Space Marine Battles - the Novels Volume 1
Page 231
Nethata’s expression was busy, already absorbed in the preparations needed to conclude the barrage and consolidate his forces with Rauth’s. For all that, Heriat had known him too long to miss the signs of lateral thinking, of external planning, of triangulation.
‘I think,’ said Nethata, keeping his eyes down, ‘that he and I will have much to discuss.’
Chapter Fourteen
The daemon was fast, far faster than Morvox. It was strong, too, and commanded subtle magicks of deception and disruption. The creature moved in a haze of misdirection – one moment darting in for the attack, the next spinning away back into the dark.
Morvox remained methodical, watchful, wielding his blade two-handed and maintaining his guard as he fought. He could feel the aura of intimidation emanating from the daemon, but it made little impact on him.
The positions of his battle-brothers flickered across his retinal display as he fought. They were all busy with their own battles; close by, but not close enough to intervene. More daemons had come since Fierez had died, dropping out of the vaults like carrion birds and dancing into combat. The mutants seemed to draw strength from them, and they clustered around the lithe, spectral figures like supplicants.
Morvox saw the claw come in – a blur of movement – and parried with his own blade. The two substances, one physical, the other quasi-physical, hit each other with a shower of witchlight. He felt the shock of the impact, and compensated instantly.
He started moving again before the pressure had released. He switched back with the blade, whipping it though the air in a fencer’s motion, forcing the creature up and away.
It smiled at him as it pirouetted out of danger. Its lilac skin shimmered in the dark, leaving trails hanging in the air like drifting pollen.
+Medusan,+ it sent, and its voice was lilting like a child’s.
Morvox ignored the taunts, the whispered half-truths as the daemon fought him. They were juvenile goads, trivial insults, the kind of thing a human would have grown out of upon reaching adulthood. The daemon was immortal, as ancient as the stars, and yet when it spoke, it spoke like a child.
It pounced back at him, flinging out a cloud of spiralling purple motes as if casting a net across him.
Morvox spun around, using his momentum to bring the blade across. The daemon veered out of its path – only just – and danced away again, laughing.
+Do you know the name Fulgrim, Medusan?+ it asked, never once moving its lips, letting its lethal claws snicker back and forth, toying with him.
Morvox wasn’t drawn in. He didn’t follow the pattern, and stuck to his own methods. He stayed close, trusting to his armour, trusting in his systems, keeping his movements efficient. He lunged suddenly, point-first, nearly taking the monster’s leg off, then restored the wall of defence.
+Fulgrim lives still,+ it sent. +I have seen him. I have loved him. He has whispered truths to me, ancient stories, tales of old wonder.+
The daemon came at him, claws criss-crossed but swinging open. It checked at the last minute, aiming to get past his guard. Morvox corrected, pulling back half a step, giving him the space he needed to block.
+Fulgrim killed a man, once. More than a man – a demigod, a paragon.+
Morvox allowed himself a flicker of dry amusement. He knew what the daemon was trying to do, but he was neither a Space Wolf nor a World Eater, forever a hair’s breadth away from some berserk rage. He had been given over to the machine-spirit; he was a process, a procedure, a single link in a greater whole.
So he didn’t rage. He didn’t launch into a frenzy of killing energy, nor roar out the name of his slain primarch as if it could somehow gift him the power to kill more swiftly.
He fought on, smoothly, precisely, rocking around his centre of gravity and letting his thousands of augmetic implants do their work.
Aspire to the state of the primarch.
+His name was the Gorgon then, though maybe you have forgotten that. What else have you forgotten, I wonder? What secrets have been lost to you?+
The daemon smiled, and swooped in close again. Morvox let it come.
+My lord Fulgrim beheaded the Gorgon. Did you know that?+
Morvox adjusted the grip on his blade, feeling the iron sinews of his left hand close tight. Servos in his upper thigh primed, storing energy for the burst to come. A series of adrenal adjusters below his rib-cage activated, matched by spike-nodes implanted under the skin of his neck.
+I have seen his head.+
The daemon saw the opening, preparing for the plunge in.
+It is still screaming.+
Morvox moved. His genhanced frame burst forwards, suddenly shifting into blinding, explosive speed. A nanosecond later his bionics did their work, powering up and boosting his response further. His blade blurred as it shot out.
The daemon stopped smiling just as the killing edge swept up, tilting out and slicing through its neck-flesh.
The chainsword flashed with the sudden release of warp energy, sending out a shockwave that nearly sent him reeling. Aetheric-residue lashed out, curling over his armour plate and scorching it. The daemon screamed, and its voice took on its true form – age-withered, fractured, composed of thousands of strands.
Morvox felt the brief burst of power ebb, and jerked the blade down, putting his full weight behind the movement. The sword carved its way through the daemon’s body, shattering the armour fragments covering its torso and unwinding the unholy wards that kept it together.
For a moment longer, it still lingered on the mortal plane, staring at him in mute astonishment.
+You–+
Morvox pulled his fist back and lashed out. His gauntlet crunched into the daemon’s face, hurling it high and breaking its back. Then he went after it, working with both blade and gauntlet, cutting and hammering until the creature’s body was ruined.
