Space Marine Battles - the Novels Volume 1

by Warhammer 40K

  The shovel came down and sliced the fosser’s head from his shoulders. The head bounced and rolled through the dust until it came to rest beside Yann’s body. Braughn’s body fell back into the hole and came to rest, twitching in the depths of the grave. Looking from the butchered body of his father to that of his dying brother, Otakar Menzel radiated a hatred his heart had never known. Taking his shovel in both hands, he stomped through the dust, heading for home, where his mother would be waiting with mule’s milk and a smile, and the boy’s bloodlust would find new expression.

  Aloysius Mosca felt the abbot’s thin staff-sceptre jab his back-flesh. Mosca had not volunteered for the prayer cordon. The chaplain of his cell-block had ordered recompense for an incident at the barracks armoury. He had been part of a team of fraters assisting in the thrice-blessing of reserve ammunition and weaponry for the Charnel Guard defence force. Every lasfusil, stubber, powerpack and individual bullet required consecration, and above the instruments of death and destruction, Mosca had found himself in a dispute with a fellow frater. The dispute had become heated in the silence of the barracks armoury and Mosca had hit out with the palm of his hand. It was not intended as a strike or an assault, but the frater who fell and gashed his head against a mortar rack did not view it that way and reported Mosca to the chaplain. Assignment to the prayer cordon had been the chaplain’s idea – a part of Mosca’s spiritual probation.

  Like thousands of others – some probationers, some volunteers – Mosca had been marched along the Great Eternity-East lychway. When the cavalcade arrived at the bleak Fifth-Circle cenopost and the miserable hovel-hamlet of Little Pulcher, Mosca and his brothers were blindfolded and led arm on shoulder to the shores of Lake Serenity. He could hear the rhythmic drone of the drainage pumps in the distance. Turning their backs to the lake they were instructed to retain their blindfolds and link hands with one another. Mosca could only imagine they were creating an unbreakable circle of prayer around the damned artefact that had been discovered below the drained surface of the lake. There had been low whispers and tattle of such a find in the fraterhouse and in the cloisters. Gossip only to match rumours of grave robbery, diabolists and disappearances out on the lonely lychways of the necroplex and burial ground provinces beyond.

  Abbots walked around the inside of the circle issuing threats and jabbing encouragement as the cordon alternated between communal prayers spoken aloud to hymnals and liturgies sung to the pearlescent skies.

  ‘Sing, you wretch,’ the Abbot behind him ordered. ‘I want the God-Emperor himself to hear you.’

  Mosca recognised the voice. A deep, baritone menace belonging to a fat bastard Mosca remembered from the Progenary. He also remembered the beatings he received at the pudgy hands of the priest and the rattan cane he used on the backs of the choristers’ legs and hands.

  Mosca’s eyes moved about under his blindfold. His mouth, moments before full of bombast and lines from ‘Exalted God-Emperor, the Shepherd of Souls’, fell to silence. Lips curled. Nostrils flared. Teeth gnashed together on the gristle of long-forgotten hatreds. Mosca released the hands of the choristers to either side. One had crushed his palm with a pious grip; the other had been moist and slippery with some penitent shame.

  Tearing the blindfold from his contorted face, Mosca revealed the blood-brimming rage of his eyes. Reaching down into the folds of his cassock robes and dust cloak, the cemetery worlder found the hot euphoria of a rough handgrip and trigger. Backing away, Mosca brought the brute length of a heavy stubber – thrice blessed and liberated from idleness in the barracks armoury – from concealment. Turning and hugging the flared muzzle of the brute to his body, the chorister yanked frenziedly on the trigger.

  The barrel danced this way and that under the recoil and Mosca’s unpractised aim, but at almost point-blank range the stubber’s bullets punched through the pig-priest’s back. With his white vestments blanching red, the abbot crashed to the floor. Like a rider trying to tame a bucking mule, Mosca brought the chugging weapon around and sent a hailstorm of lead into the presented backs of the choristers. As the massacre unfolded the cordon began to break up. With cemetery worlders screaming, falling and being blasted from their feet, Mosca spun around to present his death-dealer to fleeing choristers on the other side.

  Roaring his hatred – his being filled with white-hot insanity – Mosca felled the running choristers, the juddering barrel of the heavy stubber showering the panic-addled crowds with bullets. Like trees before the axe they fell, before their scrambling steps could carry them to the cover of headstones and cemetery statues.

