Though they moved like skeletal automatons, he saw the awareness in their eyes and felt their emotions, such as they were. It was hate that burned in their balefire orbs, pure, hollow hate. The necrons would not rest until all of Damnos was gone, its population eradicated like some cancerous plague. It was this chilling fact that made Falka and his men, all of the Damnosians, march to their likely deaths. Better to fight and die, than just to die.
Mortality had never really concerned him. He didn’t know if at the end there was anything more than a dark void without feeling. He hoped there would be light, maybe not a Golden Throne in the Eternal Palace of the God-Emperor, but light enough so he could find Jynn and be reunited. That would suit him just fine.
Falka donned his helmet – it carried the markings of a sergeant inscribed with a combat blade by Iulus himself – and hollered to his troops.
‘Gather your courage, men. We are the saviours of Damnos, fighting for our native soil. The Emperor is with us. He has sent His Angels to fight by our side. In the name of the Imperium, honour them!’
Las-fire whickered from the Imperial ranks meeting the gauss-beams in a lattice of energy, crisscrossing lethally over the wastes. The shuddering report of heavy bolters joined it as the battle tanks opened up. Pintle-mounts blazing on their cupolas, engines screaming – the last armoured company of Damnos went to war.
An explosion, emerald-tinged and violent, lit up the distance in a viridian flash.
The afterglow still lingered in Falka’s vision when he saw two beams of light strike one of the floating necron pyramids and destroy it. Beyond the enemy masses, through the cascade of gauss-flayer death, he saw the beleaguered Ultramarines too, Sergeant Fennion’s true brothers.
Even amidst the firefight – seen in cracks between the melee – they were glorious. A figure strode amongst them, his armour gilded and with a white-red crest atop his battle-helm. A cape fastened to his ornate pauldrons via taloned clasps whipped about him as he killed necrons with a glowing blade. This was the personification of a hero. It was valour made flesh. An arch-angel. It was Sicarius.
With the Emperor’s name not long passed his lips, Falka wept.
‘Immortals, dismount!’ Iulus leapt from the open-topped Chimera, landing squarely with chainsword drawn. In the next breath, he was running, a steady thud of shells spitting from his bolt pistol into the necrons. Four of his battle-brothers were alongside him, charging at full tilt, for the glory of Ultramar and all of Guilliman’s heirs.
The clash was fearsome, Iulus and his four battle-brothers weathering a hail of gauss-flayer bursts before they reached the enemy. Necrons responded to force. They had to be overwhelmed, struck such a catastrophic blow that whatever arcane engines animated them would realise destruction was imminent and quit the field for the sanctity of their tomb.
Considering their frailties, the humans showed incredible bravery to be only a few metres behind the Ultramarines. As he severed the spinal column of one of the mechanoids, Iulus felt a swell of pride for these poor doomed souls. In such an intense firestorm, casualties amongst the Guard and conscripts were horrific. Without power armour or an intensely hard armature, they fell quickly and in numbers.
Iulus lost sight of Kolpeck almost immediately. Inwardly, he chastened himself for it but this was war, the great leveller, and it had no use for sentiment. His chainblade growled, eager for the kill, and he fed it. Adopting a semi-circular formation, the five Immortals advanced, laying down an incessant barrage of fire. The necrons had thrown their infantry against them, a horde of raider constructs that the Second had become experts at fighting. Space Marines adapted quickly, learned the weaknesses of an enemy and how best to slay them. The Ultramarines, from Legion to Chapter, had been doing it for over ten thousand years. It was down to a fine art.
‘Killing is why we were born.’ Iulus recalled the words of his old trainer.
There wasn’t much guile to it. The fact that the bulk of the force was conscripted ruled out any intricate tactics. It didn’t matter. They would employ the hammer and hope it was enough.
As he cut down a raider trying to rise, Iulus caught sight of the tanks. The one with Commander Sonne was racing in the front.
Two battle tanks behind him were burning wrecks. He’d seen them stitched by gauss-beams and then explode. No rifle weapon had any right to be so potent against armour like that. It left a limping Hellhound and a Chimera with its multi-laser still functional to take on the monolith.
