Warhawk, p.23
Warhawk, page 23
The tormented sky roared overhead, furnace-bright and racing with interlocking contrails. Ahead of him were the outworks, ink-black, a rising terrain of scaffolds and bulwarks. The ground beneath his feet shook incessantly, rocked by the massed tracks scoring it for kilometres around. Already the gloom beyond the first line of ruins was pierced with pairs of pale green lenses, lumbering up out of the drifting murk with their corrupted blades glimmering.
Jangsai activated the disruptor on Ajak’s blade, and the flaring energy field was like a pure white star against the smokescreens of churning darkness.
‘Come, then, you turgid filth,’ he snarled, grinning under his helm and preparing to burst into motion. ‘Let us see how you keep up with this.’
The full muster alert had annoyed him. Crosius had hoped for hours more exploration down in the basements – he’d just had another delivery of twenty more conscious subjects – but you couldn’t ignore a priority-one summons. He’d looked at the tiny creature perched on the shelf above him, who was gnawing on a tufty bit of scalp-skin and dribbling adorably, and sighed.
‘Come with me, then,’ he said, and the creature hopped down to perch on his shoulder guard. It nuzzled into the cleft between pauldron-rim and breastplate, a gap that had widened as Crosius’ body had swollen. ‘Duty calls.’
He limped back through the doors, picking up his old chainblade as he went. Its adamantium rim was rust-addled and rotting, but something interesting was oozing from the outtakes now – he guessed it would be poisonous. Alarms were going off everywhere within the creaking space port, some of them part of the old Imperial network, some of them blaring out of newer Legion warning stations. The racket was irritating, and it didn’t seem to make anyone hurry – legionaries clumped and clanged their way towards their positions as if half-asleep, barely speaking to one another.
The daemons were a different matter. Those flickering, realm-phasing monsters were rollicking along with real excitement, slobbering and snickering, occasionally losing their grip on the physical environment and slipping through the floor entirely. They looked almost drunk, or drugged, as if just being there – in such proximity to the Anathema and His continued wards against them – turned them into imbeciles. By way of compensation for that, the slow transformation of the space port’s innards had ramped up greatly, with the old plain metal walls buckling into new and organic forms, leaking chems and spilling out with dark-edged creepers. The air around them all felt as thick as vomit, and visibility was down to a few dozen metres in the deeper pits.
He chuckled with enjoyment, and found himself cultivating the hope that, when the fighting was done, the Legion would never leave this place. Let Horus have the Palace he so craved to destroy – this intriguing tower of decay would be enough for them. They could turn it into an incubator, the greatest there had ever been, so ripe with power and virulence that the galaxy itself would be irredeemably infected.
First, though, they had to defend it. He wheezed through his rebreather as he climbed up the long stairs, gripping the rails to haul himself along. He emerged into a long hall, one that ran for hundreds of metres up towards the great gates at the western end of the ground-level galleries. A vast mass of bodies was in motion, all of them stamping and lurching their way towards the ramparts – Unbroken marching in squads, ragged bands of cultists dragged from the wastelands, the candle-flicker daemons shuddering in and out of vision. The floor shook under all that, its foundations booming as the wall guns opened fire. The mobilisation might have been premature, done without sufficient preparation or foresight, but at least it was underway, ratcheting up through the rusty gears towards battle strength.
Eventually he emerged onto the south-western-facing parapets, three hundred metres up from the level of the outworks and surrounded by heavy gun emplacements and defence towers. More than half of those emplacements were out of action, shattered by Perturabo on the way in. A few had been reconditioned, and other cannons had been airlifted in from the Legion’s own supplies, but the impression was still one of decrepitude.
Crosius adjusted the snarled-up controls on his helm visor, and felt the mechanism clunk. For a moment, all he could see was a fog of interference, before the sluggish machine-spirit finally remembered its business and targeting lines swept over a sharpening tactical vista.
