Warhawk, p.34
Warhawk, page 34
No more Overlords. No more impassable peaks. No more poisons they couldn’t ingest. Not now, not for the eternity to come.
He strode down the wide stairs, their bare surfaces still strewn with the last leavings of Perturabo’s clumsiness. He turned his gaze within, allowing the ether to show him the state of the fortress from its high summits to its bilge-filled foundations. The whole place was riddled with disease now, and that contagion acted as a weapon all of its own. The invaders were slowing down – running into that resistance, even being beaten back in places. This fortress, given time, would be their grave. If any records survived at all, the Lion’s Gate would be listed as the site of their last defeat, a final note of ignominy to add to the failures of Prospero, Kalium and Catullus.
But then they struck.
The observation gallery was a long processional space flanked by two high, armoured walls. It ran along the external edge of the western-facing redoubt, and was mostly empty save for its piles of war-refuse. Its internal lumens were long gone and its functional surfaces replaced by creeping slicks of organic matter. The far end was masked by thick spore clouds, from where transit shafts dropped down to the assembly bays and lifter platforms of the space port’s operational levels. His entourage – seven Terminator-clad warriors of the Deathshroud, plus forty-nine Unbroken picked from a variety of different formations – clunked and wheezed their way down the avenue, their cloven hooves splashing and crunching through the filth.
He sensed the attack just before it occurred. That triggered a grudging admiration even as his thoughts were snatched back into the present – not easy, to mask intentions from him in this place. Some art must have been used – the kind of cheap, bone-rattling magicks their shamans indulged in, which could be effective enough when used at the right time.
‘Ward the portals,’ he rasped, gesturing towards a cracked wall section some three hundred metres further down, where the arches over the high windows were already failing. Even as he spoke, bright light flooded through the gaps, and a roar of Stormbird engines rose up from the night sky beyond.
The Deathshroud moved instantly, forming up between the portals and their master. The rest of the Unbroken charged straight for the impending breach, targeting their bolters at the storm of noise and whirling lumens. Mortarion himself simply came to a halt, planting his scythe-heel on the rockcrete, more intrigued than perturbed.
The external walls blew inward with the thunderous clap of krak charges, followed by a percussive blast of heavy bolters. V Legion warriors flung themselves through the rents in the wall, leaping inside even while the shattered masonry was still in the air. At the same time, the familiar ozone-tang of teleporters fizzed, followed by hard bangs as air pockets were displaced. Ivory-armoured Terminators rippled into being, instantly joining up with their battle-brothers and driving on into contact. The processional erupted into a riot of flying projectiles and blazing energy fields as the two forces engaged.
Mortarion nodded silently, and his Deathshroud set off, trudging down the avenue to bring their deadly Manreaper scythes to bear. Not one of the White Scars warriors got close to the primarch – they were steadily forced back down the avenue towards the miasma field as the fighting intensified. The strike-from-distance had been a bold move, but it wouldn’t get much further.
He almost went after them himself. It might do him some good, to stretch his own cramped limbs before the true killing started. But then he felt it – just behind him, in the shadows. Not the warp technology of a teleporter, but a subtler disturbance, conjured from discipline rooted in wild lightning and twin moons over eternal grass.
He twisted around, his ragged cloak snapping around him, only to see emptiness. But he could smell the change – something was there, buried down in all that spore-drifting gloom. He took another stride, the fighting behind him forgotten, eyes narrowing against the murk.
And then a shadow moved. It shivered, before sliding up to join another one. A shred of stray light developed motion, wriggling like a serpent to join another pool of illumination. The shadows and the lights danced around one another, coalescing rapidly, before winding their ghostly way up a support column and fusing into something that began to emanate softly with gold and white. The glimmer-play slipped into and around the roil of the spore clouds, firming up into something both there and not-there.
