Space Marine Battles - the Novels Volume 1

by Warhammer 40K

  ‘Alvez, here. What is it, sergeant?’

  ‘My lord,’ said Sergeant Thanator, ‘another ork ship just struck the city. The damage is severe.’

  ‘Where?’ Alvez demanded. ‘Can we contain them?’

  ‘There will be no containing this one, my lord,’ said Thanator, and Alvez could tell by the sergeant’s tone that this was more than just another crash. ‘They just took out an entire section of the Pavelis Wall!’

  Dorn’s blood, cursed Alvez.

  ‘I need to know which section, sergeant.’

  ‘Zona 4 Commercia, section two, my lord. They’re pouring in like locusts. We need reinforcements. The sheer number of them…’

  ‘How many Adeptus Astartes did we lose?’ he demanded.

  ‘None, lord. Our forces were massed around the gate itself. The breach is a kilometre west of it. But the Rynnsguard losses… I can only guess they number in the high hundreds. There are over a million citizens in this district, my lord. We are doing everything we can, but we are few. This place is a charnel pit!’

  Alvez had already begun striding in the direction of the industrial zone’s eastern gate. ‘Hold fast, Thanator,’ he commanded. ‘You will have your reinforcements. I swear it. I’m sending Predators and Vindicators to your position.’

  Alvez’s strides became longer, faster. His footfalls shook the buildings and the streetlamps as he passed. He called to Squad Anto as he went, and they joined him, marching with bolters ready.

  A dark thought had taken hold of him and it wouldn’t let go.

  It was deliberate! It had to be. The orks had started using their ships as battering rams. What in Terra’s holy name had the Rynnsguard anti-air crews been doing?

  Had he and his Fists held Zona 6 Industria, only to lose Zona 4 Commercia?

  If the orks kept this up – and he knew they would – just how long would New Rynn City survive?

  Nine

  The Eastern Steppes, Hellestro Province

  Few normal men ever realised just how much information was all around them. The air they breathed was filled with it, but their noses were not attuned to it in the way a canid’s was, or the olfactory senses of a million other kinds of creature.

  Space Marines knew. Within their bodies, each of Kantor’s survivors carried an organ called the neuroglottis, or The Devourer, grown from the gene-seed of their fellow Adeptus Astartes and implanted during the painful process that forever physically separated them from their fellow men. The primary function of the neuroglottis was to allow instant analysis of a substance by taste. Toxins could be easily detected. Organic compounds could be tested for nutritional content. And a single scent molecule on a breeze could give away a hidden foe or tell the direction in which it had travelled.

  Cortez and his squad were once again on point, ranging a kilometre ahead of the rest of the group.

  The captain breathed, and smelled death on the wind.

  Night had fallen three hours ago, and the Chapter Master had ordered everyone to increase their pace. He hoped to cross as much distance in the dark as possible. Too slow and the daylight would find his party in the open with the sun glaring off their armour and weapons. Ork aircrews would be able to spot them from as far as the horizon.

  They had to make the most of the darkness. Kantor was guiding them north-west to the place where the Eastern Steppes ended and the Azcalan, the Soroccan continent’s massive rainforest, began.

  Once the Crimson Fists were in the cover of the trees, night and day would become irrelevant. They would move without rest, and make the capital that much sooner. Right now, all Cortez could think about was the familiar smell he had detected.

  Every breath he took spoke to him of spilled blood, of wet viscera exposed to the air. There were other scents, too. One of the strongest was dung, neither human, nor ork.

  Cattle, he thought. Kine. That’s what I’m smelling.

  The planet’s closest moon, Dantienne, was high and almost full. Her surface rock contained cobalt, and the dim light she threw down on the plains was distinctly blue. To Cortez and the rest of the Fists, everything had a greenish tinge. Their helmet visors were set to low-light mode, further brightening the gloom.

  As he marched his squad onwards, Cortez now noticed large dark objects slumped on the grassy plains. They were shapeless black things. As he and his battle-brothers drew closer to them, the smell became stronger and stronger.