Due west, the sky was on fire, and the source of it was getting closer all the time, surrounded by the flash and dart of duelling atmospheric squadrons. Below that oncoming thunderhead, as wide as the horizon itself, the conquered territories leading down to Colossi were now obscured by a rolling carpet of dust – not the lazy drifts dissipating out from sites of previous destruction, but the churned-up trails of vehicles moving, propelled at reckless speed, swarming through the remains of the old cityscape like a pack of rats.
Crosius was no master stratego, but the numbers looked… troubling. The enemy had not launched a counter-attack of such size for months, certainly not since their blood-soaked setbacks across the Anterior war-front. This, though, was concentrated. It looked determined, and it was moving fast.
He remembered Typhus’ words to him, then. You will know.
So maybe he should summon him back. Maybe this was the eventuality he’d been concerned about. Crosius picked up the fat daemon, stroked one of its chins to make it giggle, and pondered. The tiny monster didn’t seem concerned. It pointed at the advancing armour, then twisted around and farted at them.
Crosius laughed, and patted its spines. ‘Commendable,’ he murmured. ‘And no more than they deserve.’
That reassured him. He put the creature back into the crook in his armour, and fumbled for the control switch on his weapon. Far below, the clouds of dust billowed closer.
‘Race up as flashily as you like,’ he said, clambering up the steps towards the rampart’s edge. All around him, Legion warriors were cranking the gun barrels lower, hauling up gurneys of ammunition, powering the heavy engines that would swing the turntables around. The air crackled with daemon-outlines, the rockcrete flags trembled from the massed march of cloven boots.
‘We will make you suffer for it.’
Naranbaatar leapt from the open hatch of the Thunderhawk. For a second, he was plummeting, surrounded by nothing but flame and air, before he smashed to the dirt and got to work.
To his right was the carcass of a downed troop-lander, an enormous tube of darkened metal more than a hundred metres high and long. To his left was a choked-up quagmire of twisted rebar and masonry sections, a piled-up nightmare of long-collapsed structures, all but impassable even for infantry. The avenue ahead, cleared just hours ago by V Legion engineering units, was the only route in this attack-sector, and already the assault was slowing down.
All the routes had been carefully planned. Weeks of research, backed up by perilous scout missions, had given them a network of paths to the enemy. Three battlefronts had been delineated – Gold, Ebony and Amber. The first was commanded by Ganzorig, and had been tasked with driving an arrowhead across the northern sections of the space port approaches. Qin Fai led Ebony, hacking its way along the southern flank. The Khagan himself led Amber, taking the most direct vector, straight at the enemy’s gunlines.
Within those various battlefronts were the hundreds of cleared attack-runs, stripped of mines and flaywire and trenches so that the tanks could rumble down them unimpeded. For the offensive to hit its mark, to strike the walls with necessary power and numbers to drive wounds into the interior, more than eighty per cent of those runs had to be completed on time. That target was punishingly hard, made all the more so by the degradation of every piece of equipment the Legion still possessed. To be halted in the open was death, and so the tanks had to be kept moving at all costs.
Naranbaatar swung his staff around him, gathering up the kinetic force of the storm. The skull tip blazed with a pure silver light, flooding out across the wind-blasted terrain.
‘Ta makaj!’ he cried, and thrust both arms ahead of him.
Twin arcs of raw fulguration streaked out, igniting the charged air around them. His target, an enemy Spartan war machine barrelling down the narrow channel, was hurled from its axis and sent tumbling back into the path of a Rhino transport behind. That snarled up the advance from the Death Guard column beyond – ten tracked units, flanked by infantry – allowing the Imperial forces at Naranbaatar’s back – twelve main battle tanks, plus three jetbikes strafing down the side channels – to power onwards. Naranbaatar kept up the barrage, twisting on his heel to hurl more weather-magic into the enemy, shattering gun barrels and blowing apart tracks. Once the Terran Armoured’s guns came into range, true carnage was unleashed, with both traitor armour and foot-soldiers pulverised by a slamming cascade of well-aimed ordnance.
