Space Marine Battles - the Novels Volume 1

by Warhammer 40K

  canted Nomen to his sensori as several of the fixed picts on his console shorted out.

  replied the sensori, working as manically as Bonnem.

  More blurs of movement materialised ahead of them, crystallising in the swirl of the tunnel’s darkness and hurtling into range – five of them, then six.

  Nomen felt Arma’s machine-spirit raging. He felt the blind, furious lust for the kill rearing up, coursing through cabling and metal sinews.

  Part of him shared that battle-drive. The other half was getting terrified.

  he roared, goading the Titan into a stumbling walk. If he had to meet these devils in combat, he’d meet them going forward.

  He levelled both weapon-arms at the apparitions, and fired. A lethal mix of solid rounds and flame surged out.

  A chorus of fractured screaming broke out, and three of the creatures caught fire as they plunged through the raging curtain. Their immolated bodies slammed hard against the reeling voids, sending shockwaves running across the energised surface. Nomen saw a mutilated corpse tumble down the translucent barriers, disintegrating as it fell. Its limbs – what remained of them – were lithe, oddly alluring even in destruction.

  He kept firing, kept pouring his anger and fear out into the night. More shrieks echoed out, and fragments of flesh spun into the Warhound’s path.

  Nomen roared, feeding more fury into the barrage.

  Then the ammo-counter clicked empty on the mega-bolter. At the same time, the inferno cannon reached critical temperature, and guttered out. For a few precious seconds, the wall of reactive shells and flame gave way.

  cried Nomen, augmenting the command with urgency markers. He felt his heart hammering in his chest.

  The creatures made the most of the brief window, shrieking and laughing as they came. Nomen saw them properly that time – a dozen of them, maybe more. They came in the wake of their destroyed sisters, corkscrewing and diving through the heaps of smog. He watched their fangs glitter in the night.

  More time!

  He felt the ammo-belts feed into the mega-bolter’s chambers with a thick clunk. He brought the barrels round, willing the Warhound’s servos to drive them faster.

  More time!

  The first of them hit him at full tilt. He saw it break across the voids. He saw its limbs break and its claws snap, and the forward view rippled like water.

  Another came in close by, laughing like a girl. It dived right into the shield-matter, snapping with lightning-laced talons. It was destroyed, blasted into atoms by the voids. The backdraft washed across the Warhound, halting its forward momentum and causing it to stumble. The shields trembled, flickered, and shivered out.

  The binaric sign for [weapon ready] flashed up in the remnants of the Manifold, and across his malfunctioning console, and lights rippled down the flanks of the mega-bolter housing.

  Nomen issued the fire commands manually, and braced for the recoil.

  It never came. An apparition pounced onto the Warhound’s weapon-arm, ripping the mega-bolter’s cabling apart from its bracing rods. Another two swarmed across the inferno cannon housing, tearing at its slender barrels with their fangs. Reinforced metal was flayed from the underlying structure like flesh from a bone. More horrors clamped on to the massive guns, ripping, tearing and biting.

  Bonnem got up from his seat, clumsily unhooking his neural implants. His flesh was as white as bone. He reached down for a sidearm with trembling fingers.

  Nomen felt the machine’s pain as if it had been his own. Spikes of pure agony ran up his forearms, paralysing his hands and clamping them to the arms of the command throne.

  he commanded, though he couldn’t keep the raw fear out of his voice. Arma’s agony had flooded into him, like molten lead bubbling through his bloodstream. He kept issuing the command to fire, over and over, but nothing responded.

  Then the left cockpit window smashed, and broken armourglas flew across the confined space. Shards tore into Bonnem’s face, shredding the skin. The sensori, still plugged into his station, issued a panicked shriek.

  Nomen tried to rise. He tried to pull free of the cables shackling his hands and his head. He only stopped when he saw what was coming through the broken window, and something primordial within him recognised the futility of doing anything further.

