Space Marine Battles - the Novels Volume 1

by Warhammer 40K

A thousand guns were raised and aimed at the same target. Exposed on the outcrop of rock, the Chaos Warmaster, no matter how formidable his reputation, no matter how high his cunning, had no escape.

  Escape was not his intention.

  In a crackle of warp-spawned lightning, four figures appeared alongside Abaddon. In the same instant that Azrael gave the order to open fire, one of the newcomers, a shrivelled thing in unmarked power armour, erected a protective kine dome, the parabola of blue energy nullifying las-fire and deflecting solid rounds. Almost a hundred Imperial Guardsmen and Space Marines alike had fallen under the reflected barrage before Azrael directed them to cease firing.

  Beneath the dome, the three other armoured figures raised staves in the air and commenced a noiseless chant. A violent wind blew through the mountain approach, kicking up dust powerful enough to tear skin and strip paint from ceramite. Overhead, roiling clouds appeared in the previously clear sky, a purple and grey mass moving as if time had been sped up.

  Strike had watched all this unfold from the command compartment of Traitor’s Bane with a mixture of fear and wonder. He did not need to be warptouched to know that the four newcomers to the battlefield were sorcerers, just as he didn’t need the tactical acumen of a Space Marine Chapter Master to know that Draigo was right. They had been lured into a trap.

  ‘Strike,’ Azrael’s voice blared from the vox.

  ‘Yes, lord?’ Strike replied, dropping back into his command chair.

  ‘Target the outcrop. If we can’t breach the kine shield then, by the Lion, we can damn well bring him down by other means.’ The venom in the Dark Angel’s voice was palpable.

  ‘Acknowledged, lord,’ Strike said. He turned to his tank crew. ‘You heard Lord Azrael. Bring the demolisher cannon to bear and aim for the base of the ridge.’

  K’Cee bounded down from where he was sitting and went to join the demolisher gunner at the front of the compartment. Between them they had the firing solution in seconds and, accompanied by the grind of servos, swung the mighty gun around.

  ‘Fire when ready,’ Strike called over to them, not waiting for the weapon to be aimed before giving the order. The demolisher cannon fixed into position with a satisfied clank but the next sound Strike heard wasn’t the thud of the weapon firing that he had expected. From somewhere above came a noise like cartilage tearing.

  ‘What the–’ Strike’s question was drowned beneath the boom of the siege cannon discharging. He scrambled back up the turret ladder to inspect the aftermath of the shot only to find, to his confusion and dismay, that the crag was still intact and the five Chaos Marines along with it. What was more bewildering was that he hadn’t heard the detonation of the demolisher shell. He popped the hatch and stuck his head out of the tank.

  A sea of humanity, most of it wearing Mordian blue, flowed past the Hellhammer, running in abject terror towards the landing zone. Bolters opened up from the Dark Angels positions and were soon joined by the chatter of heavier weapons. An immense shadow passed over the tank and Strike looked skyward to discover the target of the Space Marines’ fire and the source of the Mordians’ fear.

  Vast wings beating with a sound like thunder, a Skulltaker – or Bloodthirster as Draigo had corrected him on more than one occasion – hovered over the battlefield, demolisher shell in one hand from where he had obviously plucked it out of the air. Half the size again of the one that appeared near Olympax, it snarled in rage before throwing the ordnance down among the fleeing Guardsmen. The ensuing explosion rocked Traitor’s Bane and showered it with debris, both organic and inorganic, forcing Strike to take cover under the turret hatch. He was about to call down to the gunners to target the daemon with the main gun when more of the tearing noises emanated from the sky. In between clouds the colour of bruises, incisions in reality opened, the stuff of the warp bleeding through into realspace.

  It started raining daemons.

  Chapter Thirteen

  826960.M41 / Lamentation. Imperial Fleet, Pandorax System

  The last of the cultists died as easily as the previous eight, the force halberd severing her thread to life as easily as it parted her head from her shoulders.

