Space Marine Battles - the Novels Volume 1

by Warhammer 40K

  Then something else made itself known. Telach recoiled, falling back down the length of the chamber.

  +An intelligence stirs. I will withdraw before–+

  He felt another mind brush against his. The touch was gentle – the merest scrape of consciousnesses – but it sent him crashing back into the tunnels beyond the gateway. For an instant, he was aware of something vast and ancient rushing up to meet him, like some bloated creature of the deep ocean sweeping out of the abyss to feed. He caught an impression of two eyes, burning like coals, and a wide, broken mouth, all of it hanging in the dark.

  Telach’s control began to slip. Nausea exploded within him, choking him and making him gag. He fled, the tunnels passing by in a blur of confused movement. Even as he rushed back to his mortal body, back to where his physical form would afford him some level of protection against whatever dwelt in the Capitolis, he heard the creature’s voice.

  It rang out in his mind, as seductive as honey, but sadistic and immeasurably, infinitely cruel.

  ‘I remember you being stronger,’ it said.

  Telach gasped, and his eyes opened. The psychic link broke, and his projected self snapped back into its mortal bounds.

  He cried out, and staggered to his knees. Blood burst from the veins on the backs of his hands, running hotly down the inside of his gauntlets. His head exploded into pain, so intense that he nearly lost consciousness.

  Rauth grabbed him by the gauntlets, forcing him to remain upright.

  Telach gagged, and his staff fell to the ground.

  ‘What did you see?’ asked Rauth.

  For a moment, Telach thought he’d lost the power of speech. It took a while to recall how to make his lips move properly.

  He saw the red eyes still, hovering over the deep shadow like sentinel flares. Their scrutiny, even for the briefest of periods, had been ravaging.

  ‘You were right,’ he rasped, spitting the words out.

  Rauth looked down at him. His helm-mask glinted in the dark. His lenses were red too, like pale imitations of the monster he’d seen.

  ‘Can we force passage through the tunnels?’

  Telach didn’t know. He couldn’t concentrate on the question. His mind spun out of control, whirling around the image of those eyes.

  Rauth pulled him to his feet roughly.

  ‘Librarian,’ he said. ‘Can we force passage through the tunnels?’

  Telach stared back at him, groggily, and said nothing. He felt a line of drool run across his chin.

  ‘It will speed the assault,’ said Rauth. ‘Can it be done? Answer me.’

  Rauth’s command had a clarifying effect. Telach felt some of his self-control return, and with it an awareness of the pain spiking all across his body.

  ‘How much faster?’ he asked.

  ‘The Capitolis has heavy wall defences,’ said Rauth. ‘The tunnels will be quicker to take, if we can force them, but only you have seen them.’

  ‘Then do it,’ said Telach, swallowing a slug of bile and blood. His heart-rate was returning to normal, though the echo of his visions remained. ‘Order it now. Bring everything forward.’

  Telach looked away from Rauth, wondering exactly what the words he’d heard meant.

  ‘Be aware, though,’ he said ‘The presence in the Capitolis: we have fought it before.’

  Chapter Ten

  Nethata sat back against the juddering walls of Malevolentia’s command chamber and tried to ignore the vibrations radiating up his back and legs. The noise and movement inside the Baneblade was constant. Everything stank of engine oil, human sweat and munitions.

  The command chamber was small and cramped, despite the enormous size of the vehicle around it. Most of Malevolentia’s bulk was taken up with its drive motors, armour plating and weapon systems, and even the Lord General’s personal unit, fitted out on Mars three hundred years ago to his predecessor’s specifications and given every conceivable enhancement, wasn’t much different.

  The tank crashed through something resistant outside – a barricade line, perhaps – and the floor tipped up by ten degrees before righting.

  Nethata gripped the sides of his chair grimly.

  ‘How soon before we reach the front?’ he asked.

  Heriat looked up from the data-slate he’d been consulting. The Commissar-General sat opposite Nethata, less than two metres away, also strapped into a seat. He’d donned a rebreather and eye-mask, just as Nethata had, and it made him look even more skeletal than usual.