  With the choristers dead and the cordon broken, Mosca turned to bathe in the hate-wrought radiance of the unholy monument he’d been securing. Through a blood-filtered gaze, he drank in the scale and magnificence of the thing. It called to him and fed his fury with its dread architecture. Pointing his weapon to the sky, Mosca fired once more. With the belt feed of the weapon dancing a diminishing jig, he sent bullets rocketing for the heavens in honour of carnage and annihilation. He didn’t notice the poor marksmanship of Charnel Guardsmen flashing about him – the single bolts of their lasfusils flying past. He was lost to the moment and lost to the monument, until a lucky shot found him – burning out the back of his skull and bringing peace to a mind devoid of reason.

  Chapter Seven

  The Beckoning

  ‘Give me a circle of the target,’ Kersh requested.

  ‘Affirmative.’

  The Gauntlet banked slightly against the setting suns. At an open airlock situated in the flank of the Thunderhawk, Kersh, Melmoch and Dancred looked down on the abomination. Nobody spoke. Micah, the Scourge’s new shadow, waited nearby. In the tactical bay behind them, Proctor Kraski chewed tobacco while High Constable Colquhoun relayed instructions to his Charnel Guard vox-operator and Pallmaster General Ferreira leant against the compartment wall clutching his stomach and covering his mouth. Beyond, Chief Whip Uriah Skase and Squad Cicatrix primed their weapons and offered thanks to the primarch.

  Below the Gauntlet were the still waters of Lake Serenity. On the distant shoreline of the lake drainage plants boiled off the fresh water, releasing clouds of steam from fat funnels up into the atmosphere. The waters had receded as such from a shallower inlet, revealing a monstrous monument that had been hidden beneath the lake’s crystal surface. A hideous multi-sided pyramid, the monument appeared like an eight-pointed star from above. It was a dirty cream colour impacted with silt and draped with scraps of freshwater weed. About the gargantuan artefact, Kersh could make out the thin circle that made up the prayer cordon, with temporary Charnel Guard heavy weapon emplacements situated at intervals beyond.

  ‘Put us down beyond the cordon,’ Kersh ordered.

  ‘Affirmative, corpus-captain.’

  With the gunship’s landing gear scraping down between the headstones of freshly dug graves, Kersh jumped from the airlock. About him, in the drained earth reclaimed from the lake, fossers had already gone to work with their shovels and masons had put the finishing touches to the gravestones adorning the neat, rectangular pits. Peering into the nearest empty grave Kersh spotted an odd arrangement of pipes running between the headstone and the grave bottom. Wire cables ran down the side of the pipes and up into the stone of the marker.

  Proctor Kraski came up behind the corpus-captain.

  ‘What are the pipes for?’ Kersh asked the enforcer.

  ‘Mistakes happen,’ Kraski informed him nonchalantly. ‘Thousands of stasis caskets and sarcophagi arrive here every day from Imperial worlds across the sector: hive-worlds, cardinal worlds, garrisons and so forth. Occasionally people are interred accidentally – sometimes even on purpose.’

  ‘Buried alive?’ Kersh marvelled.

  ‘Without power and a stasis field, dead bodies rot in the sacred earth. Those buried alive might ordinarily have an hour or two of air, screaming for their lives below the ground where no one can hear them.’ Kraski turned his head and spat a stream of tobacco and
saliva behind his back. ‘It is cemetery world practice to fashion all headstones with a safety mechanism: an air source and wire cords leading to small bells, set by the masons in the decorative detail of the gravestones.’

  ‘All the graves have these mechanisms?’

  ‘It’s an ancient custom.’

  Marching around the Thunderhawk’s nose, the Excoriators and their guides made their way towards the prayer cordon. The choristers were blindfolded and had little idea that it had been an Adeptus Astartes gunship that had landed in their midst. They also had little idea that as abbots broke the chain and moved several choristers to one side, the Emperor’s Angels walked among them.

  Beyond the cordon, Kersh strode into shallows, splashing down into the emptying lake. Fresh water lapped about his armoured ankles. The cordon lined the shore but the receding waters were still reasonably deep about the abominate structure. The Excoriators strode towards the damned object, with Skase and his squad kicking up fountains as they filed forwards in a canopy formation. Kraski, Colquhoun and Ferreira made headway a great deal more difficult, especially since the Pallmaster General was retching into the shallows following his first flight by Thunderhawk.