  The daemon’s outline glistened with light. Its flesh was glassy, as if still half embodied in another place. Blood as black as ink ran down from deep wounds in its flanks. Its eyes were like wells into nothingness, and its sleek face was pulled tight into a mask of delighted cruelty.

  As it came to kill him, its smile was almost kind.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Khadi stumbled in the dark, tripping and using her hands to keep her going. A long line of drool hung down from her chin after she’d vomited until her stomach had locked in cramps. Her left hand throbbed from being burned in a plasma bloom, and she didn’t dare unpeel the remains of her glove to see what kind of mess was under the synthleather.

  Exhaustion made her movements erratic. She caught her foot on some long, semi-buried shaft of metal and crashed to her knees. She stayed there for a moment, panting, shivering, staring.

  She had no idea where she was. The constant hammer of heavy weapons disorientated her. Bright lines of las-fire continued to lance down the tunnel in both directions. Men’s voices echoed from the vaults, and explosions flared out starkly in the ash-choked dark.

  I saw them come.

  She’d moved beyond the initial horror of seeing the daemons and passed into a kind of numb shock. Only luck had kept her alive since that first glimpse of them. She’d fired her lasgun a few more times after that, responding automatically to the flicker of las-fire from out of the dark, but had no idea whether she’d hit anything.

  I saw them take it apart.

  The Warhound had provided some respite. It had loomed up from the gloom, guns blazing, surrounded in a haze of energy, resplendent with the blue and gold of its livery. She’d seen its weapon-arms fire, demolishing the lines of mortal troops in its sights. She’d seen it stride out: invincible, indomitable, the very image of the Imperium’s imperishable might.

  I saw them come.

  Then the… devils had swooped down on it. She’d covered her face and buried it in the mud and dirt, shouting out loud to drown out the sound of their approach.

  They’d screamed as they’d flown in, like demented souls fresh from murder. The sound of them coming had made her want to slit her throat, to gouge her eyes out – anything, anything to make them stop laughing.

  She’d managed to look up once, given a flicker of hope by the sound of the god-machine’s mighty weapons firing again.

  Surely, her rational mind had told her, surely even the devils couldn’t stand against that.

  Her last sight had been blurred by darkness, smog and weapon discharge, but it had been enough: they had been crawling all over it, like hornets around a spider, gorging themselves on it, ripping into it, tearing up the ancient metal in slivers and hurling it aside. She’d seen one of the pilots being taken out, dragged from the cockpit window. He’d been shrieking like a maddened animal, and his primal fear had echoed out into the endless dark.

  She hadn’t watched after that, but his screaming had continued for a long time. She’d crawled away, dropping to all fours, barely able to think at all. Her mind raced, filled with thoughts of wrongdoing, shame, horror, fear. Every shallow deed, every casual lie, rose to the surface like scum on boiling water, crowding out her waking mind and making the very air she breathed a nightmare.

  They hadn’t come for her after that– they had other, more worthy prey.

  So she’d shivered in the dark alone, cowering, drooling, shaking.

  The shadow rose above her silently. She didn’t notice it at first – it was just one more clot of
blackness in the shifting, flickering war-hell of the tunnels. When she finally felt the presence close by, she didn’t even lift her weapon. She looked up with the expectation of finding death at last, and was disappointed to see that she wouldn’t be getting that.

  ‘Khadi,’ said Marivo. ‘Shula Khadi.’

  He was unsteady on his feet, but his lasgun was still in his hand. She could see the charge meter flashing for near-empty. His visor was broken, exposing part of his haggard face.

  She looked up at him stupidly, too weak to say anything. Her hands shook, and she let them.

  He squatted beside her. His movements gave away fatigue – he was no longer striding out with the light of the Emperor in his eyes.

  ‘Badly hurt?’ he asked. A long way down the tunnels, fresh explosions blossomed, briefly flooding the scene in bright orange light. Then it faded away, replaced by the flickering dark once more.

  Khadi didn’t know how to reply. Physically, she’d been worse. Mentally – that was different.

  I saw them come. I saw them take it apart.

  Marivo looked hard at her, lifting up her chin with his fingertip and staring directly into her eyes.