But then the air shuddered, popping like a bubble-skin, and the earth erupted. A mud-streaked dome exploded out from ground level, thrust apart by the emerging outline of something monstrous. It was huge, taller and broader than the burning skeleton of the Spartan. Its flabby, translucent body slopped out of its birth-crater, steaming and weeping, before long, bony fingers uncoiled from a dozen arms, and a white-eyed face reared up from what passed as a hollow-chested torso, all of it surrounded in bursts and smears of sulphurous gas.
‘Withdraw!’ Naranbaatar commanded the lead Leman Russ, which was now gunning hard at the creature and engaging with its lascannon.
It was too late. With a startling lurch of speed, the daemonform surged straight at the tank, latching on with its many glimmering arms. It swung the hull around, lifting it up and slamming it hard into the hull of the stricken lander. The unit exploded as it impacted, showering the monster with burning metal that ignited into green-tinged flames wherever the gas-clots gusted.
The other Imperial units had ground to a halt or were reversing. If they had been unaccompanied they would have been frantically targeting the thing with their main cannons, but Naranbaatar himself was by then sprinting hard into contact and the engagement protocols were strict – they would not risk hitting him. White Scars jetbikes streaked ahead to tie up the surviving enemy ground troops, giving the Stormseer free rein to take on the true threat.
The yaksha lashed out at him, surrounding them both with noxious plumes, grappling to drag him into its emaciated embrace. Naranbaatar used his staff as a spear now, wreathing it in crackling lances of storm-power. He thrust down, once, twice, severing unnatural sinews and cracking unreal bone. The creature tried to smother him, to wrap its watery limbs across him and squeeze his armour into cracking, but its movements were stilted, unaccustomed yet to the world of the senses and still part immersed in the dream beyond. It managed to extend an obscenely long tongue around Naranbaatar’s neck, whipping it tight and tensing to haul him in, but the move had already been foreseen – the Stormseer slashed his staff sharply, severing the muscle completely, before spinning briskly to gain momentum for the killing blow. The snarling shaft plunged deep into the creature’s throat, buried deep into the heaving sacs of glassy flesh, before Naranbaatar released its full power.
The daemon blanched, bulged, then exploded, shredded into gobbets of flying fat and gristle that slapped messily across every exposed surface for thirty metres. Naranbaatar himself remained braced at the very centre, head down and shoulders set, the remnants of the kill cooking into black slurry on his crackling stave.
Only once the last slops had landed, and the last echoes of its eldritch screams had died away, did he extinguish the flames, drop to one knee, draw in a deep breath and attempt to recover his equilibrium.
It had not been the strongest of its kind, not by a long way, but every step the army took, every kilometre of ground they covered, the creatures grew more numerous and more potent. Once they were at the gates themselves, down into the lightless shafts and the mouldering undercrofts, the daemons would be formidable indeed.
The Imperial tanks started moving again, their secondary armaments ratcheting up to support the Legion jetbikes. Naranbaatar needed to call up the air support and take flight towards the next potential choke point. Every surviving zadyin arga in the Legion was doing the same, being hoisted from crisis to crisis, gouging and smiting and carving up the warp-gorged creatures that seemed to creep out of every shadow and crater’s edge. It would all begin to tell, soon. Their limbs would become heavier, their mastery of the art less sure. Every exercise of power exacted a price, and this one could only rise.
As he got back to his feet, Naranbaatar found himself thinking of Yesugei again. None of the V had ever been as powerful as he; few psykers of any Legion had. If he had been with them still, if he had been commanding the conclaves of the gifted, would that have made the difference? Would they already be within the walls by now, following his bright star down into the depths with confidence?
It was still hard to believe that he was gone. His had always been the great guiding presence, the voice of calm and surety that had spoken to them from the start. Those who remained did not approach the same degree of patient command, and Naranbaatar, for all the long decades of service and deep combat experience, would never have disputed it.
We would have followed you cheerfully, my elder brother, he mused to himself. You would have made the night a little less dark for us.
