Indomitus, p.24
Indomitus, page 24
Nemetus hewed his blade through another beetle-like construct and kicked its twitching remains from the top of the berm that had been erected around the Orestes lifter facility. Its metallic carcass disappeared into the ether with an emerald glimmer just like all the rest.
He sighed. Two days of sporadic fighting, pushing out patrols and counter-offensives to protect the Oresteans while they improved their defences. More than forty-eight hours of bolter-fire and bladework and there was not a single alien body, limb or blood spatter to show for the honourable labour.
The lack of physical evidence made the whole experience unreal, coupled with the oppressive surge of the anti-soul effect with each enemy offensive. Nemetus had not realised before how much satisfaction there was to be gained from seeing the enemy dead heaped upon the field of victory. To see their tanks burning, their soldiers cut down, was an account of the punishment meted out for defiance of the Emperor.
He was not a bloodthirsty warrior, but he did enjoy his calling. He remembered nothing of his life before he had been chosen to become a Primaris Space Marine, but he could assume that he had been no stranger to violence.
The Chapters of the Adeptus Astartes did not recruit pacifists.
Bright stars in the firmament of battle.
This was not a battle for glory, but the presence of the Ultramarines was certainly an inspiration to the Oresteans. Wherever the warriors of Roboute Guilliman passed, hearts were lifted and spines stiffened. Without them, Nemetus was sure that all resistance on the surface would have crumbled, giving the necrons free rein to assault the orbital station with full force.
With the outer perimeter dyke now completed, the Oresteans had put down shovels and trenching tools and taken up their lasguns and shotguns again. Despite the bolstering presence of the Space Marines, their contribution was muted. The all-encompassing sense of hopelessness had disappeared; a less potent feeling of its return heralded each enemy attack.
Nemetus could feel the despair growing again. He saw it in the sagging shoulders of the troopers from the facility, and in their shuffled step as they moved to firing positions in response to the bugles of their officer corps.
Their eyes told the story most clearly. Not the resigned detachment Nemetus had seen in the gaze of soldiers of enduring service, but a detached disinterest. On the positive side, the cessation of feeling eliminated natural fear. But it did so at the expense of thought and passion, and hour by hour the lieutenant not only saw but felt the creeping doom coming back.
The roar of bike engines drew his attention to the return of Sergeant Vayoz and his outriders. They drew up a short distance from the seven-foot-high berm, the weapons of their mounts turned outwards.
‘Numbers are building to the north and the south-east, brother-lieutenant.’ Vayoz pointed with his bolt pistol as he spoke. ‘We intercepted a fair number, but at least a company-strength formation at each. Warrior constructs, gravitic skimmers and those three-legged bastards. Support creatures too. A few thousand altogether, I would say.’
‘It seems they have learned the virtue of patience,’ said Nemetus. ‘No more piecemeal attacks. Gathering for a concerted assault.’
‘We can cover one or the other, brother, but not both,’ said Vayoz. ‘The northern contingent seems bigger.’
The lieutenant considered his position, and asked himself what Praxamedes would do in the same situation. Whether intended or not, Nemetus was now responsible for the defence of the planet. A wrong choice – an ill-considered moment of rashness – threatened utter defeat. The thought troubled him more than any news about the massing enemy.
‘No, there is not much else we can do to prepare even if we have advance warning of the attack. We are ready. Resume patrol route alpha and pick off any stragglers you come across. They have been scattered and listless since we destroyed their command ship. There are bound to be more isolated pockets of enemies out there.’
‘So why are they getting organised now, lieutenant?’
It was a question to which Nemetus had no answer to give.
‘Praise the lord primarch,’ he said instead. ‘For Guilliman and the Emperor!’
‘For Guilliman and the Emperor!’ the outriders chorused before leaving in plumes of smoke and dust.
