Kantor tried to stay in close. His reach was far shorter than the ork’s. It wouldn’t help him to pull back. If he stayed here, he stayed within his own striking range, but what good would that do him when the monster was still shielded?
Another swing of the warlord’s axes gave Kantor a brief opening, and his power fist flashed forward, a devastating hook that would have killed just about any living thing. The fist’s power field snapped like lightning, and Snagrod’s personal shield flashed bright, but the force of the blow was spent on the shield, and the warlord barely even stumbled back a step.
Kantor’s adrenaline surged even higher. He felt like a child battling this thing, powerless to hurt it.
Snagrod kicked out while Kantor was focussed on the swings of the monster’s deadly blades. The kick caught him square in the stomach and launched him ten metres backwards, skidding along the surface of the landing plate.
Kantor grunted. Even through his ceramite plate, the blow had winded him.
Snagrod charged straight in while the Chapter Master was still on his back. The beast lifted both chainaxes at once and put all its formidable might into a vertical killing stroke.
Kantor rolled left, every fibre of his body committed to the motion, and the axes bit deep into the plate, lodging there hard. The motors that drove the weapons’ wicked teeth whined in complaint.
Snagrod roared and yanked at them, while Kantor leapt to his feet and slipped around to the monster’s side. There, at the warlord’s back, attached to the squiggoth-skin belt, was a curious-looking module.
The shield must come from there, thought Kantor.
In the split second before Snagrod pulled his axes free, Kantor’s sword stabbed towards the module, his movement deliberately slowed. Most shields resisted objects travelling at high speeds, but allowed slower intrusions. This was no different. The tip of Kantor’s blade pierced the energy field and skewered the module.
There was a snap of ionised air and the green shield flickered off.
Snagrod felt it immediately. With a roar of rage, he swung and batted Kantor aside with the butt of his right axe.
The blow sent Kantor skidding along the plate once more, his right pauldron almost entirely shattered, chunks of ceramite spinning away from him.
But he had achieved more than he’d hoped. The warlord was vulnerable now, and all Kantor’s fury and lust for vengeance bubbled up, spilling over his self-control like a torrent of boiling lava.
He was on his feet instantly, ignoring all his pain. His conscious mind retreated, giving way to raw, untempered aggression. With a battle cry that rang out across the landing plate, he launched himself at the ork warboss one last time. There was no holding back. His killer instinct took over everything. He would rip the beast apart or die.
Snagrod loosed a roar of his own and stormed forwards to meet him, axes high. The warlord had been undefeated in battle for a thousand years, slaying every last challenger to his rule. No mere human would change that.
They slammed against each other like crashing trucks, ceramite armour against flesh tougher and thicker than old leather. The axes whistled through the air, motors growling greedily again, hungry for meat to rip apart. Snagrod tried to cut Kantor in half with a scissor-like double backhand, but he cut only empty space.
Kantor slipped under in a blur and, at last, had the warlord right where he wanted him. His sword thrust deep into the monster’s side and twisted. Snagrod howled in pain and anger, and tried to knock Kantor away, but the pain robbed the blow of speed and Kantor evaded it, staying inside the creature’s guard. He yanked out his blade. Hot blood poured onto the landing plate. Snagrod swiped again and staggered back, his right leg drenched in slick crimson.
Kantor followed the ork’s movements, pressing his attack. He launched a savage overhand blow with his power fist, aimed straight at the warlord’s head, but the beast rolled with the blow, catching it on his huge shoulder.
The thick deltoid muscle exploded in a grisly spray, revealing the bone and sinew beneath. The impact staggered Snagrod, dropping him to one knee. Kantor leapt at him, kicking him down onto his back and straddling the beast’s huge chest. He raised the power fist again for a killing blow, but Snagrod caught it, fingers wrapping iron tight around the wrist.
Kantor’s reaction was immediate. He brought his left hand up, still gripping his sword, and stabbed down at the monster’s throat.
Snagrod’s left shoulder was almost obliterated, almost useless, but not quite.