  As the Scourge approached he saw that the huge pyramid was constructed of human skulls. Each was a brick within the horrific structure, cemented together with lake silt and sand. Kersh’s boot tapped against something in the water. Kneeling down, the corpus-captain grasped the object and brought it to the surface. In his gauntlet Kersh held a cracked human skull. Rolling it over in his ceramite glove he examined the dome of the cranium. A symbol or design had been daubed in red paint on the top, a cross run through with three parallel, horizontal lines. Kersh tossed the skull over to Melmoch who caught the macabre object, drawing a scowl from the Pallmaster General.

  ‘Bodies,’ Brother Micah called from a position ahead. Using the barrel of his boltgun he lifted a mesh of tangled bones and shredded clothing. The shallows closer to the monument were a mantrap carpet of twisted skeletal remains. Lifting his weapon higher, Micah angled the bones around. ‘They all seem to be wearing these,’ the company champion said. From his muzzle dangled a lead cloak on a chain, wrapped around the vertebrae of an unfortunate’s neck. The Pallmaster General looked up from his retching and narrowed his eyes.

  ‘How did you discover this aberration?’ Kersh put to the cemetery worlders.

  Colquhoun directed their attention to the funnels of the distant drainage plants. ‘In order to maximise plot space and extend the burial grounds, Lake Serenity had been marked for land reclamation. As the water levels fell, the top of the structure made itself known.’

  ‘What about the skulls?’ Kersh said. He turned to Proctor Kraski. ‘That’s a lot of heads to go missing.’

  ‘They’re not cemetery worlders,’ the arbitrator said, spitting a stream of tobacco-stained saliva into the shallows. ‘The murder rates are impeccable here. Until last month, I only had four murders on my slates for last year, global total. Two, the cycle before that.’

  ‘What about last month?’ Kersh enquired.

  ‘Thirty-seven,’ Kraski said.

  ‘There are a lot more than thirty-seven skulls here,’ Dancred said. Behind him, Punisher had rolled down the Gauntlet’s opening bay ramp and trundled through the shallows to take position beside the Techmarine.

  ‘We have occasional robberies,’ Kraski said.

  ‘Robberies?’

  ‘Grave robberies,’ the enforcer confirmed. ‘Mostly fossers – having a hard time meeting Ministorum taxes. You have to catch the ghouls in the act because the cunning bastards re-bury the bodies and therefore the evidence. Did catch a couple of lost souls out here a few months back. Took a ceremonial sword from a Guard officer’s casket shipped from the Kallistan garrison world. Took the officer’s head, as well. After I introduced them to my power maul they confessed that looting the graves is prolific in the martial grounds…’

  ‘Areas set aside for military burials?’ Kersh queried.

  ‘Yes,’ Kraski replied, ‘which is unusual, since the ghouls are more likely to make good on the trinkets of some hive-world spirestress than the casket of a Navy commander or Guard brass.’

  ‘What of the decapitation?’

  ‘Put in an exhumation request,’ Kraski told the Excoriator before spitting. The enforcer and Pallmaster General Ferreira exchanged a hard look. ‘But it was denied. We liaised with the Charnel Guard and organised extra patrols but nothing came of it.’

  ‘Melmoch?’

  The Librarian seemed lost in the monument’s warped design. ‘Epistolary Melmoch!’ Kersh repeated.

  ‘Eight points,’ Melmoch replied. ‘The dread star of the Ruinous Powers. Two pyramids, sitting one within the other, eight sides to face, eight corners to turn. Eight – the Blood God’s integer.’

  Kersh had fought the Blood God’s servants. Crazed cultists. Berserkers. Renegade Space Marines of the Goremongers Chapter. Even princes of the Rage Lord’s daemonic pantheon. They had all shared the same unrelenting desire to spill the Scourge’s blood.

  ‘What is the monument’s function? Is it some dark gateway?’ Kersh put to the Librarian.

  ‘No,’ Melmoch replied. ‘Not a gate. A throne.’

  ‘A throne… of skulls?’

  ‘A throne to be taken,’ Melmoch said. ‘An invitation issued. A beacon beckoning.’

  ‘A beacon for what?’ Kersh asked.

  ‘I have no idea,’ Melmoch told him honestly. ‘Proctor, all the surrounding remains seem to be wearing these cloaks. What are they used for?’