  ‘Soon,’ he replied. ‘These things aren’t built for speed.’

  Nethata nodded curtly, trying to curb his impatience.

  His bad temper, which had persisted throughout the Shardenus campaign, would not shake. Every response from a subordinate riled him, and he had to work hard to maintain a facade of calm in front of them. He was sleep-deprived. The constant demands of ensuring that supply lines were kept open, units properly deployed and reserves put in place all took their toll. He’d spent the early days of the assault resisting the urge to gland tranquilox, but lately he’d used more and more. Whenever he gave in, it made him irritable – it was a sign of failure, the erosion of a commitment he’d made a long time ago.

  Arven Rauth filled his waking life – the implacable, inscrutable, infuriating Rauth. Getting tactical information from the clan commander was next to impossible. One moment, Rauth would demand the redeployment of whole regiments of Ferik regulars for some obscure purpose, the next he’d issue a formal protest at Nethata’s request for a single Iron Hands squad in return. Every time a detachment of Guard troops was assigned to Rauth’s command it took horrendous casualties, to the extent that Nethata had started to wonder whether his men were being gunned down by his own side.

  ‘Any reports from your agent?’ Nethata asked, trying to find something else to occupy his mind.

  Heriat shook his head.

  ‘Not for a while.’

  ‘He didn’t achieve what we hoped for,’ said Nethata.

  ‘Some damage was done,’ Heriat said. ‘We always knew it would come down to brute force in the end.’

  ‘So it always seems to,’ said Nethata.

  ‘If you have a problem with that, sir, perhaps you should consider a change of career.’

  Nethata smiled painfully.

  ‘I certainly need to change something,’ he said.

  The restraint harness dug into Nethata’s chest as Malevolentia rocked and juddered its way across the broken terrain. Not for the first time since planetfall, he felt shackled, locked inside a massive system he had no hope of controlling.

  And that, of course, was the core of the problem, the source of his mounting frustration. Nethata was an Imperial commander, used to having the final say over the lives of millions of men and thousands of companies. He’d always carried out that duty soberly, mindful of the many and varied factors involved in the proper conduct of war. Every order he’d issued as lord general had been made in the full knowledge that he bore the ultimate responsibility for the consequences of his actions.

  They were his actions, his orders. His men.

  ‘I need to change something,’ he said again, this time a little more forcefully.

  They only respect strength.

  He snapped his restraint harness buckle open and stood up, holding on to the chassis around him for balance. Heriat looked up at him in surprise.

  ‘Something I can help you with?’ he asked.

  ‘No,’ said Nethata, making his way shakily over to the access hatch leading to the crew chambers. ‘Not this time.’

  He slammed his fist into the door control, and the hatch grated open. On the far side, crammed into the narrow cockpit, four crew members worked at their stations. The tank’s commander, wearing a rebreather mask just like all the troops deployed across the toxic hell of Shardenus’s wastelands, made a hasty aquila as Nethata clambered inside.

  Nethata looked past him, out through the narrow viewfinder ahead. A brace of dirty pict s
creens hung down from the low ceiling, each giving more grainy detail of the world outside.

  He saw a wide open space – the Maw, he believed it was called – dotted with ruined buildings and smouldering piles of rubble. In the distance he saw the ash-shrouded outline of the closest hive spire, mottled with a throbbing network of flame. Beyond that he could just make out the angular shapes of two Warlord Titans striding through the smoke. Lines of tracer fire criss-crossed the scene, followed by the dull thud and crack of projectile rounds. The entire northern horizon was on fire.

  ‘Status,’ he said, watching the picts intently.

  ‘On course for rendezvous with Galamoth 4th and 9th, lord,’ replied the tank commander briskly. ‘All vehicles in formation.’

  Nethata nodded. He saw the signals on the auspex indicating the presence of a huge number of heavy tanks in convoy behind Malevolentia, all fully armed, fully fuelled and fully crewed. In their wake came support vehicles, troop carriers, mobile artillery.

