Hellforged, p.26
Hellforged, page 26
Sarpedon shook the static out of his head. The overlord’s body flickered with flame. One hand, still attached by a bent length of metal, flopped to the floor.
The overlord’s skull had come to rest nearby. Sarpedon hauled himself to his feet and stamped on it, slicing it in two with the talon of one foreleg.
The wind had died along with the overlord. The other Soul Drinkers were making it into the heart chamber, bolters trained on the overlord’s remains.
‘Is it dead?’ asked Captain Luko, his lightning claws unsheathed just in case.
‘Yes,’ said Sarpedon.
‘What’s going on back there?’ came a vox from Sergeant Salk. ‘The Undying just broke formation. It’s as if they’re blind.’
‘The intelligence is dead,’ said Sarpedon. ‘There’s nothing guiding them.’
‘In that case, advancing,’ replied Salk.
The bolter fire became thicker as Salk and his men advanced through the labyrinth, shooting down the necrons whose resistance suddenly fell apart, their tactics reduced to individual random movements.
Sarpedon looked back at the ruptured heart. Tangles of flesh-ribbed cabling lay around the cradle in which the overlord had slept, shaped something like a number of metal hoops, slick with greyish gore, strung with the wires that had held the overlord curled up like the larva of some giant insect. The freezing winds had left the flesh dead and whitish, caked in flecks of ice.
A thousand tiny silvery spiders swarmed from the dead petals, scurrying like a carpet of blades. Sarpedon hurried back as they approached, their tiny pin-like legs clicking along the metal floor.
They flowed over the body of the overlord. A group of them broke off and picked up the skull, and, before Sarpedon could reach it, they had brought it over to the rest of the body.
‘Flamers!’ shouted Sarpedon. ‘Flamers forward!’
The head was back on the body. Sarpedon tried to grab it and wrench it back off, but the overlord’s hand shot up and gripped his wrist.
The flame of its eyes lit up again. Liquid metal flowed into tentacles that reached from the overlord’s ruptured breastplate. Its ruined, lopsided skull seemed to grin as it self-repaired and yanked Sarpedon off his feet again.
‘When the battle is won, your work is not done. Your duty is not a destination. It is a journey. Victory is merely a landmark on that road. You will never reach a time when your work is done and you can leave the fighting to another. You will die with the road still to be walked.’
Daenyathos, Examinations Upon Duty
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Lygris ran across the chamber just as the gunfire started.
He had seen the ruined body of the necron overlord, and had known that it was not over. A creature like that would not place the future of its existence in the fallible hands of a single physical vessel. The overlord that Sarpedon had fought was just a weapon, a machine under the creature’s control. Its mind was something else entirely.
The Soul Drinkers opened fire, but the overlord dripped with bright silver liquid metal, and every bullet scar healed instantly. Sarpedon was held in close, the overlord trying to crush him or twist his head off. The Soul Drinkers were good enough shots not to hit their Chapter Master, but the overlord was shielding its head and torso, just waiting for its weapons to solidify from the mass of shimmering quicksilver growing from its back.
They would keep it busy. That was all Lygris needed.
Lygris reached the overlord’s open sarcophagus, his feet crunching through layers of frozen flesh. The dataprobe slid from his finger. Inside the sarcophagus, nestling between the torn petals of muscle, was a column of black metal that ended in a complex shape like an open hand with clawed fingers, each claw ending in a jack that fitted into the back of the overlord’s skull.
Lygris glanced back at the battle behind him. The overlord was a mass of silver tentacles, the resources of the cradle waking up just in time to arm him with more weapons every second. Sarpedon would be dead soon.
Lygris inserted the probe and let his mind drop away from his body.
The harvesting machine had been a crude cage of simple orders. The tomb-city had been a towering ziggurat of unholy light. The overlord’s mind, the intelligence that commanded the necrons of the Veiled Region, was something that could not even fit into a metaphor conjured by Lygris’s mind. There was no way it could make sense.
It was a storm of knives; a sea of hate; an erupting star of time, spewing the future, cold and metallic, into aeons to come.
