Kush screamed.
As Omar pulled the magnoculars from his face he saw the sniper suddenly pass before him in an ugly blur. Showering masonry told the Scout that something had struck the bell tower, taking out Brother Kush as the sniper had so many others. The Excoriator hadn’t been struck by a las-bolt or marksman’s bullet. A winged monstrosity had hit the belfry wall like a thunderbolt, smashing through the stone gap that had served Kush’s aim so well, and cannonballing into the Scout. As both Excoriator and beast came to a savage halt against the opposite wall – Kush wrapped up in the creature’s talons and bat-like wings – Omar heard the Scout scream again. The scream swiftly became a gargle and then a crunch as the monster bit out the Excoriator’s throat.
The thing left Kush’s corpse and, still streaming with masonry dust, crawled horribly across the belfry at Omar. The Scout managed to get off a couple of bolts from Squad Whip Keturah’s pistol before the beast was upon him. Using the weapon as a knuckleduster, Omar slammed the fury’s gargoylesque head to one side. Its dagger-teeth came straight back at him, and it was all the Excoriator could do to clutch his fingers around its lower jaw and keep it from his face. Omar felt himself instinctively kicking out with legs that weren’t there. After the momentary strain of a struggle, with the daemon’s warp-fuelled strength getting the better of the Excoriator’s bulging arms, Omar clicked the bolt pistol to fully automatic with his thumb and nestled the squat muzzle of the weapon under the beast’s chin. Yanking on the trigger, Omar sent a continuous stream of fire through the monster’s head. Bolt-rounds tore through the fury’s infernal brain and out the top of its gnarled skull. Seconds later, the thing was a deadweight of flesh on top of him – the murderous gleam gone from its eye.
Thumbing a stud, Omar ejected the spent bolt pistol clip. Heaving the beast off his torso, the Excoriator pushed himself onto his chest and, trailing lines and drips, crawled arm-over-arm across to Kush. He stopped momentarily as the fire soul-storm tore out of the fury’s leathery remains and scorched its way up through the belfry. As Omar reached Kush it was obvious that the Scout was dead. His head hung limply from his torso by his spine and a ribbon of flesh.
Omar’s chin dropped. Without Kush, and with his battle-brothers fighting for their lives, the Scout would not be leaving the bell tower. He prised a chunky grenade from Kush’s hand. During his brief struggle with the beast, Kush had snatched it from his belt but never got as far as priming the krak grenade and blowing both himself and the daemon-monster to oblivion. Omar slipped the grenade down into his carapace. Snatching up Kush’s sniper rifle, he grunted. For a neophyte, he wasn’t particularly good with a rifle, close-quarters combat being his chosen specialism. Sliding the weapon along the belfry floor, he made for the hole in the wall made by the daemon’s entrance. Pushing himself up against a balistraria pillar, the Excoriator primed the rifle.
As he was doing so a bright twinkle in the sky drew his attention. At first he thought it must be glimmer of lance-fire in orbit, but as it began to streak down towards Obsequa City and was joined by a busy constellation of other ominous lights, Omar recognised them for what they were. Adeptus Astartes drop-pods. A swarm of them, deployed from some Cholercaust cruiser and raining down like a storm of death.
There was little Omar could do about the audacious enemy assault. His rifle could not hit a rapidly descending insertion craft and would not penetrate its armour even if it did. All the Scout could hope for was that whatever came out of the pods would oblige his questionable marksmanship on the ground.
The Scout aimed the sniper rifle down into the tight alleyways, stepwells and cloisters. Adjusting the magnification on the powerful scope for his eye, Omar nestled the weapon against a bruised shoulder. He brought his finger off the trigger as a fleeing member of the Charnel Guard flashed before the scope, running for his life down a posternway. An armoured beast thundered past, zigzagging its way across the narrow alley, crashing its shoulders into the masonry of bordering buildings. The thing lowered its head, and with a furious charge, gored the unfortunate Guardsman before stomping on. The monster passed out of sight. Leaning into the stone of the belfry wall, Omar felt the tower shudder as the beast collided with the abbey’s foundations.