  Cortez opened a link to the Chapter Master.

  ‘Orks have been here, and recently.’

  ‘They killed all the kine,’ replied Kantor, pre-empting Cortez’s next words. ‘I can smell the blood.’

  Cortez trod over to the nearest of the bodies. Dantienne’s light glistened on the piles of looping wet entrails that had spilled from a wound in its stomach.

  Why didn’t they take the meat, he wondered?

  If there was one thing orks were not, it was wasteful. Everything was scavenged. But not here.

  Then he saw deep furrows in the dirt and had his answer.

  ‘War bikes,’ he told the Chapter Master over the link. ‘I have tyre tracks here. Ork riders did this.’

  ‘Right,’ said Kantor. ‘They wouldn’t stop to strip the carcasses. They must have ridden through here slaughtering everything in sight, leaving the bodies for a follow-up party to process.’

  Cortez found other tracks now. ‘It looks like they rode off in the same direction we’re moving.’

  He tested the air again with his nose. There were definite traces of the ork stink on the breeze from the north-east. It was an acrid smell. Even the foulest of unwashed, disease-ridden human beggars couldn’t hope to smell so offensive as the xenos. Cortez detected other scents, too. One was definitely promethium. Liquid fuel. He could tell it wasn’t from a local source. There was more carbon than the refined fuels the Imperium used.

  The breeze changed direction then, coming to him not from the north-west, but from the north, where a gradual rise blocked his view of the land ahead.

  What he smelled on it stopped him in his tracks.

  ‘Human blood,’ he told Kantor over the comm-link. ‘Fresh. It’s coming from the side of a ridge just north of my position.’

  ‘There is only one small settlement in the area. The Zar-Menenda agri-commune. Can you hear anything?’

  Cortez strained his ears but the night was quiet. If there were sounds, the rise was blocking them. ‘I need to cross the ridge.’

  ‘Do it,’ said Kantor. ‘Reconnaissance protocols, brother. Understand? Keep me apprised. The rest of us will catch up to you once you have established an observation point.’

  ‘Understood,’ replied Cortez. ‘Moving out.’

  Field operations with an entirely new squad were never ideal. Cortez tried not to think about the fine brothers he had lost. Was it really only weeks ago that he had looked across the nave of the Reclusiam and felt his chest swell with pride? Was Silesi really dead? Would he truly never hear Iamad’s sharp laughter again? He was the last survivor of Fourth Company. Why was he always the last? It had been the same at Kalaphax and again and Gamma VI Monserrat, whole squads lost, and always Alessio Cortez returned from the battlefield alone, wounded and weary, but inexplicably alive.

  Now Kantor had assigned him four new faces, new to Cortez anyway. He had seen them before, of course. They were not new in that sense. In a brotherhood of approximately one thousand warriors, there were few real strangers, and though the brothers of each company mostly kept to their own, a certain amount of cross-company interaction was inevitable and actively encouraged.

  Two members of Cortez’s new squad – Brothers Rapala and Benizar – had belonged to Caldimus Ortiz’s Seventh Company, though they had served in different squads. Cortez remembered both of them from a winter combat exercise he and Ortiz had run about twelve years ago in the mountains north of Arx Tyrannus. Rapala and Benizar had performed solidly. Their scores had been unremarkable, but they were reliable with good skills across the boar
d.

  The other two battle-brothers assigned to Cortez’s command were less well-known to him. One was Brother Fenestra, a quiet, thin-faced Blackwaterite from Selig Torres’s Fifth Company. He had cold, dark eyes that never seemed to blink. Cortez had the feeling Fenestra didn’t like him much, though they had never really crossed paths before the cataclysm. It hardly mattered. He didn’t need people to like him, just to do as he said when he said it, and to show the right initiative when forced to act alone.

  The last of the four was also the youngest. Brother Delgahn had served with the Chapter just eighteen years, only graduating from Tenth Company to Eighth Company a decade ago. Like Fenestra, he seemed wary of Cortez, never speaking unless spoken to, holding back on the periphery unless called forward.