He stood over it for a moment, feeling his hearts hammering. What remained of the daemon shimmered on the floor, glowing softly as the animating power within it dissipated.
‘You talk too much,’ he said.
Then he was moving again, striding back towards his battle-brothers who were still fighting. As he went, Morvox blink-summoned a tactical map on to his retinal display, showing the positions of the entire clan.
The Iron Hands had pushed far down the main tunnel, outstripping the nearest mortal regiments and leaving them behind. Despite losses from the daemon attacks, the army’s progress was continuing. Its cohesion, though, was fracturing – the regular troops couldn’t keep up with Space Marines. Every stride took the Iron Hands further away from the main mass of the army, which had become bogged down further back, locked in a bloody tussle with the nightmarish forces dug in along the tunnel’s lengths.
‘Lord,’ he voxed to the command channel, isolating Khatir’s comm-signal. The Iron Father was fighting nearly three hundred metres away. ‘We are losing contact with the mortals. They are slowing.’
A long hiss of interference sounded over the comm-link, punctuated by bolter fire and muffled explosions. When Khatir responded, his voice was typically acerbic.
‘Noted,’ he voxed. ‘Continue on present tasking.’
Morvox looked over his shoulder, back down the smoke-choked tunnel to where the mortal ranks struggled. Even his enhanced eyesight could make out little.
‘Request permission to lead Clave Arx back to rally,’ he voxed. ‘We are losing them.’
Something like a choke came down over the link. He could hear the sounds of massive energy bursts, and guessed that was Telach in action.
‘Negative,’ ordered Khatir. ‘Continue on present tasking.’
Morvox hesitated for a moment longer. He could see other members of his clave in combat close by. The shriek and chatter of daemons had not gone away, and more would be coming soon enough.
‘The neverborn, lord,’ he voxed, making one last attempt. ‘We have not contained them – some have got past our line. You know the mortals cannot fight them.’<
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A long fizz of static sounded on the comm-link. If he’d been a neophyte, Morvox might have thought that Khatir was considering the request. But he wasn’t a neophyte, he was a brother-sergeant of the Iron Hands, and he should have known better.
‘Continue on present tasking,’ came the response, and the link cut dead.
Morvox stood still for a little while longer. The glowing runes of his helm’s tactical display danced in front of his visual field. He could see a line of Iron Hand claves fighting their way along the tunnel, drawing nearer to the open gates at the far end through which the enemy still poured. He could even detect the portals themselves, shrouded in fire and smog, and knew that Rauth would be carving his way towards them, unencumbered by secondary objectives or considerations of mortal casualties.
Aspire to the condition of the primarch.
Then the scream of the daemonic broke out again, close by and moving fast. Morvox starting moving, striding back to where his brothers fought on. He watched his helm display cycle through proximal targets, and sensed the spoor of the nearest neverborn in his lone organic nostril.
More cultists were already stumbling towards him, purple light bleeding from them like blood from wounds.
He tried to forget the face of the man he’d saved.
Aspire to the condition of the primarch.
His arms felt strangely heavy. He hadn’t quite learned to forget faces. They still resonated with him, summoning up remnants of emotion, of hesitation, of humanity.
The mortals cannot fight them.
Unable to shake off his uncertainty, he shifted back into the mechanical patterns of movement that had sustained him in the Emperor’s service for all his postmortal life. The action of fighting banished doubt. It purified the soul, and cleansed the body.
As the daemons sang in the vaults above him, Morvox took up his chainsword, assessed the tactical priority, and stalked back into combat.
Princeps Yreg Nomen of the Warhound Titan Ferus Arma felt a flicker of unease.
He felt the first stirrings of that unease even as he brought his war engine closer in to the enemy, hammering retreating ranks of debased troops with volley after volley of mega-bolter rounds. The tunnels were big, easily big enough to accommodate a Warhound Titan under their immense curvature, but it was still an uncomfortable, claustrophobic place to wage war.
The Manifold was overrun. He was getting far too many signals to be processed adequately, and most of them flagged up as anomalous. Everything else, including across the realview ports, was miserably unclear and the sensoria were badly fogged. He’d have done better with his old human eyes.
‘Working on it,’ replied Bonnem, one of his two moderati. ‘Something’s just made it worse.’
Nomen grunted, and swung Arma’s head around. The cockpit slewed through the airborne grime, and only patches of the terrain ahead showed up clearly.
Bonnem shook his head, making the cables jutting from the back of his skull clatter.
‘If it was that, I’d have fixed it,’ he muttered. ‘Want me to drive?’
Nomen smiled, bringing Arma’s left arm inferno cannon into play. As he did so, the Warhound’s machine-spirit growled its metallic approval. Below him, a whole horde of cultists had abandoned their positions and were fleeing back down the tunnel away from him.
Nomen gauged the distance, calibrated the burn, and fed it power.
The flamer sent a jet of blazing promethium streaking out and washing over the retreating gangs of foot-
soldiers. They ignited in a series of roaring, fizzing fireballs, writhing as they fell to earth.