Whether reacting to their proximity or merely self-repaired and thrown back into the fray, Adanar didn’t know or care, but one of the necron pyramids had turned and was heading for them. Lances of emerald death spat from the cannons arrayed around the machine’s flanks. A concentrated burst chewed up the Chimera, riddling it with holes before the fuel reserve cooked off and turned the vehicle into a ball of oily flame. Adanar watched it buck and spin before crashing down on its roof in a smoking, fiery ruin. He let the backwash of heat flow over his face, toss the cape at his back – it was ragged and dirty by now.
The Hellhound slewed to a halt soon after, its axle giving out. The engine screamed hot but it was just grinding metal. Adanar turned. The tank’s crew were still fighting to get out of the escape hatches when the monolith found its new target and immolated them. It was the broken axle that killed them. Fate was cruel sometimes.
Heavy bolters on the side-sponsons were throwing out shells, tearing through their belt-feeds with fury. Suddenly one of the guns clunked tight and the fusillade from the right side stopped. Then it was the left. Out of ammunition – they’d run their stockpile dry.
‘I want that thing down!’ he cried into the darkness of the cupola below.
A stuttering salvo of emerald beams stabbed into the tank’s hull before the crew could reply. The tracks slowed almost instantly, engine noise falling from a shriek to a whine to a low hum. Deceleration. It could mean only one thing: the driver was dead.
Leaping down into the tank’s hold, Adanar found a scene of bloody carnage. Crimson, though it looked more like black, painted the walls where the crew had been part-flayed by gauss-beams or shredded by internal shrapnel. In such close confines it was worse than a grenade going off. Adanar’s position in the cupola had been the only thing that had saved him. Everyone else was dead.
‘Can’t let it live,’ he muttered. Somehow, the locket-charm had found its way into his grasp. He rubbed it idly, though he didn’t remember retrieving it. Dragging the driver – or what was left of his half-cooked, cauterised body – out of his seat, Adanar scrambled into the self-same position and hit the accelerator pedal hard. It didn’t take a crew of five men to drive a tank. It took one with the will to do what was necessary.
Through the cracked view-slit Adanar made out the bulky form of the monolith. The view was mired by dirt and blood so he wiped it with his sleeve. Collision course set, he gave it everything. Stabs of light perforated the hull as the necron machine opened up again but miraculously he was left unharmed.
Just a few more metres.
The names of his wife and daughter were on Adanar’s cracked lips. The sheer side of the monolith loomed, filling the view-slit with black.
‘I am coming…’ he whispered, and closed his eyes.
An explosion lit up the battlefield. Falka saw wreckage and fire, but he was too busy fighting for his life to make out details. It was the sound more than anything that arrested his attention.
To his right, a conscript pulled a frag grenade and was halfway through a throw when a blast caught him in the neck. He fell and the grenade went off, filling the area around him with noise and hot metal. Falka’s vision faded to black. He was dimly aware of being on his back and of a damp sensation over his torso and legs. The dirt was soft and all sound slowly bled away to a soft susurrus. Through the encroaching darkness he thought he could see angels coming through the white mist…
Victory was at hand. Iulus had been in enough battles over his decades of service
to realise this. Attacked on both sides, at one a reserve battalion primarily made up of human soldiery, and the other a breakout force of Ultramarines, the necrons were well beaten. Smashed between such desperate and inviolable warriors, the mechanoids phased from the battlefield and left only the bodies of Imperial fallen in their wake.
He held his chainsword aloft, gazing around at the carnage they had reaped. ‘Victoris Ultra!’
Every Space Marine, every conscript and Ark Guard trooper raised their fists.
‘Victoris Ultra!’
‘And the glory of Damnos!’ he added, seeking out Kolpeck amongst the exultant masses. The trooper was nowhere to be seen. Iulus had no time to think further on his ebbing sense of triumph – the captain and his honour guard approached.
Sicarius clasped him in a firm embrace. ‘Well met, brother.’ He withdrew and held onto Iulus’s shoulder guards to help convey his delight at their arrival. ‘Well met!’
Humble, Iulus bowed. He saw Praxor just behind the captain and caught his gaze.