  ‘Stay low,’ Cortez told them over the comm-link as he led them up the rise. He didn’t need to whisper for the sake of stealth. His helmet’s external vox-amp was switched off and, without it, no sound leaked from beneath his ceramite faceplate, but his voice was clear and sharp on the link.

  It was hard to stay low in full battleplate, almost as hard as it was to stay quiet. Even in a well oiled and treated suit of armour, ceramite plates often rasped or clanged against each other. There was the constant low buzz of the atomic power-supply, too. After spending centuries in power armour, one tended to block it out, but it was always there, always present, and it could give you away if you forgot about it entirely.

  Within seconds, Cortez and his squad made the top of the rise and peered over. The night-time landscape stretched out before them, a broad patchwork of fields and pastures. In daylight, each would have been a different shade of green or yellow depending on the crops and grasses that grew there. Right now, viewed through the Adeptus Astartes’ helmet visors, they were all varying shades of muddy green. Wire fences and stone walls separated each and, from the west and the north-east, two wide dirt roads snaked towards a cluster of buildings some eight hundred metres away.

  This was the Zar-Menenda farming commune and, in the middle of it, hidden from Cortez’s direct view by a row of large metal grain silos, a huge fire burned, throwing its telltale orange glow on the shell-pocked walls.

  There had been fighting here, or perhaps not fighting, but slaughter. What kind of resistance could the farmers and their families have offered the brutish bloodthirsty invaders who had massacred all their cattle?

  The greenskin stink was sharper and stronger now. So was the scent of human blood. Listening hard, Cortez began to catch sounds of activity from the commune, too.

  His primary heart quickened.

  They’re still here, he told himself with a grin. Automatically, his fingers tightened on the grip of his bolt pistol.

  There were thirty of them, thick-set and green, none weighing less than two hundred kilogrammes. Cortez cursed under his helm. On one hand, he was glad they hadn’t posted any sentries. It had made the final approach to the agri-commune all too easy. On the other hand, their arrogance rankled. Were they so complacent because they believed they had already won this war?

  He would teach them the folly of that assumption soon enough.

  His squad hung back, cloaked in the shadows between two vast octagonal grain silos. The light from the massive fire the orks had lit didn’t reach all the way back here. It was as good an observation point as any.

  Peering out from those shadows, Cortez scanned the scene in front of him. On the very far side of the flames, a row of ugly vehicles, barely recognisable as bikes and buggies, sat with their engines switched off. Each was painted red. He could see that by the light of the fire. Each was lightly armour-plated and fitted with forward-pointing heavy stubbers. From the front armour, cruel metal spikes and blades protruded.

  Cortez had seen such machines in action before, other conflicts, other worlds. He knew how much ork bikers revelled in running down their prey, shearing them to pieces by ramming them head on. Despite their appearance, the ork machines could move fast. Their hit-and-run tactics made them hard to counter with just infantry. It was imperative that these orks did not get back on their bikes before he had a chance to put them down.

  Of the civilian workers who had occupied the farm, there was little sign. Cortez zoomed in on a black shape in the fire, and scowled. It was clearly a human foot. How many living souls had these orks already burned to death?

  There was a scream, and Cortez turned his eyes left. It seemed the orks were not quite done with having fun yet.

  The sound had come from the throat of a woman, perhaps thirty years old, lying in the dirt. She was surrounded by children, five of them, of varying ages, and she was hugging them to her hard. ‘Don’t look, my babies! Don’t look!’ she cried at them.

  Now Cortez saw why. From the other side of the fire, a man emerged into view, walking backwards towards the woman and her children, his arms shaking as he tried to wield an ork blade that was obviously far too heavy for him. Reflected firelight shone on the tear tracks that marked his cheeks.

  He was obviously retreating from something, and that something now appeared.

  It was the ork boss, a towering, yellow-tusked giant in a long sleeveless coat fashioned from some kind of thick, scaly reptoid skin. On the beast’s head there was a helmet boasting two straight horns, each over a metre in length. From its nose hung a gold ring, and from the belt at its waist hung four human skulls, seemingly tiny in contrast to its tree-thick legs.