There was just enough left of Lygris’s soul to scream out a last note of defiance. Then, he let it take him over, and he prepared to spend the last moments of his life causing as much damage as he could to the overlord’s mind.
The grip on Sarpedon’s throat tightened.
The silvery limb wrapped around his neck, choking the life out of him. Other limbs, like silver snakes, snared his waist and arms. He was about to die.
Then, suddenly, its strength was gone.
Sarpedon turned around and planted a foreleg in the overlord’s chest. He pushed off it, ripping silver tentacles away, and landed free of its grasp on the floor.
The light in the overlord’s eyes was going out. The fresh bullet holes in its carapace were not self-repairing. Silver spiders fell from between the joints of its body, shedding like scales that plinked onto the floor.
The anti-grav motors died down, and the overlord’s body sank to the floor. The final lights went out in its eye sockets, and its limbs and skull hung limply. It toppled over, and clattered onto one side.
There was no sound, save the faint hiss of the overlord’s capacitors cooling down. Even the cables and conduits carrying the Selaacans’ life force were turning dull.
Sarpedon watched the overlord for a long moment. Soul Drinkers advanced to stand beside him, guns trained on the machine’s corpse.
Out of the corner of his eye, Sarpedon noticed movement. It was Lygris, lying in the remains of the biomechanical sarcophagus. He was convulsing. Sarpedon ran to him, and pulled his dataprobe out of the interface the overlord had used to direct the necron armies.
‘Lygris! Brother!’
Lygris did not reply. Sarpedon turned his head over. The Techmarine’s eyes had rolled back and were blank.
‘Lygris,’ said Sarpedon, ‘it is done. The foe is dead. Share in this victory. Speak, brother! Speak!’
Pallas was at Sarpedon’s side. His medicae gauntlet snickered open and a needle emerged. He inserted it into the port in the neck of Lygris’s armour.
‘His heart has stopped,’ said Pallas. The gauntlet hissed as it injected a hefty dose of adrenaline into Lygris’s veins. ‘Nothing.’
The other Soul Drinkers were gathering. They were all battered by the overlord’s onslaught. Some had broken limbs, or were clutching bloody rents in their armour. They stood in a circle around Sarpedon and Lygris, and none of them spoke.
Pallas’s gauntlet injected Lygris again. He pulled off Lygris’s helmet and held one of the Techmarine’s eyes open with his finger, but it had rolled back and was blank. Blood ran from the tear duct.
Sarpedon watched.
‘Brother,’ he said. ‘Do the Emperor’s work. Stay alive.’
Sometimes, an Astartes could stay dead for a long time without a heartbeat, far longer than a normal man, and survive, sitting bolt upright and sputtering back to life with a new reason to seek revenge. Lygris did not.
‘The necrons have broken off their attack,’ voxed Salk from the labyrinth. ‘They’re in disarray.’
‘Hold position,’ voxed Sarpedon. He looked from Lygris to Pallas.
‘Our brother,’ said Pallas, ‘is gone.’
Sarpedon closed Lygris’s eyes.
‘Take his gene-seed,’ he said to Pallas.
The Soul Drinkers were silent. They had lost brothers before, friends and fellow warriors, irreplaceable and much missed, but they had never known a loss like this. Lygris had been there from the start. He was part of the Chapter’s soul.
Luko stepped forwards from the assembled Soul Drinkers.
‘He will join the Emperor at the end of time,’ he said, ‘and fight on.’
‘We will join him there,’ echoed Tyrendian. ‘No brother is ever lost. He fights on a different battlefield now.’
‘We all will,’ said Sarpedon. He closed Lygris’s eyes. ‘In death he has avenged himself on these aliens. There will be time to mourn our brother when we have left this world. I will carry him. We must make haste back to the Antithesis.’ Sarpedon switched vox-channels. ‘Sarpedon to Voar. What is your situation? The xenos leader is dead. Come in, Voar!’
He heard nothing in reply but static.
‘The tech-guard may have been overrun. Luko, Graevus, take the point. The rest, stay close. We’re breaking out.’
Sarpedon hefted Lygris’s body onto his shoulder, and the Soul Drinkers advanced.