  Already the thick warpfrost was receding from the mess hall they had turned into an improvised ceremonial chamber, and the buzzing Epimetheus felt in his skull when in close proximity to other psykers abated. These nine had been powerful in matters of the warp, of that there was no doubt, but both physically and mentally they had been no match for the Grey Knight. With their demise, the daemons using the Damnation Cache as a conduit into the material realm would struggle to gain a toehold in reality. Now they would have to expend more of their energies merely existing, making them weaker to physical assault. If Tzula had been able to reach the commanders of the Reconquest Force, they now had a fighting chance of taking Atika and resealing the Cache.

  With a burst of blue flame from his gauntleted hand, Epimetheus set the corpses alight, taking his leave of the chamber which was already filling with the stink of burning flesh. The cultists had died too swiftly to raise any alarm so he still had stealth in his armoury and reaching the Lamentation’s engines was going to be a lot easier without Red Corsairs guard details stalking him.

  Following the source of the constant hum and vibration that reverberated through the ship, Epimetheus slunk through the dark places, avoiding the plague zombies carrying their cargo back and forth, as oblivious to his presence as they were to everything else. The only time he had had to employ violence was when he finally reached the doors to the enginarium and found a guard posted there, the crimson paint doing a poor job of disguising his former allegiance to the Imperial Fists. The Grey Knight called upon his telekinetic abilities to move the corpse of a crewmember slain when the ship was taken. It slammed into the bulkhead with a resounding thud loud enough to be heard over the engines and, while the Red Corsair’s back was turned investigating the noise, Epimetheus moved up behind him and opened his throat with a swift motion of his combat blade. He lingered over the corpse a moment, appalled that a Space Marine descended from a Legion who had given so much to stifle treachery could have turned traitor himself, before burning through the lock mechanism with warpfire and pushing open the doors to the enginarium.

  The Lamentation was a small ship compared to others of the fleet, but the engine needed to power it through the void took up fully a third of its bulk, and the Space Marine felt dwarfed as he stood before the immense throbbing structure. The heat it threw off would have killed an unaugmented human not wearing protective clothing and Epimetheus pulled the helmet from his hip and clamped it in place to prevent his flesh from burning. A bank of instruments sat off to one side, lights and dials gently flashing and spinning to denote the ship was at rest, and Epimetheus strode over to study them. The sheer number of indicators and controls was baffling and it took him several minutes to deduce what did what. Eventually, settling on a T-bar lever that even he would need both hands to operate, he took a deep breath and pushed it all the way upwards.

  Epimetheus hadn’t been sure what to expect. The very concept of overloading a spaceship engine suggested to him that it would go nova very quickly, melting down almost instantaneously and obliterating the vessel and all on board. Instead, the thrum of the engine rose in pitch and several of the dials crept to the right, moving from sections marked in green through a spectrum that terminated in red.

  Epimetheus had been moulded in the image of his primarch, remoulded in the image of the Emperor upon his ascension to the Grey Knights and blessed with enormous psychic talent. When he had set out on this mission he had assumed it to be one-way and was willing to sacrifice his all to ensure its success. If he did not have to needlessly lay down his life then he wasn’t going to do so. He checked the dials again to see how fast they were moving and calculated that he had just over thirty minutes to get back to the landing bay and commandeer one of the ships there to try and make it back to Pythos. Hopefully, with all of the confusion a ship blowing
up in their midst was going to cause, the fleet would be too busy to notice a tiny fighter sporting the colours of the Red Corsairs speeding towards Pythos. He gripped the lever again and pushed it further upwards, wrenching it from its housing before tossing it away. By the time anybody else realised that the engine was going to blow, they wouldn’t be able to do anything about it.

  He turned to leave but discovered that he was no longer alone in the enginarium. Clad in red and black armour haloed by a spiked golden arch sat atop his backpack, stood a figure he only recognised from Tzula’s memory: Huron Blackheart.

  In one hand he held a massive power axe, already activated and bristling with energy, while his other was covered by a taloned power fist, similarly ready for battle. At his feet, a strange creature loitered, its maw a mess of misshapen teeth, its leathery pale orange hide mottled with brown pustules. He could see both of them with his eyes but neither registered as presences in the warp, which had allowed the Tyrant of Badab to get the drop on him.

  ‘So,’ Huron said, raising his axe and charging the Grey Knight, ‘who do we have here?’