Through the pain, the ork managed to bring his ruined arm up just in time. He caught the blade of Kantor’s sword in his right hand, the edge biting deep into his fingers. With a roar of pain, the warlord wrenched the blade from Kantor’s grip. It skittered away across the ground.
Kantor snarled and launched a barrage of punches with his gauntleted left hand instead. There was no deadly power field over that hand, just hard knuckles encased in armour. It was enough. The fury of his blows was terrible. He rained punch after savage punch on the warlord’s face, smashing the beast’s tusks, tearing deep red gouges in its cheeks and brow, blinding one of its eyes and breaking its massive jaw.
Snagrod scrambled to defend himself, but, from his back, one arm greatly diminished in strength, the other locked in a death grip around the Chapter Master’s power fist, he could do little to resist Kantor’s unrelenting fury.
‘You destroyed our home!’ Kantor yelled as he tore the warlord’s face apart. ‘You killed my brothers. Now you pay!’
The words were wasted on the warlord’s tattered ears, but the meaning was not. Death was close, closer than it had ever come to the greenskin leader before.
With an infuriated roar, Snagrod bridged, thrusting his torso up from the ground with the full power of his thick legs. Kantor was flung off and scrambled back to his feet to continue the attack. Snagrod didn’t wait for that. He rose and ran, his huge feet pounding the plate, straight towards the place where the gunship still hovered. Kantor gave chase, but there was a sudden stutter of autocannon fire and he had to leap back to avoid being torn apart by the shells.
Snagrod kept running, blood pouring from his wounds in red rivers, splashing a great wet trail onto the landing plate as he went. The gunship dipped towards the edge of the plate just as Snagrod arrived there, and the warlord leapt into the open bay-door in the side of the craft, causing the whole gunship to swing unsteadily for a moment.
Kantor roared in frustration as he watched the ship drift away from the edge on tongues of blue fire. The warlord was going to escape!
There was a rattle of fire from behind him, and a patter of bolts exploded on the gunship’s cockpit bubble. The armaplas cracked under the hail of shells, but it didn’t break. Still, the ork pilots weren’t about to wait for another volley of fire. They swung the gunship around and increased its thrust to maximum.
As the ship roared off towards the south-east, Kantor’s eyes tracked it.
He saw Snagrod lean out of the bay-door and look back at him.
Incredibly, it looked like the monster was laughing.
Five pairs of heavy footsteps stopped at Kantor’s side.
When the ork gunship was gone from view, Kantor turned, and met the visored eyes of Terminator Squad Victurix.
It was Rogo Victurix, the squad sergeant, who spoke first.
‘He got away.’
‘This time,’ Kantor snarled back.
‘We have the spaceport secure,’ said Victurix. ‘Anais has the defence grid online. Ruzco is already guiding in the first of the landers. It is minutes away.’
Kantor looked out across the Nolfeas Plate. The damaged ork bombers were still there.
‘We need to clear the tops of the three terminal towers,’ he said.
His voice was low, rasping. He was coming down from the adrenaline surge, and even his Adeptus Astartes physiology felt weary after a battle like that. The pain of the blows Snagrod had landed began to push through to his brain now as the adrenal
high seeped away.
Victurix nodded to his fellow Terminators and said, ‘I think we can take care of that.’
They would simply push the bombers over the edge of the plate. Together, the Terminators had more than enough combined strength for that. They would clear the areas below of their brother Space Marines first, of course.
‘You know, my lord,’ said Victurix, his tone suggesting a wry smile under that heavy ceramite faceplate, ‘you look terrible.’
Kantor didn’t have it in him to laugh, not right now.
The warlord lived.
The secondary sun was rising, poking up just beyond the lip of the eastern horizon.
Golden beams of light kissed Kantor’s battered armour. He turned to look north, wondering how the Silver Citadel fared. What of Maia Cagliestra and her people? What of the Old Ones, the Dreadnoughts he had left to fight on the walls. The void shields had probably fallen by now, or would be close to it. In a few minutes, the first of the Naval landers would be here. The Legio Titanicus were coming, but were they too late? He and his dauntless Adeptus Astartes had done everything they could. They had seen to the things that were within their power, and at great cost. Much of the Chapter’s blood had been spilled. Many brave brothers would be mourned.