Nemetus activated his armour’s vox-booster, hoping the Ithraca’s Vengeance was in orbit above. They had been shuttling soldiers and supplies along with a few remaining system craft, using the lifter facility to bring the troopers down to the surface. Several thousand had bolstered the defence in the last six hours.
‘Ship command, this is surface command. The enemy are delaying their approach and forming up for a more coordinated massed attack. Request disruptive bombardment.’
After a few seconds the vox hissed in response. Praxamedes’ voice came through slightly muffled.
‘This is ship command. Surface bombardment is not possible at this time. We are detecting multiple incoming void signals, approaching at speed. Offloading last of our embarked troops so that we can manoeuvre and respond.’
‘The necron fleet is coming back?’
‘They’ll be on us within the hour, brother. Expect a concurrent assault on the surface.’
‘We are ready,’ said Nemetus. ‘What is the captain’s plan?’
‘To protect orbital approach and keep your position secure. The necrons seem more focused on the planet than the orbital palaces for some reason. If we can keep them from landing more troops, you should be able to hold off what has already been deployed.’
‘I have a feeling that they are going to be harder to kill once the fleet comes back,’ said Nemetus.
‘Is your sword arm tired, brother?’
Nemetus laughed. ‘No, but it would not hurt if you came down here and used yours a little, brother.’
‘The captain has stated he will command any counter-attack force. I’ll be wielding the cruiser again.’ Nemetus heard a long sigh.
‘You are a great commander, brother, and the captain knows it.’
‘We have far greater concerns than my lack of recent field experience. I trust you will hold the facility and not get distracted.’
‘Ancient Magnatus came down with the Bladeguard in the last orbital lifter carriage. The captain has sent me the company standard as a reminder of my duty to this place. Not that I needed it.’
‘Of course not. The Emperor protects, brother. And we are the Emperor’s will. I shall see you again when the battle is done.’
‘The Emperor’s grace follows you, brother.’
Nemetus killed the vox connection and looked out from the berm. Would the enemy attack first from the north or the south-east, or both together? Did it matter?
He disliked waiting for the enemy; it spoke of inaction and surrendering the initiative. But he had sworn to defend the lifting site. On the other hand, Nemetus reasoned, an aggressive defence was still a defence.
He opened a vox to the pilot of the gunship that had brought down Ancient Magnatus. After all, he was not a patient commander.
CHAPTER THREE
The humans were obliging in their ignorance. While Simut’s fleet regrouped, they had wasted any chance of escaping by shuffling their ships around in orbit over the third planet. The course of the orbital installation that had proved problematic had brought it almost directly over the battle about to unfold on the ground. While the barbarians probably thought themselves safer under the protection of the huge artificial satellite, it simply presented Simut with a single target. He was not one to overcomplicate plans and so the fleet set forth at highest speed to confront the enemy while they were concentrated.
He noticed that Ah-hotep had spent a considerable amount of time in the resurrection vaults of late and now her cortical field was virtually cocooned within the Sun of Endings’ sensor banks.
‘What do you see, plasmancer?’ he demanded, tugging at her communications matrix. ‘What energising sight takes your eye from the battle?’
The hovering entity drifted closer to the command throne, eyes flickering with annoyance.
‘I dance to the background radiation of the universe, my lord, and sway to the rhythms of the stars.’ She bowed, as well as she could, and stretched a hand towards the photoglyphic plates. They burst into bright light, flooding the mastaba with a shifting, golden hue.
‘It is beautiful,’ Simut admitted. ‘But hardly appropriate to be so distracted even as we close in on my final victory.’
‘A marred beauty, my Lord of Hosts,’ said Phetos, gesturing towards the display. The golden expanse shrank away, centring on an area mottled with black dots.
‘What is it?’ Simut leaned closer out of physical habit, one he had not lost over aeons of stasis. His proximity to the data made no difference to its clarity but it felt like it should. ‘What am I seeing?’
‘A faint ripple in space-time, my lord,’ explained Ah-hotep. ‘The echo-wave of dimensional shift engines.’