  826960.M41 / Delver-stronghold 2761/b. Mount Dhume, Pythos

  The screams of dying men drowned out the wails of the horrors birthing into reality. The daemons were indiscriminate, caring not who they slaughtered and Mordian and Catachan died alongside Dark Angels, no pecking order being applied to the killing. Some turned upon each other, the lure of fresh souls not great enough to outweigh settling old scores or challenging those more favoured by their patrons.

  Winged fiends flew overhead, engaging the Dark Talons that still flew air cover, macabre dogfights sporadically breaking out and filling the sky with bursts of explosions and low hanging vapour trails. Thunderhawks struggled to get airborne, their hulls caked with bloated and clawed horrors. Dark Angels armed with flamers bathed them in fire but they too soon found themselves buried under a morass of the Neverborn, stripping away armour and tearing at the flesh beneath. Those Imperial Guardsmen not run mad by the sight of things that should not be walking among them, fought in vain, their lasrifles no match for iron-tough hide. Some had made it back to the shelter of the mine but they were merely delaying the inevitable. As soon as the daemons had massacred those who had stood and fought, their turn to die would come.

  Their differences set aside for the sake of battle, Azrael and Draigo fought shoulder to shoulder, the Titansword and the Sword of Secrets rising and falling in concert, despatching daemons back to whence they came. The Supreme Grand Masters’ armour was streaked with gore, and a heap of rapidly dissolving corpses lay in a ring around them.

  It served as no warning to others of their kind as still the Neverborn drove at the two Space Marines, looking for one or the other to falter and grant them an opening.

  Behind them, Traitor’s Bane traversed the slope slowly, the mobile fortress shredding and broiling daemons with its weapons and crushing them beneath its treads, but those it killed were a mere drop in the ocean compared to the numbers still spewing forth from the portals. Realising its threat, a pack of lithe daemons targeted the Hellhammer, their vaguely feminine forms scrabbling over the hull with claws and blades in place of hands.

  ‘They’re right on top of us!’ Tamzarian called out.

  ‘We need to burn them off,’ Strike answered. ‘Can we turn the flamers on ourself?’

  ‘Negative, chief,’ one of the gunners replied. ‘They don’t have the firing arc.’

  K’Cee, who had been fiddling with a bundle of cables behind one of the auspexes, loped over to Strike’s command chair and pointed at one of the buttons he had added to the armrest. Many of the modifications the jokaero had made to the tank were purely cosmetic – a flange here, some filigree there – and the number of extra buttons K’Cee had added purely for the sake of symmetry or aesthetics had become the bane of Tamzarian’s life. This one, however, appeared to do something and he was most insistent that the colonel press it. Which he did.

  The hull of the Hellhammer lit up as millions of volts of electricity passed through it, frying the boarders and turning their white skin and violet hair the darkest black. Their remains tumbled from the hull, breaking like charcoal on the hard ground.

  Enraged, the Bloodthirster turned its attention to Strike’s command vehicle, swatting other winged daemons out of the way like flies as it tore towards the Hellhammer.

  ‘Target it with the demolisher and hellhammer but stagger the shots by a split second,’ Strike ordered, peering out through the view slit. Two shots followed soon after, their report blending into one due to their proximity.

  Without pause, the Bloodthirster caught the first shell in its powerful grasp, its fingers leaving an impression on the tough metal casing but, distracted, it was too slow to react to the second which caught it square in one of its meaty flanks. Time seemed to freeze for a moment, and all on the battlefield stared enraptured as the massive daemon tumbled out of the sky. It twisted mid-fall and landed crouched on its feet, the force of impact breaking open the ground beneath it and felt as far away as Atika and Thermenos. It rose from its haunches and raised its head to the clouds before emitting a deep bellow of rage and pain. It looked back towards the Hellhammer and charged.

  Lesser daemons struggled to get out of the way, and those unfortunate enough to be caught in the Bloodthirster’s path were either trampled underfoot or picked up and slung bodily at the tank. Achieving a pace that nothing of its size and bulk should reasonably reach, it launched itself into the air, axe raised above its head ready to smash it through the body of Traitor’s Bane.

  826960.M41 / Lamentation. Imperial Fleet, Pandorax System

  ‘Not very talkative, are we?’ Huron Blackheart commented, sweeping his power axe through the space Epimetheus had just vacated.