  ‘Can you move?’ he asked. ‘We need to pull back. We need to get out. Can you move?’

  She saw the daemon’s eyes hovering in front of her, like a mirage. They stayed there, even when she closed her eyes and screwed them tight. Those eyes made her want to scream, though she’d already done so much of that that her throat was hoarse and raw.

  Marivo grasped her shoulder, shaking her a little. His movements were urgent, and a little too quick. He was scared too.

  ‘Shula, look at me,’ he said. ‘Look at me. They’ve got the Warhounds. They’re tearing up the tanks. We have to pull back.’

  Somehow, then, swimming from somewhere deep inside, Khadi felt a smile flicker across her chapped lips.

  ‘I’m beginning to like you, Marivo,’ she said, stuttering over the words. Her throat constricted as she spoke, as if the muscles had forgotten how to work properly. ‘You’re learning.’

  Marivo didn’t smile.

  ‘I’m glad,’ he said. ‘Really. But now we have to move.’

  Khadi coughed up more phlegm, and felt Marivo steady her as she got it out. It tasted bitter, as if she’d swallowed engine lubricant.

  ‘You could go,’ she said, feeling the worst of the shakes begin to ebb. ‘I’ll slow you down.’

  Marivo looked over his shoulder, like a hunted beast. The explosions from down the tunnels were coming nearer. With the Warhounds out of action and the Iron Hands seemingly careless of how much their allies suffered, they were horribly exposed.

  ‘You will,’ he said, grabbing her breastplate and hauling her up. He grunted with the effort of it. ‘Throne, you really will.’

  She didn’t resist. Once she was on her feet she found she could stand, just as long as she leaned on him.

  Khadi couldn’t see what Marivo’s expression was. The small patch of exposed flesh around his chin looked bloody, like he’d taken a heavy blow there. His breath came in tight, shallow bursts.

  ‘So what’s the plan?’ she asked.

  ‘Plan?’

  ‘You always have one.’

  Marivo laughed – a bitter, choking snort that cut off quickly.

  ‘Is that right?’ he said, dragging her along with him.

  Together, they crept along the shattered grav-train tracks. Tracer fire shot out above them, lighting up the ferrocrete of the tunnel roof. Munition booms, fuel-cell detonations, human screams, daemonic screams, all of them followed, resounding in the vast, enclosed spaces overhead.

  Khadi clung on tight to Marivo, gritting her teeth, trying to squeeze the nightmares out of her mind’s eye.

  ‘I’ll work on something,’ said Marivo, panting as he dragged her along. ‘For now, just try to keep walking.’

  Telach looked up. The real world overlapped with the psychic one in a shifting, sliding blaze of false colour.

  The vast subterranean gates to the Capitolis, the terminus of the long transit tunnels, stretched away above him, massive and imposing. Huge pillars of adamantium reared up from the floor, banded with granite and carved into exotic swirls. Stone and metal glimmered in the dark, outlined with shrouds of corpse-light that flickered and swayed rhythmically.

  Daemons wheeled and dived in front of the gates, tearing through the air like flocks of raptors. Dozens of them had come through the portal and into the tunnels, shrieking and throwing themselves into combat. As they passed, auras of madness lingered in the smoggy dark. The physical elements themselves seemed to recoil from their presence, leaving eddies of ash hanging in the air like the wash of ships in oil-fouled water.

  Some were downed by the hail of bolter fire that rose up to greet them. Others veered their way through the barrage and came crashing to earth, only to meet the massed blades of the claves. Their death-screams echoed up into the shadow-shrouded vaults, bouncing from the pillars and running down the grav-train tracks.

  But daemons, even lesser daemons such as these, were more than a match for individual Iron Hands, and their capriciousness in battle was for a purpose. As Telach knew, but few other mortal humans did, daemons never died. Their fragile physical forms could be shattered, banishing their essence back to the shadow world that spawned them, but respite from their malice was only temporary.