With dust raining down about him, the Excoriator concentrated on his rifle’s cross hairs and the heretic prey that might pass before them.
The Dreadclaw’s rocket roared its kamikaze delight. The drop-pod was ancient, corrupt of spirit and falling apart. Its nameplate had once read Darkheart, but was now a flashburned smear – the result of an ill-advised insertion through the caustic cloud-cover of the Kassandrun hive-world. The Darkheart had later been appeased by the blood of innocent hivers, battle-splashed and splattered across the Dreadclaw’s malevolent plate.
As another atmospheric stabiliser was ripped from its hull by the raging descent, the craft began to pitch and wobble. The sickening motion tore at the Dreadclaw’s superstructure, and the pod gave a metallic whine of internal agony. Inside the craft, amongst the swaying chains, trembling brass strutage and the stench of old gore, eight sons of Angron strained against their descent cages. Their plate was brazen horror, embellishing the blood-red sheen of gore-speckled ceramite. Spikes – both metal and warped bone – adorned their battle-blessed forms, and their helms were ghastly and extravagant. Weapons ached in their racks for the taste of first blood.
Umbragg of the Brazen Flesh stood with a brain-dashed boot on the long defunct guidance runebank that occupied the centre of the compartment. It mattered little to the Traitor Legionaries that the runebank was dead and silent. The Darkheart would guide them to slaughter as it always had. The World Eaters champion held on to ceiling chains with both gauntlets – his only descent precaution. As the Dreadclaw had tumbled away from the battle-barge Rancour, part of a low orbital swarm delivering the shock troops of the Blood God to the cemetery world, Umbragg had indulged his psychosis. The cybernetic implants buried deep in the primordial depths of his brain flushed the World Eater with a hatred unbound. His mind was an open wound, a twisted knot of psychosurgical scar tissue, only good for killing.
The World Eater loathed the long sub-light journeys between massacres. The Rancour was an adamantium prison, Lord Havloc their craven watchdog. Havloc was indeed blessed of Decimate Khorne – but Umbragg could not find it in himself to feel similar appreciation. Wars should not be fought from the command throne of a battleship. The weakling Imperium was an empire of dirt – dirt that it was Umbragg’s murderous duty to saturate with the coward-blood of the False Emperor’s subjects. To baptise with the teeth of his axe and the wrath of the Blood God’s grace. But the Cholercaust followed the Pilgrim, and the Pilgrim – the Right Claw of Khorne – followed the crimson comet, the corporeal manifestation of the Blood God’s will. Therefore, the sacrilegious inactivity of the armada’s progress had to be endured. It had to be suffered – like the slow passing of the blade across the flesh – until finally, the comet led the chosen of Khorne back to Ancient Terra and on towards an empire’s end.
On the approach to the tiny Ecclesiarchy world, Umbragg had felt the stirring. The Cholercaust’s communal desire to kill. The infighting. The self-slaughter. The flaying of flesh from decapitated skulls. The disciples of the War-Given-Form, at one with their true purpose. The brute simplicity of mass invasion. The slaughterous advantage of strength and number – the Blood God’s potency realising and realised in the tsunami of gore spilt before his warrior-subjects’ blades.
Like magma churning inside the rock prison of a volcano, the exalted rage of the berserker built within Umbragg. He watched the unworthy slave-soldiers of the Blood Crusade fall on the planet in their thousands and thousands – all hate-twisted, battle-hungry and eager to catch the Blood God’s eye. With them went Khorne’s blessings – the daemonic expression of the War-Given-Form’s presence on the field. Carnage-fired beasts, engines, powers and princes, killing shrines to the Skull Lord’s decimate will. With unbearable restraint – h
is ancient bones literally shaking with the desire to war – Umbragg watched the aspirant champions of the Cholercaust take their place in mob-ranks of common killers. Warlords and butchers, their prodigious taking of life had warmed the Ruinous overlord to them.
