Hand of abaddon, p.16
Hand Of Abaddon, page 16
Rostov rose to his feet. ‘Unlikely to be an accident then…’
Antoniato called out. He had ranged ahead of the others, scouting for trouble. His face looked grim as he waved them over. A body lay at his feet, half hidden by a piece of wreckage. The burly veteran pulled it aside a few inches so Rostov could see.
It was a human in a grubby ex-Militarum uniform.
He met Antoniato’s gaze, who said, ‘There are more this way.’
The veteran led and they followed, tracking through the carnage. Whatever initial skirmish had started this fight, it had moved deeper into the mining works. Here, both the dead Kin and their attackers were strewn over carts or piled up in excavation pits.
Lacrante eased over the body of one of the dead with his boot, revealing a pale and emaciated human in scraps of clothes and a rudimentary environment suit. She had an eight-pointed star carved into her face, the wound long healed but leaving a vicious scar. Her expression was almost euphoric.
‘Cultists,’ he uttered unnecessarily. The bile in his voice was evident.
Cheelche hawked and spat. She might be xenos, but she despised the worshippers of the Dark Gods as much as her Imperial comrades.
This was but the first of many cultists, though several of the dead zealots were less than human and had horns or bestial mutations. Many looked more beast than human, in fact.
Antoniato quickly made the sign of the aquila. ‘We should not linger,’ he said, and eyed the way ahead and behind them.
‘The fight went that way,’ said Lacrante, gesturing towards further signs of disturbance.
Rostov nodded, grateful at least that Yamir had not been amongst the fallen.
‘We follow.’
They found Yamir slumped against a metal crane, his armoured tunic torn open and a hole in his chest. He lived. But barely. As soon as his watery gaze found the inquisitor, the rogue trader tried to speak.
Rostov sank down to his haunches so he could meet Yamir’s eyeline. ‘Easy, old friend,’ he murmured, and gently laid a hand on the dying man’s shoulder. Yamir’s mouth gaped open and shut, his words coming in a near-silent rasp.
Lacrante stepped forward. ‘My lord…’ He brought forth a medi-kit, but Rostov shook his head. Instead, the inquisitor leaned in to hear his friend’s final words.
Yamir’s breath smelled of old coins as he spoke. ‘They still have him… the captive. He has the Hand’s mark. I think… I think he’s important. His followers… they came back. Many… a great many. Overwhelmed… us.’ He gripped Rostov’s lapel, tugging it hard and forcing the inquisitor to look him in the eye. A single tear rolled down his cheek. ‘I don’t want to die…’
Rostov gently cupped the side of his face and held Yamir’s hand until his grip loosened and his arm fell by his side and the light in his eyes turned grey. Rostov made the sign of the aquila and stood. He activated the vox-bead in his ear that linked him to the Omnes Videntes in orbit above the moon.
‘Captain Nirdrangar, bring your entire platoon to the surface immediately. Threat imminent.’
A muffled affirmative came from the other end of the feed before Rostov severed the connection. His face was grim. Pained. The sharp prickle of needles in his hand had returned, the itch like scar tissue, irritating. He felt vengeful and knew it showed in his demeanour.
‘I had known Yamir for over ten years. He was an operative, on and off, throughout that time,’ he said, pulling out his pistol and checking the ammo gauge.
Antoniato did likewise, as did Lacrante.
‘I guess this means diplomacy is out…’ muttered Cheelche, seeing to her own weapon as she clipped grenades to a bandolier with her spare hands. ‘Should have stayed on the bloody ship.’
The storm troopers landed amidst swirling dust, clad in red and black with their faces masked behind expressionless rebreathers and goggles. Each trooper held a hellgun across their chest and wore a grenade belt. They disembarked smoothly from three separate gunships, taking up ready positions around the inquisitor and his operatives.
Captain Nirdrangar stepped ahead of the group to approach Rostov directly. The faint haze of a green targeting array was just visible in the dark gloss of his lenses.
‘Enemy disposition unknown,’ Rostov told him, ‘resistance expected to be high. Act with extreme prejudice.’
Nirdrangar nodded. He was a bear of man, both tall and broad, especially when bulked out by his armour. He had a powerblade mag-locked to his back, and maintained trigger discipline on his hellgun.
His voice was a machine-filtered rasp through his rebreather. ‘Extraction?’
‘One,’ said Rostov, donning his helm and seeing a raft of data flare into life. ‘Priority target. I will mark upon contact. We will be encountering potential friendlies. Exercise cautious fire discipline. I have no desire to make a bad situation worse, captain.’
Another nod. ‘Understood.’