‘Necron ships,’ said Simut. ‘Where?’
‘Heading in-system,’ the plasmancer replied. The data reorganised to show the incoming craft already at the outer system, moving fast. Dozens of signals blotted out the natural flow of the universe’s energy.
‘It must be Tholotep,’ Phetos said, turning to his master. ‘He leads a fleet to replace us, Lord of the Silver Mountain.’
‘Treachery,’ snarled Simut. ‘Suddenly it all becomes clear, like the sunrise breaking over the Nathor Hills.’
He had no recollection of Nathor, having seen the beautiful range only in broken archive data, but the overlord fancied he had to have been born in such an auspicious location.
‘It is Tholotep that has been working against us! He has manoeuvred us into a trap with the humans, setting a task he thinks we will fail.’
‘To what benefit, Mighty Overlord of the Six Hills?’
‘To rid himself of a powerful rival within the dynasty,’ Ah-hotep answered quickly. She moved even closer, voice barely a whisper, her cortical stream a trickle of data. ‘He is nothing but a glorified administrator, overlord. He desires the credit of success earned by others.’
‘He has always tried to undermine me,’ Simut replied. He looked at the size of the fleet and marvelled at it. If only his cousin had gifted Simut with half of that resource he would have swept away all before him. ‘We must place the resonator before he arrives! He cannot take credit for an act already complete, and his duplicity will be revealed to King Szarekh.’
‘And the humans, Majestic Ruler of the Void-Seas?’ Phetos returned the main data-display to the target planet.
‘Placing the resonator will silence them. The plan does not change.’
‘Yes, my lord,’ said Ah-hotep. ‘With your permission I will continue to monitor the energy streams to glean more data and perhaps confirm the presence of Tholotep in the new fleet.’
Simut granted permission with a nod and a dismissing wave. He returned his attention to the humans, formulating his plan. It would not matter what losses were incurred in the installation of the pylon. Once the planet was under his dominion he would be within his birthright to take Tholotep’s fleet for the continued success of the expedition. Its arrival was timely, and the overlord wondered if his cousin had perhaps seen something of Tholotep’s plotting and despatched him to Simut for just that purpose. This recalcitrant barbarian system would not stand in the way of Simut’s rise to greatness.
Her body was dust. Less than dust. Her particles returned to the great cycle of the cosmos, her soul set free from the woes of mortal concern. Yet Zozar was trapped in this realm of life, and while life persisted he could not know peace. It had been hard to find her among the newly created ranks of the necrons. The mass transference had seemed an impossibility when Szarekh had first conceived of it, but the lies of the sungods had settled deep in the king’s heart and he would not be swayed. Zozar had seen how fragile life could be under the unforgiving, dying sun of their world and had been numbered among the first volunteers to lend his scientific intellect to the cause. How vain they had all been, and how naive in their vanity.
He flexed beweaponed extremities and looked at the fortifications raised up before his army. A prison.
His army?
He had been an engineer, and creator of dams and lifting machines and bridges. When had he learnt of war?
Zozar had become a hunter at first, desperate to be reunited with his wife and children. He had never found the young ones – lost somewhere in the innumerable, mindless phalanxes of warriors that had speared the expansion of the dynasties across the stars; resurrected so many times they had been processed out of existence. It was probably better that they remembered nothing of playing in the gardens and climbing the north side of the pyramid. Better that they were soulless, dreamless tools of war than know what they had become, like Zozar.
His wife he had found after seven days. She was one of the ones that had fared worst, her connection to life, her soul-strength so powerful that the transference had driven her insane. She had the artificial body of a queen but her thoughts were locked outside of it, wandering in the bright orchards of her mind, staring at softly lapping seas on golden sands only she could feel – yet knowing the agony of loss, her brightness dimmed, a sun behind the cloud of what had happened.