  ‘Your coordinates came from Clan Commander Rauth, did they not?’ asked Nethata.

  ‘They did, lord.’

  Nethata looked out of the front viewfinder again. To the east of the principal hive spire stood a smaller structure – a lesser spire, relatively intact along its southern face. Enemy positions lodged high up in the walls had not been the target of Rauth’s assault, and still mustered a volume of fire on his right flank. If Nethata had been in overall command, he’d have moved to neutralise that threat before pressing on towards the centre of the cluster. That would have been the prudent thing to have done.

  ‘You have new coordinates, commander,’ he said, leaning over to consult the principal logic engine before inputting them. ‘We shall join with the Galamoth as planned, but that flanking position cannot be allowed to persist.’

  The tank commander looked back at him. His movements betrayed his nervousness.

  ‘Uh, lord, are you–’

  Nethata shot him a cold smile.

  ‘Perfectly. Make sure that the entire column receives the new coordinates. Do not disappoint me: the smaller outposts must be silenced.’

  Without waiting for a reply, Nethata made his way over to a set of looped rungs in the walls. He climbed quickly. With every step he took he felt his spirits lift. He remembered how life had been in the early days of his service – commanding tank battalions, crawling around in the machine’s innards, sacred unguents caking his hands and face, working from engagement to engagement with only the raw thoughts of aggression and survival to occupy him.

  I have forgotten where I came from.

  Nethata hauled the release lever down and the top hatch sprang open. A hot blast of smoggy air rushed down onto him. He pulled himself up, emerging from the armoured cocoon of Malevolentia and out into the open wind.

  The ash started to coat him in seconds. He smelled the acid tang of toxins as the tank tracks tore them up from the earth beneath. Devastation lay all around him, curving in a wide, broken swathe across the northern horizon.

  Nethata felt his heartbeat more strongly, fuelled by the thudding vibration of the immense vehicle beneath his feet. He felt the enormous power placed within his hands, the destructive potential he had been solemnly charged with directing, and it thrilled him.

  ‘I will show you strength,’ he breathed, gazing out at the secondary spire and already relishing its destruction. ‘I will show you mortal strength.’

  A crackle broke out in his earpiece, followed by Heriat’s concerned voice from the chamber below.

  ‘We seem to be changing course, sir,’ he said. ‘Is everything in order?’

  Nethata smiled.

  ‘It is, Commissar-General,’ he replied. ‘Perfectly so.’

  Rauth strode through the fields of death, feeling blood and viscera sluice down his armour as he went. His tread cracked the ground and bones beneath him, leaving a trail of shallow footprints in the raw ferrocrete. Above him, broken lumens flickered intermittently, making the narrow chamber look like an erratic stop-frame vid-feed. The walls, just like his armour, were streaked with blood.

  On either side of him came four Terminator-clad warriors of his retinue, the elite of the clan. Their power weapons shimmered like stars in the void.

  They crunched their way through a thick layer of burned, twisted and ruined bodies. Corpses stretched away fore and aft, interlocking and overlapping into a carpet of cadavers. Some wore the olive-green of the Ferik Tactical; others the pearl-grey of the old Shardenus regiments. Some of the flesh was pink and human; some mutated almost beyond recognition.

  The chamber, narrow and enclosed, was a killing ground. Rauth had known it would be when he’d ordered the mortal soldiers to take it. If time had not been pressing, he could have circumvented the choke-point and assaulted it from above, below or behind. Time, though, was the one thing he didn’t have, and so the humans had been hurled into the gaping jaws of the hive’s defences, cracking them open, chamber by chamber.

  The tactics were effective. Led by individual squads of Iron Hands, the regiments of the Ferik Imperial Guard had hacked, bludgeoned and shot their way deep into the heart of Melamar Primus, tearing a path directly through the centre of the hive and driving the traitors back.

  As Rauth swept his gaze across the floor of the chamber, he saw just how many of the mortals had paid for their zeal with death. Hundreds of bodies lay immobile in the chamber. The rough surface of the floor was viscous with a thick layer of mingled blood, sticky and glistening in the on-off light.