The torrent of flame guttered out, and Nomen shifted his attention back to the mega-bolter. Those few of the enemy who managed to escape the flames were mown down by scything barrages of projectiles.
The exercise of power was always reassuring. It eased the link between his mind and that of the engine’s, and made the business of piloting much more pleasant than it otherwise could be.
He brought the gun barrels up for reloading. In the brief lull, he let the Manifold feed him what information it could. Nomen had lost contact with the Iron Hands, who had pushed on up the tunnels with surprising speed. In their absence, the three Warhounds had formed the lynchpin of the Imperial advance, forming mobile firebases around which the mortal troops and tank columns could rally.
As the infantry units had ground their way along the tunnels, however, that pattern had begun to break down. Losing his sensoria readings had been the start of it. Then, one after another, he’d lost signals from the accompanying armour. It had started to feel like he was fighting alone in the dark, for all the information he was getting. The outline of the tunnels still registered – when he lifted the Warhound’s head, its forward-facing lumen beams exposed the curved ferrocrete ceiling above – but more or less everything else was a mess of static-fuzz and feedback.
It was demeaning. A war machine of Arma’s pedigree and refinement had no business being underground.
Nomen felt the reload process complete, and geared himself up for renewed action.
‘Multiples, bearing 5-6, coming up slow,’ replied Bonnem, working hard to make some sense of what he was getting. ‘Enemy advance steady.’
He turned in his command throne, craning up to look at Nomen with some concern.
‘From what I can see, my princeps, we’ve got a lot of units going backwards,’ he said. ‘We’re almost blind here. Recommend we pull back until I can clear this up a bit.’
Nomen felt the twinge of unease again. What was that?
The clouds of smog cleared a little directly ahead, exposing a ragged line of loyalist troopers pinned down by a steady stream of enemy fire. Just as Bonnem had reported, it looked like they were on the back foot and in a state of disarray. Something registered further out as well – a shimmer on the grid, moving fast, looking for all the world like a sensor artefact.
Then he swung the mega-bolter down, opening fire in a long, controlled burst. The advancing traitor line was blown apart in a whirling hail of exploding stone and fire. The noise was tremendous – a hammering, thrumming, thudding roar of pure mechanical rage. Bodies were thrown high into the air, torn into limbs and ragged scraps of armour. The screams of the dying were almost inaudible behind the wall of noise created by the vicious, sustained barrage.
Nomen let the torrent cease, and prodded the Titan into forward motion again. Below him, the loyalist troops he’d saved scrambled to get out of the way. Clouds of ash and smog continued to thin ahead of him, revealing part of the long tunnel wall ahead. He could see a little more light, which was encouraging. Something up ahead, out where the sensor artefacts had formed, was glowing lilac.
‘No response from supporting engines, my princeps,’ reported Bonnem. ‘I begin to suspect vox-jamming. Repeat: we should withdraw.’
Nomen ran his cable-tied fingers across the arm of his throne, grazing the controls casually. The spectral presence of Ferus Arma was at the forefront of his mind, fresh from the kills that stimulated its ancient consciousness. Whenever he felt that mind press against his so acutely it was hard to heed calls to pull back from combat.
canted Nomen calmly.
Something shimmered across the sensor array, ghosting like concentrated interference on a pict screen. Nomen terminated the datastream and sank into the Manifold.
Then he saw it.
‘Incoming!’ shouted Bonnem. The skein of the Mani-fold distorted – even the spatial indicators warped out of alignment, making a mockery of its orientation capabilities.
The first one hit hard, coming out of the dark like a missile.
Nomen didn’t see much of it – just a pair of eyes, swimming fast out of the gloom, glistening like jewels.
‘Hard about!’ Bonnem roared, and the thing hit the frontal voids.
Shields screamed from the impact, shivering and spraying sparks out like a krak discharge. Arma rocked back on its legs, causing the servos behind the plate armour to hiss and buckle.
said Nomen, trying to bring the mega-bolter up fast enough. He opened fire, feeling like he was aiming at ghosts.
Another one streaked in, diving and wheeling through the lanes of fire. Nomen saw something like a woman’s legs kicking, as if the thing was swimming through the air. He tracked it manually, spraying bolter rounds wildly. Something must have connected – he heard a thin wail, and glowing trails of plasma splattered against the voids.
For a second, the horrendous sense of dread eased. Then two more signals whistled into range. The Manifold buckled, sheared, and started to go dead. It couldn’t track them fast enough.
‘They’re using themselves,’ muttered Bonnem, frantically working to divert power to the void generators. ‘Themselves.’
The two apparitions hurled themselves into the shields, spiralling free of the increasingly erratic bolter fire. A fraction before impact, Nomen caught sight of a face – a woman’s face – snarling with glee, lit up by muzzle-flashes and some strange kind of inner light. The face looked ecstatic.
Then it disappeared in a riot of colour and flame. The shields shuddered under the dual impacts, and warning klaxons broke out from the chamber beneath the cockpit. Violet lightning arced across the Warhound’s shields, crackling and lashing.