Chaplain Iktinos stood surrounded by the bodies of his flock. The Undying had kept coming, thousands of them, but the flock had held firm and sold their lives for a price the Undying could not pay. The Soul Drinkers that still lived at the gate breach were a tiny island in the sea of alien steel, but they had not taken one step back.
The aliens faltered. Their relentless advance stumbled, in many cases literally, the warriors losing all coordination and sprawling uncontrollably onto the bloodstained ground. The monoliths ground to a halt, and their guns lowered and fell silent.
Iktinos clambered on top of the bodies and looked through the gates. The whole Undying army was milling aimlessly, its individual warriors reverting to crude placeholder programs that had them patrolling at random, firing ill-coordinated blasts up at the walls.
One of the surviving flock clambered over to Iktinos. His name was Brother Sarkis, and he had lost most of his leg, flayed away to the thigh. He changed the magazine of his bolter as he paused to draw breath.
‘Chaplain,’ he said. ‘What has happened?’
‘Sarpedon has been victorious,’ said Iktinos. He switched to the vox-net of the Raevenian army. ‘Sons of Raevenia! The Undying have been broken. Their minds are addled and their wills broken. Strike now, for Raevenia! Strike for your queen!’
The reserves broke cover and ran forwards, the foremost shouting war cries to spur their fellow soldiers on. The men taking cover on the walls emerged from shelter and brought their guns to bear on the Undying again. The few survivors of the command tower, bloody and ragged officers forming a crowd of walking wounded at a triage station, decided, as one man, to join in the final routing of the Undying.
For the sons of Raevenia, it must have been a glorious moment, one they would speak of for generations, and that would adorn works of art and fanciful histories long into their future.
None of that mattered to Iktinos.
They swarmed past Iktinos and his surviving flock. Gunfire hammered relentlessly, and the Undying fell in their hundreds, like cattle penned in to be slaughtered by Raevenian fire.
Less than a dozen of Iktinos’s flock lived. They gathered around him now, most of them wounded, some hauling themselves up from beneath the bodies of the dead. They had all once been battle-brothers of the Soul Drinkers, but now they were something else, their personalities subsumed to Iktinos’s. They served him now, and, through him, his master.
‘I have brought us here,’ said Iktinos, ‘and we live. Thus has our victory been won. On this dismal and distant soil, we have sown the seed of mankind’s future. We may not live to see the future unfold, but have faith, my brothers, that it will come to pass! The words of the prophet will out! His will shall be the truth!’
Iktinos’s flock bowed their heads and knelt among the dead, the ground beneath them consecrated by the blood of their fallen brothers.
Iktinos took his copy of the Catechisms Martial, the manual of war written by the philosopher-soldier Daenyathos, from where it hung by a link of chain from the belt of his armour. He held it up to his chest, over his primary heart, and bowed his head in prayer.
‘We may not survive what is to come,’ said Iktinos. ‘Those we once called brothers, the hunting dogs of the corrupt Imperium, may not see fit to spare our lives. It matters not. For him, what we have sought here will be found. He who has directed us, who has written out the future history of the galaxy for us to read, his will shall prevail. We have served! And so we, too, shall prevail!’
The Soul Drinkers at the gate clutched their own copies of the Catechisms Martial as they chanted.
‘We shall prevail!’
The Soul Drinkers advanced at a run through the tomb-city. Gun smoke was heavy in the air, tinted by the unnatural haze of burned alien metals.
The necrons had scattered. They fell before volleys of bolter fire and a few well-placed chainblade thrusts from Graevus’s squad. They were roaming at random through the remains of the tomb-city, even the ornate necron lords stumbling blind. Like those in the labyrinth before them, they were unable to mount a defence against the Soul Drinkers.
There was no sign of Voar and his magi, save for the bodies of the fallen tech-guard, draped in pools of blood over the wrecked tombs.
‘Where in the hells are the Mechanicus?’ snarled Luko. His body language suggested he would rather the necrons mount a proper defence, so he could get his claws into some metal.
‘They fled,’ said Sarpedon, still carrying Techmarine Lygris’s body on his shoulders. ‘Or were captured.’