But then he was stirred by the whine of a jetbike approaching. The machine juddered to a halt and the rider dismounted – a sergeant in dirt-and-blood-covered armour, all sigils of his brotherhood totally obscured, but with the height and gait of a newblood rather than a Chogorian.
‘Do you require assistance, zadyin arga?’ he asked, bowing low. ‘Is there anything I can do for you?’
In the background, the noises of combat were still ongoing. Troops were still fighting, the tanks were rolling again, and amid all of that, with the danger very much live, this sergeant had thought it important to ensure that his Stormseer was attended to.
They look to me as I once looked to him, Naranbaatar thought. And they can have no memory of the time before, when all these things were begun, when we were children too.
‘You fight superbly, darga,’ he said, returning the bow. ‘Please continue it – I shall be fine.’
Naranbaatar moved off then, letting the sergeant remount and get back to the task at hand. Intermittent signals were blinking on his helm display – the Thunderhawk was coming around sharply, angling under fire, and would soon be making its descent. The next battle would then follow, and then the next, and then the next.
‘Because we cannot match those who came before us,’ he said out loud, clambering up to the landing site, repeating the mantra he had spoken ever since Catullus in the hope that he would one day truly believe it. ‘Only go as far as memory and vengeance permit.’
The game
The cards
The Nails
He should never have got so far.
Valdor began to think ahead to a difficult possibility – a future in which, for the first time ever, he did not capture his quarry. If Fo somehow got away amid all the confusion, then the consequences did not bear thinking about. If he were taken alive by the enemy, then that was even worse. So he had to be found.
And yet the city was on the edge of capture. The enemy advance was now visible in all directions, a ring of fire that was steadily contracting, gnawing away at the softening defences and pushing ever closer to the core. Those battlefronts were already contested by armies of millions. As the hard hours passed, those millions would become tens of millions, further unbalancing an already one-sided slaughter. Time was running out.
Valdor crouched down for a moment, his long cloak draping over his knee. He let the killing edge of his spear dip a little, angling down into the darkness, glistering with a faint gold-silver light. Blood seemed to burn away from it, once the killing was done, leaving it just as pristine as ever. Amid all the squalor of the defeat, that one weapon remained pure, as hateful and stark as it had ever been.
He stared at the ground ahead of him. A thousand bootfalls had stirred the dust, blotting one another out and making the tracks unreadable. But then he wasn’t there to read trails in the ash. He was there, at an intersection of possible futures, to take a moment, to place himself in the place of the hunted, to imagine the path he must have taken.
Valdor closed his eyes, and rehearsed what he knew. He had penetrated the deceptions of the murders, the false leads running off into already conquered urban zones, the dismal procession of broken equipment and misleading ciphers. The man he hunted was good at this, maybe as good as any he had ever gone after, but the pool of locations was shrinking fast now and no living soul knew the ways of the Palace better than he did. This was his territory, the one he had scouted out and marked over decades, all the while preparing for just such an eventuality. In the brief stillness, he gauged probabilities, considered what the man required for his work, where he could get it, what path he must have taken towards it to keep himself hidden and alive.
The spear trembled a little in his grip. He opened his eyes, now certain of the route ahead. He moved out, breaking from the shadow, out along the high-strung viaducts over the chasms of roiling fire. He ran swiftly, his heavy tread making little impression on the wind-blown filth around him. His armour was silent, a masterpiece of technomancy even by the standards of his order – save for the glittering spear, he was almost invisible in the murk, all that finery concealed by the palls of ash and grime smeared over every surface.
These were perilous places now, some abandoned ahead of the enemy onslaught, some already infiltrated by forward units. Dislocated body parts – fingers, arms, legs – were heaped up and protruding from the sea of rubbish, pale grey and black, the dead skin as hard as rockcrete and becoming brittle in the scouring winds. The currents shrieked and moaned around every corner, just on the edge of howling intelligible words, but prevented, just, by the frail wards still rattling in place.