Mortarion never saw the moment when the Khan emerged. One moment it was all indistinct, just a spectral distortion over the building’s structure, and then he was present, solid, standing free of the column, his blade already drawn and the glamour’s edge dying away.
His weather-workers had some skill, then. They had brought him here, sent him ahead of the advance to ensure that they met undisturbed. That couldn’t have been easy.
Still, it had always been about the two of them, ever since that first encounter in the ruins of Tizca. All their respective armies, all their war machines and their allies and their overworked psykers, those were really just the mechanisms by which they could be brought together again.
Mortarion regarded his brother. The Khan had changed since Prospero. He still carried himself with that old arrogance, the aristocratic aloofness he had always worn as close to his flesh as the self-inflicted scar. Something about his aura was different now. Resigned, perhaps. Or maybe just ground down, finally hammered to the same level as the rest of them. You couldn’t fly free all the time; sooner or later, gravity would drag you back into the slime.
‘You look quite terrible, my brother,’ Mortarion told him.
The Khan made no move. No sudden burst into motion with the sublime White Tiger dao, no breathtaking leap into strike-range. He just stood there, his grip on the hilt loose, his battle-scarred armour glinting softly in the greenish nimbus.
In the end, he only uttered a single word.
‘Wings,’ he said contemptuously.
Mortarion chuckled. ‘A tremendous gift. I am still learning how they work.’
‘A mark of your corruption.’
‘Tell that to the Angel.’
‘He wears them better.’
And that was the strangest thing of all – to talk to him again, brother to brother, just for a moment before it had to end. For so long, his every thought had been of the kill that had been denied him, but now it was just the old fraternal one-upmanship again, the kind of relentless needle all of them had given one another since the start. Because you could forget, if you were not careful, how alone they were; that no one, not the gods, not even their own father, perceived the universe just as they did. They were unique, the primarchs, bespoke blends of the physical and the divine, irreplaceable one-offs amid a galaxy of dreary mass production. In a fundamental sense, Jaghatai knew more of Mortarion’s essential character than most of the Death Guard, and he knew more of the Khan’s than the peoples of Chogoris. That had always been the paradox of them – they had been strangers in their own homelands, cut off by fate from those who should have been their blood brothers. Now they were all back on Terra, the place of origin, and all that seemed to have been forgotten amid the heedless hurry to murder one another.
‘So you choose to end your war here, Jaghatai,’ he said. ‘On a world you never much cared for.’
‘I remain its defender,’ said the Khan, finally placing his dao into guard.
Mortarion kindled the corpse-light over Silence, and the great scythe’s blade shimmered with reflections of the other realm.
‘For a little longer,’ he said.
It hadn’t been four hours. Ilya woke with a start, and knew instantly that she had been out for a very long time.
‘Damn him,’ she spat, reaching for a swig of water before swinging her legs over the edge of the cot, straightening her uniform out, brushing her hair back.
She had been dreaming. It was always the same dream – Yesugei’s voice, sent to her on the bridge of the Swordstorm.
Do not grieve. We were made to do this, szu. We were made to die.
She felt sick. She should have seen it earlier.
‘Damn them,’ she repeated, reaching the door, unlocking it, and veering unsteadily out into the corridors.
Sojuk found her soon afterwards. He was fully armoured, helm on, and looked as if he might have been making ready to break out somewhere at short notice.
‘I told you to wake me,’ Ilya said.
‘My apologies.’
‘Which I’ve had enough of.’ She fixed him with as steady a glare as she could manage. ‘I changed my mind. We’re not staying here.’
Sojuk looked back at her.
‘There are three Thunderhawks in the last hangar,’ Ilya said. ‘I’m taking one.’
‘Those are reserved for–’
‘Don’t tell me the plans – I worked them up myself. You want to fly it, or just watch me go?’
He drew in a breath. ‘Permit me to know why.’
‘Because he’s going to die, Sojuk.’ She brushed a distracted hand over her hair again, wondering if she looked deranged. ‘I should have known it, when he came to speak to me. He told me he was coming back. I believed it. Then again, he’d never lied to me before.’
