Space Marine Battles - the Novels Volume 1

by Warhammer 40K

  Melamar Primus dominated the northern horizon, a steep pyramidal structure of towers, walls and interconnective buttresses. The whole spire was burning, locked in the agony of a thousand firefights across its many hundreds of levels.

 

  Killan complied, zooming in on the reeling structure ahead and picking out the key battlegrounds. The noise of weapons fire, repetitious and echoing, rang out across the Maw. The cracks and booms were dulled by distance, but the effects of the detonations were plain to see. Beyond Melamar Primus nothing was clearly visible – a huge pall of oily smoke curtained the buildings beyond.

  canted Lopi, assessing the terrain ahead. He felt the machine-spirit of Vindicta growling at the back of his mind, stung into life by the smell of promethium and cordite on the air.

  The Titan lurched onwards, demolishing whole rows of shattered buildings as it came. Behind it, the similarly domineering profile of Castigatio lumbered through the gates, followed shortly afterwards by the three roving Warhounds. The smaller war engines pulled ahead again, driven to seek out the nearest action by their restless MIUs.

  ‘Incoming transmission,’ reported Killan. ‘Medusan origin. Do you want to take this now?’

 

  A hololith pillar rose from the floor in front of Lopi’s casket, atop which a ghostly image rippled into solidity. It was a Space Marine helm, as black as night and covered in metallic implants. It didn’t move.

  canted Arven Rauth in perfectly inflected binaric.

  Lopi smiled again. For some reason, he couldn’t seem to stop smiling. His spirits sang with the thrilling, overwhelming power at his fingertips, and the blunt greeting of the Iron Hands’ commander only amused him further.

  he transmitted back.

  He didn’t say orders. The Mechanicus didn’t take orders from Imperial factions, not even if they came from the Adeptus Astartes. The bonds between them were at once stronger and weaker than those between commander and commanded, and as subtle and ancient as the Imperium itself.

  replied Rauth.

  Lopi looked down at the hololith pillar, struck by the pointlessness of transmitting the perfectly static image of a helmet over a lithfeed.

  he responded.

  The helm-image remained in place for a moment, but no reply emerged. Then it blinked away and the feed cut out.

  Yemos turned to Lopi, his eyebrow raised.

  ‘To the point,’ he said.

  Lopi laughed.

  he canted.

  The Warlord’s pace immediately picked up. A low, grinding roll echoed up from the enginarium chambers as the motive trains ramped up power.

  The Melamar Primus spire rocked closer with each stride, gradually unfurling itself in its full, austere glory. Like all the spires of Shardenus Prime, it was huge almost beyond comprehension.

  canted Lopi.

  Jerolf canted back, furiously busy at his terminal.

  The lesser spire of Melamar Secundus loomed along the right flank, burning just as furiously as its sister. Large sections of its protective outer armour had been stripped away, as if whole gunships had been flown directly into it.

  The Warhounds raced ahead, all three of them sweeping towards the wasteland between the spires. Vindicta’s sensors picked up massive levels of toxicity at ground level, and Lopi saw mist-banks of green-tinged chemical smog clinging to the forest of abandoned buildings in the gaps between hive towers.

  ‘Range closing,’ reported Killan, looking into an augur-pict intently. His fingers ran absently over his terminal controls all the while, constantly panning, rotating, augmenting and decluttering. ‘Multiple targets on the threshold. Ah – I can see their problem.’

  In the narrow gap between the two Melamar spires, several groups of traitor armour had taken up position and were hurling shells into a sector of Melamar Primus that flagged up on the grid as occupied by loyalist forces. Lopi picked out a whole line of Basilisks recoiling as their payloads were unleashed. Each of them bore strange symbols in purple and grey on their armour plate, ones he didn’t like to look at for too long.

  said Lopi, watching through the Manifold as the ground targets came within range.

  The tanks ahead must have detected the incoming Titan group, but they hadn’t made any detectable move to withdraw. Perhaps they underestimated the range of the Warlord’s cannons. If so, it was a costly mistake to make.