  The fighting had been savage. Appropriately savage.

  Ahead of him, one of the bodies moved slightly. Rauth’s helm visor zoomed in on it automatically, drawn by the gesture.

  He paused. All around him, his retinue stopped walking. All four behemoths stood silently, towering over the twisted field of corpses in silence.

  One of the mortal soldiers was still alive. Rauth’s armour sensors picked up his life-signal pulsing weakly. Moving cumbersomely in his heavy plate, he stooped over the stricken Guardsman, letting his helm’s augmenters pick out the man’s outline in the flickering gloom.

  A pair of eyes looked up at him from the floor. They were wide and red-rimmed. The man’s helmet visor had been shattered, exposing a blotchy, bloody face within. He breathed in shallow gasps, and pink foam collected at the edges of his swollen lips.

  For a moment, the two warriors looked at one another. Rauth saw the enormous chasm in the mortal soldier’s chest where a las-beam had punched through. He saw snapped ribs sticking up from a pulpy mass of charred muscle. He saw organs trembling within, glossy where the intermittent light flashed across them.

  Rauth looked at the flesh at the edge of the wound, noting how it tried to repair itself. Blood was already clotting, pooling like oil and coating the ragged fringes of the opening. The man’s heart laboured, pumping more blood around what remained of his body. It would not be enough – the injury was mortal.

  Still, though. The man was fighting.

  Rauth looked deep into the man’s eyes. For some reason he found himself unwilling to do what was necessary. He drew his gauntlet up and pressed a finger lightly against the man’s temple.

  He waited a second longer. The man knew what was coming, and seemed to accept it. He stared straight back up at the Iron Hand, somehow maintaining eye contact, unable to speak, his fragile breathing growing just a little more urgent.

  Then Rauth pressed his finger home. The movement was gentle, like cracking an egg-shell. The mortal shuddered, then fell still. Blood pumped from his wounds, but sparse breaths no longer issued from his gaping mouth.

  Rauth withdrew his gauntlet and slowly stood up. His retinue made no movement.

  Nethata’s words came back to him then, like a ghost-echo on a faulty audio recording.

  You will remember that they are human. Like you used to be.

  It was hard to recall a time when Rauth’s existence had been anything like the fragile, bloody one led by the mortal Guar
dsmen he led into war. They were ephemeral, those men; like short-lived insects destined to breed, fight and die. By contrast, Rauth knew that he was functionally immortal for as long as his warrior skills proved equal to those he faced in battle. He would never feel his muscles atrophy, nor the grip on his weapon weaken. If a las-beam somehow penetrated a Space Marine’s primary heart then his posthuman physiology would compensate immediately. In Rauth’s case, the centuries-worth of bionic implants that riddled what remained of his mortal frame would keep him going, keep him fighting, keep him existing.

  Such had been the case for hundreds of years. Over the slow passage of time he’d only felt himself grow harder, colder, more unyielding.

  Did it matter, that he’d virtually forgotten what it was like to possess mortal frailties? Would it have made a difference to his strategy, had he been able to fully recall his old capacity for terror, for fear, for weakness?

  He remembered the words of Raukaan’s old Iron Father, the one who’d plucked him from the howling wastes of Medusa and started him off on the process that would slowly bleed away his humanity.

  In times ahead, he had said, your mortal mind will return to you like a ghost. It will whisper to you, telling you that you have become a monster. A thousand voices will tell you this. You will be tempted to believe those voices.

  Rauth lifted his gauntlet up and looked at it. The mortal’s blood glistened from his fingertip.

  They speak the truth, though you must not heed them. Some truths are ruinous, and some deceptions necessary.

  Rauth remembered how he’d felt when hearing the words for the first time. He’d not listened. He’d never listened, back in the days when his passions ran hot and his spirit raged against the symbols of authority.

  And what if they strike near the mark? What then? Some men, we believe, must become monsters so that all of humanity does not become so.