‘Szu, I do not think–’
‘Shut up. It was you that got me onto this. And then my dreams did.’ She shook her head. Exhaustion still clung to her, making her thoughts sluggish. ‘He didn’t want my advice. He was saying goodbye. And I’m not having that. Not again.’
‘If the Khagan–’
‘–ordains it, then you won’t question it? That’s what you’re going to tell me?’ She squared up to him – a fragile human woman, dishevelled from sleep, up against a towering, armoured killing machine. ‘Horseshit. It’s this blindness that’s brought the house down about our ears. Are you coming with me or not?’
Sojuk thought for a moment, then nodded.
‘Good,’ Ilya said, starting to walk again. ‘You’re a better pilot. I’d have crashed the damn thing in anger.’
They made their way quickly up the levels, most of which were empty now. As they went, Ilya heard the nervous chatter from the comms rooms, the failing whine of air filters. The place was evidently still undiscovered, which was a good thing. The skeleton Legion staff would have to think about evacuation soon, whatever happened at the space port. Until then, they were manning the augurs for as long as possible, doing what they could to keep the fractious comms lines functional.
They reached the hangar, where the three prepped gunships rested on the apron, plus a brace of personnel transporters. The place wasn’t even guarded, given how few troops remained, so they could just walk up to the nearest one, unlock the cockpit and activate the flight controls. Sojuk settled into the pilot seat, calmly initiating the preflight sequence.
‘This will be dangerous,’ he said.
‘You don’t say,’ she replied, strapping herself in. ‘Take us across the gap at full speed. Remain at altitude, do not engage hostiles unless you absolutely have to.’
Sojuk started the engines up. They growled into life, echoing in the confined space, and made the whole chassis tremble. He turned on the main lumens to light up their passage across the threshold, then started the outer door countdown.
For all Ilya knew, there was a Warlord Titan on the far side of those hangar doors, just waiting for them to emerge so it could pick them off. Or maybe there was nothing at all any more, just a radiation-scoured wasteland with no living souls at all. All that mattered was getting across to the far side, staying alive long enough to reach their final destination.
‘And when we get there?’ asked Sojuk, applying pressure to the controls and ramping up the motive power. ‘What is our precise destination?’
Ilya sat back in her overlarge seat, clutching the arm supports and tensing up for the lurch of movement. A flight in a Legion gunship was an uncomfortable experience at full speed even for someone in prime condition. In her state, it felt liable to shake her to pieces before they got halfway.
‘It’ll be visible,’ she said confidently. ‘He’ll have made sure of that.’
The hangar doors completed their ascent, revealing a narrow strip of smoke-churned night. The fires were still burning across a vista of ruination. In the extreme distance, Ilya thought she even saw the place itself – the plague mountain, thrusting out against a horizon of greenish flame – though maybe that was just her imagination.
Sojuk prepared to fire the boosters. ‘You are sure, szu?’ he asked, just one more time.
Ilya set her jaw. She was sick. Her head was already pounding, her skin flushed. She was also scared. Very scared.
‘Do it,’ she said.
The Thunderhawk’s thrusters boomed, and it rose from the apron. Sojuk killed the lumens, angled the controls, and sent them shooting out into the blood-curdled night.
He was failing now, becoming weaker, getting slower. Jangsai’s armour over his right leg and side was cracked open where a charge had got too close, something that compromised his protection from the airborne toxins. He’d taken glancing bolt-hits across his breastplate, and a serrated dagger had perforated the cabling under his left armpit. The blade must have been laced with poisons – the wound wasn’t healing, and blood now leaked steadily out of the joint between ceramite plates.
Would a true Chogorian have done better? Would Ajak, say, have lasted longer against the relentless onslaught, evading the worst hits and punching back harder?