Amongst these were bands of tainted Angels. A young and fallen brotherhood. Warriors whose shame it had been not to see the slaughter of the Heresy and the apocalypse wrought on the sacred soil of Ancient Terra: Goremongers, Skulltakers, Angels Apocrypha, the Blood Storm, Thunder Barons. It was only after the renegades – young in the ways of the blade – had thinned out the enemy, leaving only the worthiest skulls for the taking, that the Pilgrim unleashed his warbands of World Eaters.
Ancient, superhuman flesh within Traitor plate, driven by a mind without doubt or fear. The World Eaters were the very living expression of the Blood God’s destructive power. His daemons might be a bloodthirsty essence, tapped directly from Khorne’s primordial fury, but it was thousands of years of bloodshed, committed in the Blood God’s name by the death-defying sons of Angron, that fuelled such ancient power. In this way, daemonkin might be part of the War-Given-Form, but the War-Given-Form was part of Umbragg and his xiith Legion brethren’s desire eternal to see the galaxy burn.
As the Dreadclaw gave another sickening wobble and the fresh screech of lower atmospheric descent assailed the drop-pod’s exterior, Umbragg’s berserker fury broke its banks. The enemy was close. His axes would sing through priest-flesh. The red glory of lives ended would fountain about him in glorious, hateful celebration. A roar built within his cavernous chest – a raw unburdening that was matched by the caged warriors of his warband, the Clysm. The Darkheart shook with the World Eaters’ rage. Umbragg began to smash his spiked elbows into the compartment wall and his fists into the brass ceiling. The dim memory of an ancient alarm fired and the craft’s interior flashed a pleasing alternation of red emergency lighting and darkness. The World Eaters howled their savage frustration – their cybernetically enhanced hatred for the constraints of the Rancour, for the rattling Dreadclaw, for the cemetery world victims-to-be and the Imperium they represented, for their fellow Blood Crusaders, for each other, and for themselves.
Like a redirected torrent, murderous thoughts and desires flooded Umbragg, flowing through his psychosurgically savaged brain. The Brazen Fleshed warrior no longer wanted to kill; he needed to kill. The Darkheart was bleeding. The World Eaters had smashed the compartment plating and torn out cabling, hydraulics and mesh-hosing. Blood and ichor sprayed from the damaged section, bathing the Traitor Angels in a crimson shower. Forcing his pack to the wall and wrapping thick ceiling chains about his arms with savage circles of the wrist, Umbragg prepared for the Dreadclaw’s landing.
Before the World Eater knew it, the Darkheart had buried its gear-talons in cemetery world earth. The shock of the brutal landing was forgotten instantly, swallowed whole by the berserker instinct to break free and kill. With the bone-shattering impact of the landing still reverberating through him, Umbragg of the Brazen Flesh had unthinkingly hit the disembarkation stud and snatched his blessed chainaxes, Pain and Suffering, from their compartment mounts. Freed from their descent cages, the World Eaters berserkers of the Clysm dropped down through the retracting bulkhead.
As soon as their ceramite boots hit the planet surface, the Chaos Space Marines’ helmet optics scanned for life signs and heat signatures. The Darkheart had punched its way through a cathedral roof, and the Dreadclaw’s landing talons were buried in the stone floor of the nave. Their optics cut through the dust and debris to reveal warm bodies running down an ambulatory parallel to the cathedral wall. The warband broke into a run, the World Eaters pounding across the nave at the stone wall with an insatiable appetite for violence.
Umbragg reached the wall first, shouldering his power armoured way straight through the masonry to appear like a conjured daemon before the shocked and terrified stream of Charnel Guard and armed cemetery worlders flooding into the passageway. The mortals were already running for their lives from something, and Umbragg feasted on their fear. They ran straight at his axes. Gunning them to full furiosity, the World Eater cut, cleaved and butchered his way through the screaming mayhem. The Clysm joined him, slaking their own thirst for blood effortlessly spilt. The World Eaters descended into a brutal frenzy, chainswords hacking off limbs, axes biting through bodies and bolt pistols taking off heads. Umbragg felt the release of carnage accomplished, the god-pleasing sensation of blood pattering in sheets and sprays across his Traitor plate.