  So it was that the daemons opened themselves to risk so casually. For eternal beings such as them, birthed at the dawn of mortal sentience, the price of temporary dissolution was low. Every time one of their bodies absorbed the leading edge of a mortal blade, another one of their dread sisters was given space to dart in and deliver a true killing blow.

  And when such inhuman weapons struck home, the Iron Hands died truly. Their bodies were durable, cast from genhanced sinew and buttressed with grafted bionics, but still they died. For every daemon that was sent howling back into the abyss, another human warrior took a mortal wound, or was ripped apart by snapping claws, or was prevented from coming to the aid of a brother.

  Throughout it all, the claves fought silently, grimly, mechanically. They stayed in close formation, matching the daemons’ chaotic rage with stoic resolve. They used their blades with precise, limited movements, and withdrew again when the work was done. Bolters were fired sparingly once the creatures had dropped to ground level. Every battle-brother knew that daemons were undone better with the weapons of eternity – swords, knives, axes, fists.

  Telach watched the brutality unfold – two mingled furies locked together in an close-pressed, desperate orgy of committed bloodletting. Slowly, painfully, the ground was won. Unlike the earlier fighting conducted against the masses of mutated human troops, this time the Iron Hands took heavy casualties. Each step was paid for in blood, but the claves remained resolute. They ignored the dead and fought their way up towards the towering gates.

  Khatir kept up his battle-cries during the grinding progress, his vox-amplified exhortations ringing out against the distant walls. His flamers lit up the dark, glowing magma-red and reflecting dully from the ebony of his shoulder guards. He advanced in tandem with Rauth and Clave Prime’s Veteran Sergeant Imanol. Even the daemons, those spirits of infinite contempt and mockery, shied away from them. When they eventually summoned the resolve to attack, Rauth smashed them aside with great sweeps of his glittering power sword. The blade shone like ice against velvet, electric blue and blazing with disruptor energy.

  Even that light, though, paled beside the brilliance of Telach and his three acolytes. The four Librarians stood apart from the main host, stretched out across the full expanse of the cavernous space, wreathed at all times in coruscating fire. Bright white flames raged over the nightshade-blue of their battle-plate, at once as hot as pitch and as cold as the void. The psykers were like pillars of fire in the night, and aether-born matter streamed towards them like glowing dust pulled into orbit around forming stars.

  The daemons knew well en
ough just how much the Librarians could hurt them. Alone among the warriors of the claves, Telach and his brothers controlled the very substance that gave them form. They could pull apart the hidden tapestry that underpinned the world of matter and extension. They could hear the secret dissonances in the aether, the dissonances that prefigured coming storms of warp magick. They could create devastating eddies of their own. They could perceive the souls of the living and the dead around them, overlaid onto the skein of physical perception like a targeting grid.

  Of all of them, Telach was the greatest. His power was the most complete, the most subtle, the most thorough, the most deadly. His mind strode across the planes of the warp with calm certainty, drawing dark energy from across the veils of reality and directing it, screaming, into the world of mortal existence. Throughout the long march along the tunnels, he had deployed his cold fire judiciously, protecting his brothers from the worst predations of the daemon horde and throwing the unholy creatures back towards this, their last redoubt. He had been immense, immutable, inviolable, a spark of dazzling clarity amid a battlefield of filth, horror and fear.

  And now the gates loomed before him, vast and corrupted. Telach could see the imprint of tormented souls in the metal and stone. He could hear their screams, locked in the very stuff of the hive spire, condemned to a living death amid the foundations of the immense Capitolis spires.

  He could see the open doors, each one embossed with bronze and iron. He could see the portal through which the horror still emanated. He could see the ancient engravings over the massive lintel – Turris Capitolis, Shardenus Primus Exultans – and the foul sigils that had been scrawled across them.

  Beyond the doors, he could see the beginning of the Great Stair – the gigantic passageway up into the hive towers beyond. He could feel the close warmth coming down from that opening, as if generated by the coals of a huge fire that had been burning for days and was only now coming to its full pitch of consuming heat.