Impossible to know. Plenty of veterans of the ordu had already died in this place, and plenty of newbloods had made kills of their own. After a while it had become hard to even tell the difference – everything was coated in slime and gunk, the brotherhood sigils obscured and the fighting style reduced to a soul-draining slog.
He had fought beyond himself just to reach this point – up out of the wastes, in through the broken gatehouses, then further into the port’s yawning innards. At times he’d been completely alone, at times he’d managed to link up with the remains of other Legion formations. Everything was broken up, though: shattered against the unmoving object set against them. Qin Fai should have been pushing through these halls by now. Instead, his forces were still bogged down, more than eight kilometres away through the bewildering tangle of corridors and transit vents. The only comms he received now were hissing fragments – snatches of increasingly desperate injunctions from what remained of the Colossi command. It didn’t sound like they knew much about what was going on. Jangsai couldn’t blame them – no one did, not in this vile murk.
Sooner or later, you had to take matters into your own hands. With no other commanders in range, he’d gathered together what he could, and fought on towards where he believed the Amber spearhead must still be fighting. His ragged collection now comprised twenty warriors of the ordu – from seven different brotherhoods – and fifteen battle tanks – all Leman Russ units of one variant or another. Together they had made some progress. It was all painfully slow – advance in the shadow of the tanks, let them smash up the established defences, then the infantry could sprint out of the shadows and assault what remained. Then repeat, again and again, trying to ignore the wounds you were taking, the strength you were expending, the damage being done to the armour.
Now they were into the truly massive internal spaces, the ones where the void craft could be lowered and raised on mighty grav-plates, leading steadily up to the exposed landing stages of the atmospheric levels. Jangsai pushed on, keeping his body low, flanked on either side by the rumbling hulls of the tanks. Bodies lay everywhere, mangled and dismembered, face down in the sludge, twisted between the empty caskets of destroyed vehicles. He could hear the smash and echo of fighting up ahead, and ordered the pace picked up.
He almost missed Naranbaatar. The Stormseer was barely breathing, slumped up against a huge support column, his staff burned black and the light of his helm-lenses extinguished.
Jangsai raced over to him, crouching down in the greasy water and lifting his head up.
‘Zadyin arga,’ he said reverently. ‘Where are your guards?’
Naranbaatar coughed weakly, reaching out to Jangsai as if blinded. ‘Sent them… on.’
‘You must come with us.’
‘No. No… no time.’ He tried to rise, and cascades of blood ran down from his helm-seal. ‘The Khagan. He strikes ahead. At the Lord of Death.’ More coughing, more slicks of unclotting blood. ‘Ganzorig is held up. Qin Fai is held up. Too slow. All must get… to him. Must be… faster.’
The Stormseer was on the verge of death. He sounded delirious, driven over the edge by some colossal internal trauma.
Jangsai lowered his head, trying to catch the stilted, gasping words. ‘Where is he? Where do they fight?’
‘Landing stages.’ Naranbaatar’s helm fell back against the column. ‘Somewhere… up there. Make haste. All must… get to him.’
The landing stages were both numerous and enormous. Half the space port was taken up by their sprawl, and it might take days to fight across them all.
But there was no question of asking more. The Stormseer was on the cusp of death now. In other times, the warriors would have paused there, offered the rites of kal damarg – the ritual of the dead, honouring his sacrifice and undertaking to avenge him. After that, his warrior-soul would be joined to theirs, giving them fresh zeal for the fight, even multiplying – so the teaching had it – their sword-arms’ strength.
‘It will be done,’ was all he said, moving Naranbaatar’s broken body so that it would not slide into the waters at least. ‘I swear it now, honoured master of storms. It will be done.’
Then he stood. The tanks were grinding ahead, throwing up waves of sludge as their tracks churned. The lead unit, the one marked Aika 73, had made a move towards what looked like an intact enemy position a kilometre and a half away, off in the shadows. Jangsai’s warriors loped along in its wake.