‘All is in readiness back at Kellenport?’ Sicarius pressed, letting the sergeant go.
Iulus confirmed this.
‘Then we had best make haste.’ Sicarius turned to indicate the larger necron army behind them. The Ultramarines had put ground between them and small longer range skirmishes were still going on between the assault squads and the necron gun-platforms, but the majority of the phalanxes had slowed to a crawl. ‘The overlord rebuilds his forces but will continue the advance. We must reach the staging ground before he meets us.’ Something flashed behind the captain’s helmet lenses; either retribution or anger, but Iulus couldn’t tell which. ‘I vow this will be our last retreat.’
With that, Sicarius left him. It allowed only the briefest of reunions with Praxor.
‘I am pleased to see you still alive, brother,’ Iulus said genuinely. The two sergeants clasped forearms.
Where Iulus gave off a reserved ebullience, Praxor’s mood was dark. ‘Many are not.’ From the reduced ranks of the Shieldbearers, it was obvious that his squad had suffered.
‘Death or glory, brother,’ said Iulus. ‘It is our way, our lot.’
‘We have chosen death.’ Praxor saluted, though the gesture was perfunctory and intended to end the brief discourse, and tramped away with his battered squad.
The Dreadnought, Agrippen, followed in his wake.
‘Immortals indeed,’ said the venerable warrior, appraising Iulus’s men.
‘We are too stubborn to die, old one.’
‘When we reach the walls of Kellenport to make our stand, that trait will be tested, I feel,’ Agrippen replied before walking on.
Iulus looked out into the advancing necron sea, a silver waste bringing ruin to everything in its path. Ixion and Strabo were withdrawing too, having neutralised the vanguard of gun-platforms. The necrons were consolidating their forces. They had time and growing numbers on their side.
‘Yes,’ his answer came, too late for the Dreadnought to hear. ‘Yes, it will.’
Turning, Iulus saw the conscripts and Ark Guard gathering too. He stopped a corporal on his way. ‘You!’ The man looked up fearfully at the imposing cobalt warrior-knight. ‘Where is Trooper Kolpeck?’
Chapter Twenty-Six
They stood shoulder-to-shoulder, bolters locked and ready, blades drawn and gleaming with the rising of the moon.
Before them, the third wall, its gates laid open for the sally of the Damnosian defenders. The humans were behind them now, tucked into their firing holes, pressed against their battlements and looking down on their champions arrayed in the Courtyard of Xiphos.
Praxor did not turn to look, he didn’t need to. The humans had made their last act of defiance; it was up to the Ultramarines to become the true saviours of Damnos now.
‘Do you remember our words about King Vidus?’ asked Sicarius. The Shieldbearers were next to the Lions of Macragge in the line.
‘A legend of triumph over adversity, my lord,’ Praxor replied.
‘Indeed, brother-sergeant.’ Sicarius pointed to the third wall and its open gates, an expansive gesture of his sword-arm encompassing the courtyard. ‘This is our Thermapylon, and we the seven hundred whose blades and courage blunted the cruel ambition of a tyrant. History repeats itself, Sergeant Manorian, it always does. We stand at the cusp of it now.’
The Lions stood straighter at their liege’s words. Vandius thrust the banner of the Second higher and it caught the wind. Daceus sent a crackle of energy through the fingers of his power fist. Gaius Prabian drew the blade of his sword against his shield, making the metal scrape in a wordless challenge.
This was what it meant to be a Lion. It was utter devotion; it was obedience and blind trust without equal. Sicarius only brought those who followed his will without question into his inner circle. Ironically, this was the closest Praxor had ever been to joining them and it was also the moment he knew he never would.
Agrippen was close, on the other side of Sicarius’s honour guard. His eternal gaze was on the battlefield ahead. The Dreadnought was not here on Damnos to report on the captain of Second Company’s actions, nor was he following any agenda Agemman had set. He was merely here to fight, to honour the Chapter’s name and lineage.
‘I am my Chapter’s unsheathed sword,’ said Praxor at last.
‘Then make your blade ready, brother,’ Sicarius answered, the Tempest Blade held before him, ‘for the enemy comes! Courage and honour!’