What happened next lay as much in the hands of others as it did in those of the Crimson Fists.
Kantor knew this for certain: his Chapter would survive. The Crimson Fists would claw this world back, province by province, metre by metre if necessary. Everything would be put right. If he did nothing else in this life, he would see to that.
He was Lord Hellblade, twenty-ninth Chapter Master of the Crimson Fists, Scion of Dorn, born to wage war in the name of the Emperor.
Alessio Cortez would stand with him, and so would his unflinching battle-brothers, warriors like Daecor, Victurix, Grimm, Deguerro, all of them.
Dark decades still lay ahead, but he would endure.
The Chapter would endure.
Epilogue
Remembrance
‘It is only on days like today, the anniversary of the day the tables finally turned, that I allow the memories to resurface, that I truly dwell on the totality of the destruction we faced. Despite my rank, despite my years of petitioning, I was never able to gain access to the complete truth of what happened at the spaceport. I know only this: had brave Space Marines not given their lives knowing they would never hear our thanks, not a single man, woman or child would live to remember the war.
‘The void shields of the Zona Regis were close to overload when the greenskin Gargants finally turned to engage the fresh Imperial forces suddenly attacking them from the rear. From the relative shelter of the gun towers, we saw Navy landers descend, vast armoured craft studded with guns and missile-pylons, filled to the brim with brave and hardy souls. We saw wings of fighters and Marauder bombers roar out over enemy lines, something we had never thought to see again, and watched those lines blaze yellow-white as deadly payloads hit their mark. Tired as we were, wounded, desperately hungry, we cheered as I know I will never hear men cheer again. We watched the greenskin invaders die by the thousands, then the tens of thousands, and somehow, somewhere, we found the energy to lift our guns again, and lend the last of our strength to the fight.
‘Ten years have passed. Ten years to the day. As we do every year, we gathered on Jadeberry Hill, veterans, politicians, survivors, to pay our respects to those that gave everything, men and Adeptus Astartes both.
‘The governor was there. She has aged so quickly since the war. She looks haunted, and rumours abound that she will abdicate in favour of her granddaughter soon.
‘Of course, we are all a little haunted.
‘At midday, the skies opened. A cold rain lashed down. We took shelter in the memorial building where a string quartet played Guidollero’s Vasparda et Gloris, and, together, we stood and wept in quiet gratitude for the souls of all those mighty warriors by whose determination and ultimate sacrifice we yet lived, and who, in this life, we could never hope to repay.’
Extract: In the Shadow of Giants: A Retrospective General Saedus Mir (934.M41-)
Fall of Damnos
Nick Kyme
Prologue
274973.M41
The primary generators were dead. No litanies to the Machine-God, no entreaties to the Omnissiah were about to revive them. The last tremor had been the largest – the Mandos Prime fusion stations were down.
It was the job of Gorgardis and his crew to repair them.
‘Critical failure across all facilities,’ the exofabricator muttered. His breath fogged the air with the cold from the permafrost.
‘My lord,’ a voice crackled through the vox-implant in Gorgardis’s ear. The heavy ice and some kind of latent, as of yet unspecified, radiation marred his reply with static.
‘Present,’ said the exofabricator, distracted with his scanner read-outs. The seismographic returns were incredible, more than merely tectonic plate shifts. Perhaps the planet was destabilising.
The voice’s next words made Gorgardis stop what he was doing.
‘We’ve found something.’
He licked his lips, tasting the blandness of ice crystals, and put away the scanner. Artak’s position in the facility came up on the retinal display of his optic implant. It was flashing, and a small binaric code indicated the other exofabricator was a further eighty-six point two metres down.
Gorgardis paused to think, the logic engines supplementing his organic brain functions making swift correlations. ‘I’ll be right down,’ he said, and made for the nearest rail-lifter.