The storm troopers moved out, filtering into six squads of ten, going low and fast. They tracked the outward signs of the battle across the desolate grey moon plain, following the dead, spent shell casings, the harsh, scorched rock after an explosion. Cordite and fyceline hung in the air like a shroud, the taste ashen on the tongue, even through Rostov’s rebreather.
The trail quickly led them to the edge of a massive crater, more evidence of fighting here spilling down into the expansive, unknown darkness below. Gunfire rattled distantly, coming from that benighted place, and flashes of energy fire. Heathen voices growled on the air.
Nirdrangar paused at the crater edge, a black maw beckoning in front of him. Night-vision scopes probed the shadowy depths, a steep decline leading to the bottom.
‘Onward,’ Rostov urged, and drew his sword. The blade lit in the half-dark shadow of the cavern mouth, a crackling beacon.
He plunged after the storm troopers, descending with them, the sounds of conflict ever closer. Trusting to their Militarum training, Antoniato took his hefty plasma rifle down one flank, while Lacrante and his lasgun took the other. Both men looked focused, having switched to a combat footing. Only Cheelche appeared unchanged, grumbling every step, wishing she was anywhere but here.
The slope of the crater led to a vast underground chamber, one of several hollowed out of the moon, judging by what Rostov had seen from orbit. A manufactured borehole of staggering scale. The chamber had once been an immense mine-head, the equal of most Militarum muster fields or a capital ship’s embarkation deck. It had been stripped of all equipment, and every mineral seam ruthlessly drained dry with only scant evidence of it left behind. The sheer industry, the enterprise hinted at was staggering. The Kin had cut this crater themselves, and here at its nadir, Rostov caught his first sight of them.
A tight knot of warriors fought shoulder to shoulder, surrounding their chieftain, or kâhl – for Rostov was not entirely ignorant of their culture, despite never having made their acquaintance. She wore no helm, her scarred visage enough of a snarling mask. Strands of red hair flailed like tongues of fire. Between the hulking warband of her retinue, more wall than warriors, she fired off shots from some kind of volkite weapon. In her other hand, gripped in the thickly armoured fingers of a mass gauntlet, was a ragged-looking cultist officer.
The one who bore the mark, and the last tangible lead Rostov had to the Hand.
He marked the ragged prisoner as a priority target, a blazing red terminus icon leaving no doubt as to the man’s status.
Under Nirdrangar’s command, the storm troopers converged, using scraps of cover to mask their immediate approach. The two ex-Guardsmen followed their lead, each naturally falling in with one of the squads and adopting their rhythm and assault posture. Rostov stayed independent but in close proximity to Nirdrangar. Via his retinal lens output, which had overlaid a tactical schematic displaying the relative positions of his troops, he noticed that the chikanti hung back. Doubtless, she was trying to find some vantage from which to best deploy her long-las.
‘Guard my back, Cheelche…’ ordered Rostov.
‘It’s not your back I’m worried about.’
She would see it done. He trusted the xenos more than most humans he had met.
Greyfax’s troops were worthy of their billing, effortlessly breaking into kill teams as they homed in on the fighting. Up close, it was frenetic.
The Kin had arranged their forces in a series of concentric circles, using overlapping fields of fire to whittle their enemy’s ranks. They fought with determination and had dragged injured and even dead allies behind their serried firing ranks. Behind this first line stood a second, using the cover of earthworks and barricades that must have been improvised but looked as solid as any Militarum redoubt. They shot over their shoulders or by the ears of their fellows, displaying a nerve and precision that impressed the inquisitor. A third cohort wore little to no armour and plunged through the well-disciplined ranks before them wielding energised hammers and axes, howling oaths as they hacked at any enemy daring to probe the Kin’s battle lines. At the heart of the ring, its indomitable nucleus, were the kâhl and her sworn warriors.
Even from a distance, Rostov recognised their discipline and dauntless courage. He had seen few Astartes who could boast of greater.
But the Kin were vastly outnumbered. The enemy host surrounded them, a horde of robed and flak-armoured cultists, abhuman beastmen, scavenger creatures like emaciated dogs but with overlarge jaws, and other even more hideous monstrosities. Amid the unwashed mass, Rostov caught sight of more than one ogryn, the hulking beasts carrying the taint of mutation in their crustacean claws or spiked, scaly hides. Combat servitors wielding saw blades and hammers, their grey flesh wretched with sores, roamed alongside gene-bulked zealots hefting piston-axes. Several of the cultists wore Guard uniforms from old and disbanded regiments, held together with scraps of armour and belts, their faces crudely etched with runes. A banner hung raggedly from a pole like skin from a flayed corpse, and an officer wearing a jacket festooned with tarnished medals shouted guttural orders. They had come for their leader, the one clutched in the kâhl’s fist.