He had known then that he could not live with the burden of what he had done, what he had helped take place. So many millions of souls destroyed, replaced with facsimiles of life. Looking at her, seeing the puppetry of her body wrought in silver and gold, Zozar had joined her in madness. He had broken her form and smothered her resurrection field, the misery of it stripping away any last vestiges of honour or compassion. He tried to kill himself but awoke again in a freshly forged body, reincarnated in an exact replica.
Zozar had known then that it was only by eradicating all sentient life, by filling the neversea with the souls of all mortal things, would he finally be delivered from his living prison.
Every being that opposed him was an obstacle to be overcome in that greater goal. The humans that lined the earth ramparts and the walls beyond were doomed. They would die eventually, their bodies mouldering to nothing, consumed by the cosmos. But they might procreate, spawning new life to curse the galaxy with its presence. They defended future generations of taint. They had to be eradicated for the greater plan; it was not enough for nature to take its course.
With Zozar came lines of warriors, flights of skimmer Destroyers and his stalking skorpekhs. Many had resisted his command to assemble, their need to annihilate all life stronger than the command protocols that bound them to their Destroyer-liege. Some were separated by oceans, others embattled against other foes. Yet within a turning of the world he had brought together several thousand of his death-dealing kin and bound them to his single will.
He could not remember exactly why the station had to fall. It mattered nothing – the eradication of life was the only purpose he needed.
The first bullets and stabs of energy lanced out from the outer defences as his ad hoc cohort streamed across the crop fields, wading through waist-high cereals, emerald eyes fixed on the hated living. Around their feet scuttled a carpet of plasmacytes, a wave of canoptek organisms dedicated to keeping the rest of the matrix free of the Destroyer creed, which had the added effect of making them amazing reconstruction devices for broken skorpekhs and Destroyers. Where an explosion or condensed light beam was powerful enough to break open the body of one of Zozar’s followers, the plasmacytes swelled in number, regurgitating stored Destroyer energy to bring their subjects back to artificial life.
The lead squads opened fire – a glitter of gauss energy that sprang up towards the defenders dug in at the top of their raised defence. Emerald beams dragged back and forth across the lines, vaporising every living cell they touched, cracking against crude barricades of crates and upturned storage bins. Haulers and smaller vehicles had been dragged into place to create more obstacles, but to the anti-gravitic engines of the Destroyers they were no hindrance. Rising above the advancing lines of the warriors, the Destroyers darted forwards, heavier gauss cannons stabbing down at the humans sheltering behind their improvised casemates.
Though they took casualties, increasing as the range shortened, Zozar impelled his legion forward without recourse to evasion or cover. Their bodies and canoptek resurrection were the surest defence against the enemy weapons, and speed of attack would eventually lessen the threat they faced.
The exchange of small arms intensified dramatically as the necrons reached open ground where scorched dirt and crop stubble, along with fuel particulates remaining in the air, identified a strategy of burning the ground cover. Bullets and energy beams came in a near-constant flow from along the rampart. On the walls beyond, heavier weapons hissed, roared and snarled into life, tracer ammunition and pulses of plasma flashing out towards the skimming Destroyers. More warriors fell, their torso cases broken open, limbs detached, heads pummelled by repeated hits. Emerald gauss beams flashed back into the storm, turning defenders to nothing in moments, opening holes in the line, lessening the incoming fire.
Zozar cared nothing for the fallen of either side. Battle was a means to an end, not some accomplishment in its own right. And as blunt as his attack seemed, it was part of a greater plan. Another force was approaching at an angle to his, smaller but speedier. With the enemy diverting their strength against the all-out assault, they would be helpless against the secondary attack.
It was only when he came within range of the enemy fire himself that Zozar noticed something strange. He could detect nothing of the chemically propelled mass-reactive warheads that had shattered so many Destroyers in the preceding attacks. He paused in his advance to probe forward with trans-spectral sensors, seeking the tell-tale blue armour and heat plumes of the enhanced humans.