Much of the hard ice around the structure had melted, but it was buried so deep and seemingly without end that it was impossible to tell just how big the thing was.
There were icons upon the smooth outer wall. It looked like metal but very dark, shimmering, almost vital. Despite a wealth of experience in runic symbolism and semiotics, Gorgardis didn’t recognise any of the iconography.
‘Unknown provenance,’ he muttered, tracing his hand over the symbols but being careful not to touch them. He turned to Artak, who was waiting anxiously behind him. Gorgardis waved him on. ‘Bring up the servitors – drills and hammers, heavy-bore.’
Magos Karnak observed the pristine surface of the half-buried ruins with cold detachment.
‘Incredible…’ he breathed. It had been many years since he’d experienced awe, let alone expressed it through his organic vocal cords. Karnak was mostly machine, but he still retained the gamut of human feeling. Presently, it was being stimulated to a greater extent than he’d thought possible since his apotheosis from the flesh.
Mechadendrite scanners performed a full spectral, auditory and metallurgic analysis of the structure, feeding the results to the tech-priest’s machine-cortex for later study. An initial review made little sense.
‘And you went to every length to open it?’ he asked.
Gorgardis gestured to the half-dozen wasted servitors slumped in a pile nearby. ‘We exhausted our every resource,’ he said.
Upon witnessing the slab-sided ruins, he’d summoned the tech-priest of the facility at once. Karnak had been swift to respond, bringing in his adepts: a horde of enginseers, transmechanics and genetors. The tech-priests were baffled.
Gorgardis went on, ‘Returns from our sonar-staves reveal that this is but one structure amongst a series of many. Most are buried deep beneath the ice bed.’
‘And this?’ Karnak referred to a floating grav-bench on which several items of alien origin were arrayed.
Gorgardis singled out a six-legged creature with silver chitin across its back and mandibles not so dissimilar from mechadendrite tools.
‘My best estimate is a repair drone of some sort. It’s dead.’
‘Or dormant,’ Karnak countered, his gaze absorbing and cataloguing the other mechanical finds on the bench. Some were perhaps weapons; others were harder to classify. Partial degradation from exposure to ice moisture made the task diffic
ult but not impossible. ‘I’m taking all of them,’ he decided, before showing Gorgardis his back and driving away on the tracked impellers he had in lieu of his legs.
‘M– my lord?’
‘All finds are to go to Goethe Majoris where they can be better studied.’
Gorgardis made the sign of the Cog and went about his orders.
‘Seal this site,’ Karnak added by way of afterthought. ‘Its secrets will be revealed to us in due course, Omnissiah be praised.’
Act One:
Emergence
Chapter One
779973.M41
The vox-transmitter was wretched with interference, so Falka hit it again.
‘Keep doing that and you’ll break it,’ said a deep and sonorous voice behind him.
When Falka turned, his smile was broad and bright enough to light up the whole mine. ‘Jynn!’
He seized the woman in a bear hug, lifting her off the ground. Even in her environment suit, she felt the steel of his girder-like arms.
‘Easy, easy!’ she warned, mock-choking.
Falka put her down, ignoring the questioning glances from the rest of the shift. Riggers, drill-engines and borer-drones advanced towards the darkness of the vast ice-shaft like an army. They were accompanied by menial servitors and heavy-set chrono-diggers. Like Falka and Jynn, the human contingent of the labour force wore bulky environment suits to stave off the cold and make the twelve-hour cycles possible.
‘Where’s your rig?’ asked the big man. He’d stripped back the thermal protection on his arms, revealing faded gang-tats and wiry grey hair. ‘I didn’t see it.’
Jynn pointed to a docking station, one of many in the massive ice cavern. Like most of the mining vehicles it was squat, decked out with plates and protective glacis and only partially enclosed. A crew of three menials and a pair of chrono-diggers stood around it awaiting her return.
‘She’s all mine,’ she said proudly, adjusting the thermal-cutters, flare-rods and chain-pick fastened to her tool belt from when Falka’s bear hug had dislodged them.
Space Marine Battles - the Novels Volume 1 Page 101