  Lopi felt the shells slot into the barrel of his arm-mounted quake cannon like blood running through his veins. He stretched out his right hand, and the gigantic weapon swung up into firing position.

  Praise to the Omnissiah, he recited. Praise to Him who built the machine, who dwells within the machine, who sustains the machine.

  ‘Targets fixed,’ announced Yemos. A note of eagerness – raw and vital – infused his normally placid voice.

  And so perish all who blaspheme against the holy standard templates of humanity.

  Lopi opened his eyes, letting real vision fill out the shifting splendour of the Manifold.

  Guide the dread hand of Your servant.

  he canted, envenoming the order with a binaric ruination glyph.

  The Warlord’s massive quake cannon erupted. A huge explosion rocked out, echoing from the walls of the still-distant spires. Vindicta’s chassis swayed back, reeling from the enormous force unleashed. A stream of dirty black smoke twisted away from the firing arm, streaking across the wasteland towards the armoured positions.

  The round crashed into the enemy position, burying the lines of tanks in a storm of fire and earth. A huge pall rose into the air, lit from within by crimson explosions as fuel tanks detonated. The noise of the impact – a massive, echoing roll and boom – followed, resounding from the walls of the flanking spires. A ragged blast-wave radiated out from the epicentre, tearing through what remained of the forces on the ground and flattening everything in its path.

  Lopi watched the devastation with satisfaction, still smiling. Nothing, but nothing, was more exhilarating than piloting a machine of Vindicta’s destructive potential into combat.

  he canted, smoothly navigating through the Manifold for secondary targets.

  Around him, the remaining Titans opened fire, hurling a barrage of spitting, roaring, crackling energy into the enemy ranks. The sky filled with the growl and thunder of terrifying weaponry being unleashed. The earth cracked and the ash clouds boiled. The Warhounds, given their head at last, charged ahead, letting loose with their ferocious arm-mounted weapons. Castigatio emerged from Vindicta’s shadow, powering up its own massive frontal array for firing.

  Across the devastation of the Maw, already scoured into patches of molten metal by the predations of the Iron Hands, the god-machines of Legio Astorum strode into the inferno, and on their shoulders came the storm of the Omnissiah’s wrath.

  Telach closed his eyes and leaned back against the wall. The power generator on his back hampered his movements. He felt confined, feverish and claustrophobic. Nearly two days of fighting against a seemingly endless tide of corrupted mortals had taken its toll on his spirit, and his head throbbed within its psychic hood. Unlike his battle-brothers who fought only with physical attributes, Telach drew on the powers of the warp, and the effort required to tap into that capricious well was significant.

  From somewhere far up ahead he heard the heavy, repeated noises of combat. Nowhere in the hive was free of it – most levels of
the Melamar Primus spire were contested, and the crash of explosions and drum of bolter fire echoed down the long corridors and up air-ducts.

  Every Iron Hands squad was active, spread out across the labyrinthine interior. When he chose to, Telach could see them all in his mind, arranged like dots of starlight amid the huge backdrop of the hive spire. The younger the warriors were, the brighter their light burned. The veterans of the Chapter, those like Khatir and Rauth, only shone dimly in the dark, like the afterglow of a lumen after the power has been cut.

  He knew why that was. Perhaps only the Chapter’s Librarius really understood the price the Iron Hands paid for their physical enhancement.

  What would happen, Telach wondered, if an Iron Hand ever achieved the perfection he craved? What would happen if, by some miracle of bioengineering, the very last fragments of organic matter were stripped from his metal skeleton? Would he register at all on Telach’s map of souls, or would he slip into nothingness, lost in the background coldness of the material universe?

  Perhaps, if so, then that would not be something to mourn. No one could deny the power given to the Chapter by its continual quest for augmetic self-improvement. The Iron Hands believed, perhaps even correctly, that no force within the Imperium was as resolute as they were. More deadly warriors existed, they acknowledged, more violent, more flamboyant, faster and more devout, but none that possessed the capacity to endure as they did, to weather any storm with infinite stoicism, to keep going even when the enemies ranged against them had no limit.