Bolts from lasfusils sizzled pointlessly off the champion as wall-to-wall Certusians were sacrificed on the twin altars of Pain and Suffering. Suddenly the source of the cemetery worlders’ panic appeared, crashing into walls and pulverising the cobbled ambulatory. A brazen-plate beast with a serrated crescent horn and armoured hump charged up through the Guardsmen and fossers, eyes ablaze with animal anger, a monster out of control. It gored and trampled a path through the fleeing crowd, stamping and swinging its razor-horn to the left and right. Umbragg watched the ripple of bodies as they bounced off and over the daemon’s hump. As the kill before him was stolen by the creature’s stampede, the World Eater stepped to one side and buried his chainaxes, in quick succession, in the living metal flesh of the beast. The Chaos Space Marine’s weapons chugged deep into the monster. The juggernaut crashed on, bouncing from one smashed wall into another until it collapsed, the beast’s momentum ploughing its horned head through the dust, debris and cobbled floor. Streams of brazen flame erupted from its fallen form, funnelling through chinks and rents in its armoured hide. The dark energy spiralled upwards, carrying fragments of clinker plate and great brass rivets with it.
Umbragg turned back with a triumphant bellow of rage, his fists to the sky. About him World Eaters continued to cleave through the Charnel Guardsmen. Two cemetery worlders were suddenly before him, dappling his chestplate with rifles that were loud, annoying and pitifully ineffective. Looking down on the taller of the two fossers, the World Eater swung out the back of his gauntlet. Swatting the puny mortal aside, Umbragg took off his head with the backslash.
‘Donalbain!’ the second Certusian yelled, his voice shot through with the weakness of useless human emotion. Shock turned instantly to anger – a feeling Umbragg of the Brazen Flesh could appreciate – and the fosser ran at the armoured giant, smashing at his ceramite plating with the scuffed butt of his rifle. Within his helm, the World Eater licked his cracked and aged lips. Clasping the weakling mortal by both his head and shoulder, the World Eater tore in two different directions. With ease the Certusian’s screaming head broke from his thrashing torso. Tossing both aside, Umbragg showed his bloody palms to the sky. With the massacre coming to an end about him, Umbragg of the Brazen Flesh snorted.
‘Find me Angels!’ he bawled at his dark brethren.
Chapter Twenty
Endgame
I can feel the city slipping away from me. I am Adeptus Astartes. Sentiment is nothing to a demigod. Death is a way of life. That the citizens of the Imperium fall is of no consequence to an Angel of the Emperor. We save as many as we can – as I have here on the cemetery world. Men fall, but the Imperium endures. The city is slipping from me as a game of regicide from a master. There is a difference, however, between feeling defeat and knowing defeat. I am warrior enough to know I am beaten. My heart beats for my Emperor. I will never lay down my weapons. I will never give up. While I live, my enemies’ lives will pay forfeit. My spirit is unbreakable. These things I feel. What I know is the difference between strategic success and tactical failure – and I have failed.
I see now, as I fight pauldron-to-pauldron with my Excoriator brothers, the anatomy of a world’s demise. I see now how the Cholercaust Blood Crusade sundered planet after Imperial planet, and how it will go on doing so – right up to the Vanaheim Cordon and beyond. Through Segmentum Solar and the core systems; right up to an unsuspecting Ancient Terra. Unsuspecting, because none know what I know now. They will
underestimate the Keeler Comet and its strange ability to turn a population against itself, creating reinforcement for an army as yet unarrived. What they will see as an astral body – a returning visitor – I know as a gateway to Chaos. They will not call for reinforcement, as others have failed to do, until far too late. They will fail to appreciate the Cholercaust’s number and overestimate their own. They will make a stand – as I have done – because that is what warriors do. They will stand aghast, as I do now, at the Cholercaust’s speed and hunger for annihilation. They will not imagine that a force could end a world in all but a day, overrunning an entire planet with heretic, renegade and daemon. Finally, with Traitor Legionaries – the Blood God’s chosen – falling from the stars and hunting them for sport, they will see how easily they have fallen and the horror that awaits others for whom the same mistakes are equally inevitable.
Space Marine Battles - the Novels Volume 1 Page 204