The Ultramarines took up the bellowed cry, their voices in unison, their purpose as one.
‘Courage and honour!’
Necron raiders were the first to breach the wall. As they did so the charges Iulus had set all those hours ago ignited, filling the Courtyard of Xiphos with rock and fire.
Tonnes of rock and plascrete descended on the necrons. Many metres thick, several kilometres long, the third defensive wall of Kellenport was obliterated in the blast, burying everything around it. Dust and dirt rose in a massive pall to blanket the advancing necron forces. It churned across the courtyard, brushing against the assembled Ultramarines and colouring the edges of their armour. The Space Marines let the debris cloud roll over them, unmoving. It only took a few minutes for it to be swept away on the breeze and an echoing silence to eclipse them. Seconds later, green balefire orbs resolved in the gloom as the next line of mechanoids thrust into the rubble.
With much of the vanguard crushed, the necron overlord had little choice but to press his elites into the breach. By now, the phalanxes rerouted to destroy the Ultramarines had been gathered. Necron immortals stumbled over the wreckage of the wall to be met by a stern barrage of bolter fire. They were beyond mere raiders though, and weathered the storm with impunity. Gauss-blasters answered in rapid-fire bursts that shimmered like green pyrotechnic across the snowy courtyard flagstones.
Falka watched it all through his firing slit on the wall. A thick bandage was wrapped around his torso from where the shrapnel had hit him. Despite the cocktail of drugs in his system keeping him upright and battle-worthy, the wound hurt like all the hells. Others weren’t so lucky. Pelk lost most of his throat to the blast; Hiiken, an eye and the back of his skull. Men had died, but Falka lived. Perhaps the Emperor had blessed him; perhaps He had blessed them all. He hoped His gaze would fall on His Angels too as the necrons poured into the courtyard.
I am doom. The words echoed inside the Undying’s cavernous mind. He had contemplated oblivion, his endless sentence of existence, and decided that all life must be eradicated from the universe. Cities burned, their populations reduced to ash by his wrath; worlds imploded, sucked into a vortex of obliteration; entire systems ignited into endless flame witnessed by his mind’s eye.
This is death, this is all… I shall show it to the universe.
The curse was alive in his memory engrams, as pervasive as any flesh-borne contagion. It had condensed his self-awareness down into a singularity – the obsession with total destruction.
Hurl rock and earth, until the world is bare. It is as inconsequential as a speck of dust. Across the debris and the sundered remains of the defensive wall, the Undying found his prey.
This was the one who had defied him.
He glared, imagining the ending of all things, and outstretched a skeletal finger.
‘Eradicate them.’
Reacting to the voice of their overlord, the immortals marched into the billowing dust cloud in phalanx. The Undying went with them. His honour guard attempted to close around him, glaives drawn up protectively in the simulated behaviour of aeons past. With a curt gesture, like he was parting the waves of some ancient sea, the Undying broke apart their circle and advanced after the immortals. Obeisant, they followed.
I am no longer flesh. I am abomination. I am destroyer.
The hollow thoughts echoed in his slowly fragmenting mind. Weapons-fire was coming from beyond the debris. War was joined again. Igniting the blade of his war-scythe, the Undying stared into the storm and felt… nothing.
Two-handed, Scipio hammered the necron lord over and again with his chainsword. Whatever the strange orb in the monster’s chest had done to it, the Voidbringer was reduced to scrap. With a final cry of anguish, it phased out, seemingly drawn into the artefact only for it then to collapse in on itself in a miniature event horizon.
Scipio sagged a little, his breathing rapid. ‘It is done,’ he announced, but Tigurius wasn’t listening. The aura was still emanating from his body and he focused to control it.
Extending a shaking hand, he uttered in a broken rasp, ‘Get me to the ridge, as high as you can.’
Surveying the immediate area, Scipio looked for further threats but the necrons had ceased their advance. In fact, in many instances, they had simply stopped. The effect of the Voidbringer’s destruction was potent and debilitating, it seemed. His constructs appeared slower, sluggish even, as if having to recalculate or waiting for the hole in their chain of command to be repaired. Those necrons that had to defend themselves did; those beyond the immediate reach of the battle remained still.
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