  The ork boss moved slowly forward following the terrified man around the fire. It was unarmed, but that hardly mattered. Even though the farmer bore a blade, he was outmatched in every way. This was a game to the orks, a sickening cruel game with only one possible outcome.

  The other orks sat in the dirt hooting and howling with bestial laughter, watching their boss torment the last of the humans. They, like their boss, had rings through their noses. Their waistcoats were made of the same kind of reptoid skin as their bosses. It hadn’t come from any creature on Rynn’s World. Cortez was sure of that.

  The woman was screaming directly at the man now. ‘Just run, Aldren,’ she begged. ‘Just leave us and run!’

  If the man, Aldren, heard her, he showed no sign of it. His wide, unblinking eyes were locked on those of the monster as it closed the gap with him. He lifted the blade as high as he could, grunting with the effort. The ork boss stopped for a second and watched him, red eyes gleaming with cold, cruel amusement. Then it stepped forward.

  Aldren lunged and brought the ork blade down as hard and as fast as he could, but it was a pathetically inadequate stroke. The ork boss batted the blade aside, and it flew from Aldren’s hands.

  ‘We’re going in,’ Cortez told his squad. ‘Weapons ready.’

  ‘I thought we were on reconnaissance protocols only, my lord,’ said Brother Fenestra uncertainly.

  ‘We were. Now I’m putting you on combat protocols. Lock out all other comm-channels except this one and encrypt it with an alpha-three key. The only voice you need to hear is mine until I tell you otherwise.’

  He sensed their hesitation. They knew what he was doing. By locking out communication from the Chapter Master, Cortez was denying Pedro Kantor the chance to issue orders, orders that would most certainly have him falling back without dispensing the kind of righteous vengeance his soul demanded. Unreachable over the link, Cortez could thus avoid any charges of direct disobedience. It was a strategy he had used before, and not just a few times.

  ‘Did you hear me?’ he snapped at his squad. ‘I said alpha-three. Do it now.’

  His Adeptus Astartes did as they were told. He had known they would. He was still Alessio Cortez after all. Despite everything that had happened, his legend still loomed large over the Chapter. Sometimes, his fame and reputation were useful after all.

  When each of his Adeptus Astartes confirmed the comms lock, he told them what he wanted them to do and, in pairs, they moved off. Benizar and Delgahn went left. Rapala and Fenestra went right.

  There was little Cor
tez could do until they were in position. It wouldn’t take them long. The commune was small, and the deep shadows thrown out by the fire hitting the buildings and silos offered superb cover.

  Cortez turned his attention back to the fate of Aldren, the woman and her children.

  The ork boss had reached out its right hand, gripped Aldren by the head, and lifted him into the air. With the man dangling, his arms flailing uselessly at the ork’s arm, his legs kicking and flailing, the ork boss turned towards the fire and began walking, a deep, throaty chuckle emerging from its throat as it did so.

  The woman’s screams took on fresh urgency now. ‘Throne, no!’ she wailed. ‘Aldren!’

  To her children, she yelled, ‘Close your eyes, my babies. Close your eyes and don’t listen!’

  Cortez tightened his grip on his bolt pistol. The fingers of his power fist flexed and clenched hard. They could have crushed steel. ‘Damn it,’ he muttered. ‘Hurry up.’

  But he knew his Space Marines would not be in place in time to save Aldren and, if he moved prematurely, he would jeopardise the first part of his plan. There was nothing he could do.

  The ork boss reached the edge of the blaze now and bellowed something to its fellows. Cortez scowled at the sound of the ork language. It was as ugly as the beasts were themselves. Whatever the creature said, a fresh round of hooting and laughing began, which seemed to satisfy the ork boss. It stretched out its arm and held Aldren out over the fire.

  Yellow flames licked his legs greedily.

  The air filled with the skin-crawling sound of agonised, high-pitched screams.

  ‘Where are you?’ Cortez demanded of his Fists, speaking through gritted teeth. ‘Why aren’t you in position?’