  They took pride in that belief. All of them, from the rawest Medusan neophyte to the revered ancients in their Dreadnought sarcophagi, carried that pride in their beating hearts, using it to drive them onwards to new feats of endurance, of devastation, of resistance.

  Pride, thought Telach. Perhaps that is the last emotion to go when the final soul-flicker has been extinguished. We have, after all, purged everything else.

  ‘Librarian.’

  Telach opened his eyes and saw Rauth coming towards him. Despite the enormous weight of armour he carried, the commander approached with stealth. His battle-plate was smeared with lines of blood and charred with las-burns. A hot stench of ammonia hung in the air around him; an after-effect of his power sword’s disruptor field being shut down.

  ‘Commander,’ Telach acknowledged, bowing his head.

  He felt guilty even though he knew he had nothing to feel guilty about. Telach knew his limits, and knew how much more his powers would be needed in the days to come. He needed rest at regular intervals, just for moments, out of the constant grind of ceaseless sector-by-sector, room-by-room combat.

  For all that, he still felt guilty. Rauth made everyone feel guilty, as if he carried some kind of secret knowledge within his metal cranium concerning every time the warriors under his command had ever been weak or mistaken or foolish or remiss.

  ‘Are you wounded?’ Rauth asked.

  ‘Preparing for the next assault,’ Telach replied, truthfully enough.

  He felt like adding justification for that, knowing it would not make him feel any better.

  My eyes are already bleeding. The skin over my scalp is blistered and my lips are cracked. You have no conception of what you ask of me, nor what you ask of anyone else.

  ‘I need your services,’ said Rauth. ‘The Titans have engaged the enemy in the Maw. We need to accelerate the advance.’

  Telach knew what was required immediately, and pushed himself away from the wall. His muscles protested, and he ignored the pain.

  ‘Location?’ he asked.

  Rauth stowed the power sword against his armour.

  ‘After cleansing the two Melamar spires, we must advance straight to the Capitolis. I have no intelligence on the transit routes. Give me your insight.’

  Telach let his mind go blank and closed his eyes. He planted his staff on the ground and leaned against it, feeling psychic energy run up and down the shaft.

  ‘By your command,’ he said, beginning the mental ritual that would cast his mind beyond its physical shackles and into the miasma of the aether.

  Telach took a long, shallow breath, forcing his primary heart to slow its combat-ready beat.

  Then, slowly, he opened his mind’s eye. The world around him – the sounds and scents of the hive spire – slipped away, to be replaced by a phantasmal world of translucence and ephemera.

  +I am transcended,+ he pulsed, speaking directly into Rauth’s mind. He no longer had full control of his physical lips, and the visions he saw did not come from his mortal eyes.

  As if from far away, he heard Rauth’s voice answer him.

  ‘The transit tunnels. They are all I need to see.’

  Telach let his consciousness drift out of his body. He felt it pass through the layers upon layers of ferrocrete and adamantium above, drifting northwards. Everything was abstract, fleeting, picked out in watery lines over a gulf of darkness. Flickering images of living souls glowed within that darkness – fighting, fleeing, charging, dying. Even as his own soul soared above them, Telach could hear the icy hiss as men were cut down, releasing their quintessence into the metaphysical melange of the waiting warp.

  He broke free of the hive’s confines and looked down, from above, over the entire hive cluster. In every direction he could see the ghostly outlines of troop movements. He saw mortal men marching in endless ranks, filing out of the clot of darkness at the centre – the Capitolis – hundreds of them, driven onwards by faceless creatures with corruption clogged in their veins.

  Those men were no longer like the ones they’d fought out on the Helat, or across the Gorgas, or even during the first days of the assault on the Melamar spires. Telach could feel their debasement keenly; they were mockeries, cruelly altered by whatever power had taken root in Shardenus.

