood-spattered ferrocrete.
The gunship lifts away, turning as it does so, to roar back over the gatehouse and settle close to the burning wrecks of the Immolators, obscuring two of the empty drop pods with its bulk. Hydraulic landing skids descend as it touches down at the centre of a plume of plasma jets and whirling ash. The engines cut out a second later.
In the wake of such intense destruction, the quiet is like profound silence for a few seconds. The cloister feels small, filled with the presence of the Space Marines. It’s more than their physical size. Their war-plate gives off an aura, heat vents causing the air to shimmer, the buzz of unheard vox-links like static on the edge of hearing. As they move, every footfall is a thunderclap, every servo motion accompanied by a whine of expended power.
While the squad in the cloister fans out, weapons trained on the broken heretics, the Space Marine in blue turns, a few last fronds of energy crackling down the skull staff, reflected in the black lenses of his helm.
‘Identify yourself,’ the closest Space Marine barks, his deep voice given a metallic tremor by the power armour’s address system.
‘Kage,’ I stammer, holding up my hands. I glance towards the Colonel before continuing. ‘Lieutenant Kage.’
The door behind me slams open, bringing a slap of footfalls. Two of the Space Marines adjust their aim and the footsteps stop.
‘Battle-brothers!’ I hear Old Preacher exclaim. ‘Blessings of the God-Emperor upon you for your intervention.’
The half-squad of Space Marines on the wall have turned their weapons out over the approach while the Battle Sisters move across the cloister, heading through the broken remnants of the gate and back to the ramparts. I assume that means the abbey has been secured again, and let out a long breath.
The warrior with the blue on his armour has been surveying the cloister, the tip of his skull-staff glowing with a yellow aura. He turns on me, sheathing his blade as he does so.
Armageddon Saint - Gav Thorpe Page 18