  ‘It’s part of an Ecclesiarchical practice,’ Kraski said. ‘I know little of it.’

  The Excoriators turned on Ferreira.

  ‘Lead capes,’ the Pallmaster General confirmed. ‘They are a form of punishment. Penitents volunteer to bear the considerable extra weight as part of their rite of atonement. They are a metaphor for the tardiness of their wearer’s spiritual progress.’

  Melmoch looked back at the knotted remains in the shallows. Kneeling he plunged his gauntlet into the water and retrieved a rusty blade. Scanning his eyes across the glassy surface, he found a second and a third, all simple knives, pitted and brown.

  ‘Melmoch?’ Kersh prompted. ‘Opinion?’

  ‘Corpus-captain, I think that it is entirely possible that the monument is a reasonably recent construct. These bodies probably belong to cultists devoting themselves to the Blood God and his murderous ideals. As the proctor indicates, graves are robbed and skulls are taken. The martial burial grounds are targeted because the Blood God favours the skulls of warriors for his throne. The caskets are reburied to avoid suspicion in the same way that the monument was constructed in secret on the lake bed.’

  ‘Breathing apparatus. Heavy equipment. That is a significant undertaking,’ Dancred reminded the Librarian.

  ‘More than you know,’ Melmoch said, standing upright with the knives in his gauntlet. ‘The monument has been entirely constructed by hand. Each skull added to the submerged structure would be a one-way ticket for its bearer. Each cultist would wear a lead cape and take a blade with them. The lead would take them to the bottom, where they would add their grave-robbed gift to the throne. They would then slit their throats and baptise the unholy monument in the murk of their offered blood. Murder – of the self.’

  Nobody said anything for a few moments.

  ‘Macabre,’ Dancred said finally.

  ‘Committed,’ Melmoch replied.

  ‘Futile,’ Kersh concluded. The Scourge bit at his mangled lower lip. He looked about the Excoriators and cemetery world significants, then took in the ghastly monument with an all-encompassing stare, from top to dreadful bottom.

  ‘As every Excoriator knows, it is a great deal easier to destroy than it is to create,’ Kersh said. ‘We’ll widen the exclusion zone and have the Angelica Mortis obliterate it from orbit.’

  ‘Completely out of the question,’ the Pallmaster General suddenly piped u
p. There was a new-found edge to his voice – an imperiousness that Kersh hadn’t heard him use with the Excoriators before. ‘The cemetery world’s sacred earth will not be tainted with violence and bombardment.’

  ‘It already seems tainted,’ Kersh returned. ‘That is why we’re here.’

  ‘It would cause untold damage to the surrounding plots and tombs…’

  ‘We can calibrate the warhead,’ Techmarine Dancred informed him.

  ‘What if you miss?’

  ‘We’re the Adeptus Astartes, Pallmaster,’ Kersh barked back. ‘We do not miss.’

  ‘I’m sorry, corpus-captain,’ Ferreira said. ‘But I cannot allow that kind of an intervention.’

  ‘It is a Ruinous artefact,’ Chief Whip Skase called across with venom. ‘We do not need your authorisation to destroy it.’

  ‘Corpus-captain,’ High Constable Colquhoun interjected. ‘I’m as eager to be rid of this abomination as you are, but the Lord Pontifex will not sanction an orbital attack on Certusian soil. There must be another way. Please, my lords.’

  ‘If you don’t want our assistance,’ Skase threatened, ‘then you can keep the damned thing. The Excoriators have duties to attend to elsewhere…’

  ‘Skase…’ Kersh said. The chief whip looked from Ferreira and Colquhoun to the corpus-captain. ‘What about that?’ Kersh nodded at Dancred’s itinerant Thunderfire cannon. Punisher had rolled through the shallows to take position dutifully by the Techmarine’s side. ‘Could we demolish the monument rather than obliterate it?’

  ‘Unbelievable,’ Skase concluded in the background.

  ‘The Thunderfire cannon can deploy subterranean ammunition designed to destabilise and disorientate,’ Dancred said, his face whirring and clunking. ‘Directional salvoes combined with strategically placed demolition charges from the Charnel Guard armouries – in prodigious amounts, of course – might topple the structure.’

  ‘That will take days!’ Skase fumed. The squad whip wanted off the cemetery world as soon as possible to continue the hunt for the Alpha Legion.