  The Grey Knight countered with a riposte from his halberd, the buzz of energy becoming a crackle as the two power fields met. He said nothing.

  ‘Come now. At least tell me which Chapter sired you so I can have your corpse shipped back to them.’ Huron pulled his axe away and swung again but his blow was again blocked by Epimetheus’s weapon. ‘Or wear your hide as a banner the next time I face them in battle.’

  Epimetheus went on the attack this time, a flurry of strikes aimed at Huron’s body but each one met by the head or haft of the traitor’s axe. Whatever had blinded him to Blackheart’s presence was inhibiting him from using his psychic abilities, and the Grey Knight was now reliant on only his skill with a physical weapon to see him through this battle. The creature that had been at Huron’s heel was perched on a railing designed to prevent crewmen from falling into the vast chasm surrounding the engine and was looking on disinterestedly. Epimetheus couldn’t pinpoint it, but he was certain the wretched thing was blanking out his powers.

  ‘I do not recognise your colour scheme and you bear no markings on your armour. Are you a renegade like me?’ Huron said, switching tack and attempting an uppercut with his power fist, which Epimetheus knocked away with the haft of his halberd. ‘Because I can always make use of somebody like you, particularly in light of your gifts.’

  Epimetheus broke his silence. ‘I’d rather die here on this ship than throw in my lot with you.’ He gripped the halberd in both hands and was using it two-handed like a staff, blocking Huron’s blows with the base and attacking with the head. He struck a glancing blow to the traitor’s thigh, cracking the ceramite, but Blackheart immediately retaliated with an attack of his own that struck Epimetheus on the pauldron, taking off the surface layer of verdigris and moss that still coated it.

  ‘Interesting,’ the former Astral Claw said. ‘Are you an Iron Hand? No, still too much flesh to you, not enough augmetics. A Silver Skull? Perhaps not. You didn’t spend months consulting the innards of dead animals before deciding whether to fight me.’

  Epimetheus said nothing and let his weapon do the talking instead. Three blows aimed for the head, all parried by Blackheart’s axe.

  ‘Or are you a Grey
Knight? The Hamadrya here tells me that your psychic abilities are off the scale. Nothing it can’t keep in check, naturally, but impressive nonetheless.’ Blackheart aimed a blow at Epimetheus’s midriff. The Grey Knight stepped back allowing the power fist to pass through thin air and lunged with his halberd, narrowly missing the traitor’s head.

  ‘Yes, I think that’s it. You are a Knight of Titan. A daemon hunter. Be sure to give my regards to Mordrak the next time you see him. I hear he holds quite the torch for me.’ Blackheart took a step back from Epimetheus, giving himself more room to swing his axe which met with the adamantium haft of the Grey Knight’s weapon.

  ‘What I don’t understand is the armour. A suit like that is a Chapter relic and should be worn by a Chapter Master. You are certainly not Kaldor Draigo so why do you wear the suit? What marks you out as being so special?’ His axe head clipped Epimetheus’s pauldron again. ‘But that’s not a relic to you, is it? You’ve always worn it. I can smell the millennia on you, Grey Knight. That same stink of the ages that emanates from Abaddon and his ilk.’

  Epimetheus’s blows came harder now, his choler up. Had Blackheart really figured all of this out from the state and pattern of his armour or had his familiar read him? If it was powerful enough to suppress his psychic powers, then it was likely able to brush the surface of his mind without him knowing. The Grey Knight was relentless, forcing Huron onto the back foot. The Red Corsair’s swipes were purely defensive now, driven back by Epimetheus’s onslaught.

  ‘I’ve hit a nerve haven’t I, Grey Knight? Not only are you ancient, but you were one of the first to wear the silver of the Grey Knights. More than that you were one of the–’

  Overreaching slightly to block a thrust of the halberd, Epimetheus took full advantage and struck Blackheart on the back of the bicep forcing him to drop his axe. Swinging the pole arm back around low, he smashed the haft against the back of Huron’s calf, dropping the traitor to the floor. In an instant, Epimetheus was over him, halberd tip poised to carve open the Red Corsair’s throat.