‘No survivors?’ asked Graevus up ahead. ‘No communications?’
‘Let us hope,’ said Tyrendian bleakly, ‘that they did not take the Antithesis’s transport craft with them.’
The Soul Drinkers crossed the threshold of the tunnel leading up from the tomb-city. The tunnels were similarly devoid of decent resistance. Graevus’s squad cut down the few necron warriors that came towards them out of the blackness, or shot isolated scarabs off the walls.
‘Voar,’ voxed Sarpedon. ‘Come in! Where are you?’
There was still no reply. Even as the Soul Drinkers approached the surface, the tech-guard’s vox-channels were empty.
Sarpedon watched the battle-brothers around him as they covered the tunnel ahead of them and behind them. Every Astartes was battered, and many were wounded. There was not one who did not have a chunk of his armour flayed or sliced away. A few could not move on their own, and were supported by their battle-brothers. The force that marched towards the opening that led to Selaaca’s fallen capital numbered barely one hundred Soul Drinkers. Even if Iktinos’s force had survived on Raevenia unscathed, Sarpedon commanded little more than one-tenth of the Chapter’s original strength. A Chapter under the Imperial yoke could expect to be disbanded with such irrecoverable losses, and added to the long list of Chapters that had been destroyed in the long war since the Age of Imperium began.
Sarpedon would not let the enormity of that hit him, not yet. There would be time to consider the Chapter’s future later. For now, they had to rendezvous with Voar, if he was still alive, and get off Selaaca.
The ruins of Selaaca’s capital became visible at the end of the tunnel. A few bursts of bolter fire shattered the scarabs still clinging to the walls and ceiling. The deep wound in the earth and the pall of smoke from the crash-landing pointed towards the resting place of the Antithesis, which Voar had assured Sarpedon contained enough transport craft and fast fighters to get the Soul Drinkers off the planet.
Sarpedon directed the Soul Drinkers to a ridge overlooking the stricken spacecraft, several hundred metres away. The battle-brothers formed up along the ridge, watching the approaches to the spaceship warily.
‘Voar, come in,’ voxed Sarpedon again, tapping into the ship’s vox-net. ‘We’re making our approach to you. Acknowledge.’
‘Still nothing?’ asked Luko.
‘Nothing.’
‘Then we go in?’
‘Yes. All Soul Drinkers,’ ordered Sarpedon, ‘approach in line! Expect resistance!’
As if in reply to his words, a blue-white lance of energy tore down from Selaaca’s sky, and speared the Antithesis amidships. The sound was appalling, a shriek of superheated air ripping through the city. The ground shuddered, and ruins tumbled, bringing down necron structures, and revealing the raw stone of the fallen city through the wounds that opened up.
‘Down!’ yelled Sarpedon. ‘Take cover!’ He threw himself down on the reverse slope of the ridge, rolling Lygris’s body off his shoulder to the ground by his side.
Chain reactions ripped through the hull of the Antithesis. The ship was hundreds of metres long, and, though double that length lay between it and the Soul Drinkers, the ground beneath them shook like an earthquake. Fissures opened up in the ruins, sending the remnants of Selaacan buildings and necron structures alike falling into the networks of tombs and warrior forges below. A flare of plasma ripped up into the sky from the ship’s engines, and another chain of explosions tore right through the heart of the ship, rippling up the side of the hull and bursting its sides. Broadside guns and chunks of deck flew trailing flames. Bolts of molten metal fell in a searing rain, sizzling against the ceramite armour of the Soul Drinkers. The sound was tremendous, like the roar of a stormy ocean amplified a thousand times.
The din died down, but the heat rolled over the ridge, hot enough to scald the lungs. Sarpedon pulled himself up to the edge of the ridge so that he could see.
Over the course of several minutes and hundreds of explosions, the Antithesis was utterly torn apart. The final chain of detonations blew off its prow, and molten metal flowed from its severed neck in a red-black torrent, like thick gore from a massive wound. The ground below it sagged with the heat billowing out of the wreck, and, as it dissolved away, the huge charred hull sections began to sink.