  +Reinforcements continue to move from the Capitolis,+ he sent. +Many of them. They will not die as easily as those we have faced.+

  He let his psychic self sweep onwards, out beyond the northern reaches of the Melamar Primus spire and out over the wasteland beyond. He heard the dull crump of heavy ordnance, and saw the massive outlines of Titans striding into battle. He saw armoured columns from both sides rumbling towards the front. He saw gunships sweep into contact, stuffed with troops or loaded with cluster bombs. Ever since the Iron Hands had broken through the outer walls, the fighting had spread like a virus within a body, flooding the arteries and heading for the major organs.

  Telach felt himself falling. He drifted down slowly, caught by the eddies in the warp and guided by them.

  North-east of the Melamar spires stretched another wide region of abandoned industrial wastes. Clouds of toxic fog rolled between the old manufactoria walls, green-tinged like the glands of a corpse. The Shardenus complex, like many he’d seen, was a series of towering islands amid a sea of noxious filth.

  +Zones north of Melamar are empty. As you suspect, enemy forces being conveyed underground.+

  Telach fell further. The ground rushed up to meet him, and his insubstantial echo-form sank clean through it. He felt a chilling sensation as he bored down through layers of earth, metal and aggregate.

  He emerged into a huge underground tunnel, as dark as the void save for regular bands of gently blinking guidance lights. The tunnel yawned away north-east, cutting straight through the earth under Shardenus Prime and heading towards the central spires of the Capitolis.

  +Numerous fixed artillery points,+ sent Telach, sweeping up the length of the tunnels and observing carefully. +Defence lines established every five hundred metres. I see trench construction, deployment of heavy weapons groups.+

  Wide-gauge rail tracks had been dug into the tunnel floors. Massive land trains ground their way back and forth, adding to the cocktail of greasy smoke that hung permanently in the roof space. Telach saw the souls of mortal defenders burning like stars in the gloom. Unlike the souls of the loyalists, those souls glimmered with a purplish light, shot through with the refracting power of the aet
her.

  +Supplies still arriving,+ he sent, watching the unloading of a whole series of tracked artillery pieces from the cavernous interior of a land train. +Their defences are formidable.+

  He looked ahead, peering through the shrouds of filth in the air. Even the psychic projections in his mind were fouled by it.

  +I approach the junction with the Capitolis spire. I will attempt to penetrate the outer level.+

  A massive gateway swept up out of the shadows, circular in shape and studded with defence lasers. The land trains passed through blast doors five metres thick.

  As he attempted to follow them, Telach sensed a pressure exerted against him. He felt suddenly hot, as if he’d strayed into a furnace.

  He came to a halt, hanging like a ghost above the gateway, watching the land trains trundle back and forth below him.

  +Resistance encountered. I shall persevere, masking my presence.+

  Telach pushed on, drifting through the gates. A huge chamber extended out on the far side – some kind of enormous dispatch depot, stuffed full of armaments and supplies. Automated cranes swung to and fro, pulling materiel from towering stacks and loading it on to the waiting land trains.

  The pressure in his mind grew.

  Telach pushed deeper in, feeling the character of the air change with each passing metre. The atmosphere became sweltering and moist, like the depths of some tropical world on the eve of monsoon. The noises of battle preparation echoed strangely in his psyche, distorted and stretched out. He felt nausea blossom at the back of his throat – the throat that still lay kilometres away in the depths of the Melamar hive.

  +I am in the Capitolis, just beyond the subterranean gates,+ he sent, pushing the message through with difficulty. +The presence of the arch-enemy is evident. It is waiting, gathering its strength. We have not seen the extent of it yet.+

  Telach swam up towards the terminus of the giant chamber, seeing more tunnels leading away and up into the centre of the colossal hive spire above. As he drew closer to them he saw how the stone walls on either side had been tortured and warped. The faint impression of faces stared out from the structure of the walls, each one fixed in an expression of agonised pain. Fluid dripped from the ceilings above him, glimmering with a pale pink lustre. He heard screams, or something like screams, resounding out from far away.