Ostensibly, the Kin adopted a defensive strategy to repel these heretics and grotesques. Rostov saw it for what it was. A last stand.
So he stood and shouted out, ‘Ave Imperator!’
A few of the outliers at the edge of the host – the ones who had lingered to feed on the dead, their own and those of the Kin who they had not been able to drag away – turned at the sound. They appeared drunk, gorged on their feast, and so they scarcely reacted when Nirdrangar and his men scythed them down.
The first few they killed up close, using bayonets and blades. Rostov impaled one with his sword, flash cooking its innards before moving on to the next. More than a hundred died in those initial bloody seconds. These were the dregs, the lesser scum subservient to the more dominant. Short-range lasguns characterised the engagement that followed, hellguns rippling the air with sudden furnace heat. A storm trooper went down, shot through the neck with a harpoon. Two more fell swiftly afterwards to a rash of scatter shot and a lobbed grenade. Rock and dust flew upwards in a yawning plume.
The chatter of Lacrante’s lasgun whipped across the Imperial flank, the ex-Guardsman laying down a curtain of fire that had the cultists scattering for cover. It gave Nirdrangar’s men an opening to exploit, and they took it hungrily, advancing with focused aggression. Antoniato snapped off shots with his plasma rifle, half-melting a servitor and coring a rapidly cauterised hole through a zealot.
An ogryn, hunched over with mutation, loomed out of the shadows and came at Rostov. It swung a crude spiked orb on a chain, and the inquisitor had to dart aside to avoid being crushed. He ducked a second swing, the chain cutting through the air above his head with a shriek. A slash of his blade opened up the ogryn’s belly, cleaving through plate and mesh and leather. Its guts sluiced outwards in a gory flood and as it stared dumbly at its innards, Rostov stabbed it through the eye.
Breathing hard, heady with triumph, he almost missed the second brute coming for him with a hammer. He turned, too late, hoping his armour’s inbuilt refractor field would take the blow, when the ogryn’s head snapped back, its skull cored through. It lumbered for a few seconds as the rest of its body caught up to the fact that it was dead, and finally fell face down.
Cheelche’s voice came through his vox-bead. ‘Told you so…’
Rostov turned, giving a nod to the chikanti, who had found a rocky perch from which to snipe the cultists, and went back to the fray.
The horde was thinning but still massive. Only now his forces had fully engaged did Rostov appreciate just how many cultists had been lurking in the shadows, as if the dark had been hiding them and only now spewed them forth. Nirdrangar and his storm troopers were holding their own but taking casualties, down to eighty per cent of their original number.
The Kin maintained their rate of fire, seemingly unmoved by the reinforcements. Then, through the firestorm, Rostov caught sight of the kâhl. He was closer now, having been swept up in the attack which had just begun to stall. Her face was a mask of barely restrained anger as she bellowed out a war cry.
From a wide and craggy overhang that almost blended into the rock face, several feet above the ground, a cloaked and hooded figure appeared. At first it was swathed in shadows, and then a crackling light kindled in its eyes, revealing a bearded, male face weathered with age and wisdom. He held a staff in one hand and as he raised it aloft the azure light of his eyes, which grew more vibrant with every second, seemed to pass to the rune-etched shaft…
And broke loose.
The lightning arc cascaded down on the cultists in jagged tongues of storm fire, searing flesh from bone. A clutch of beastmen howled in primal terror as an ogryn was blasted apart, their fear only short-lived as the lightning crackled through them a few moments later. Dozens were slain in what was but a precursor to a slaughter.
Releasing a shout, the cloaked and hooded figure urged his kinfolk into battle. They came from the shadows of the same overhang, a band of Kin wearing exo-frame armour and toting cannons and man-portable ordnance. At his command, they unleashed their weapons. Energy fire and solid shot hailed down on the cultist horde in a thunderous bombardment.
Still in the thick of the fighting, Rostov wondered if the Kin had been as beleaguered as they had first appeared. The warriors on the ground suddenly adapted to the appearance of the heavier-armed Kin, their defensive rings breaking into two firing lines that punched forward and back, more spear than shield. They swept into the cultists, whose ranks were already broken by the relentless barrage hammering them from on high, and shattered them utterly.
By the end, Rostov had sheathed his sword and the storm troopers were reduced to onlookers as the Kin destroyed the heretics with ruthless efficiency. Lacrante and Antoniato had gathered by their master’s side.
‘You did say these were our allies…’ ventured the veteran as the last of the cultists were being put to the sword. Or in this case, the fist, the final blow delivered by the kâhl herself.
She stomped towards the inquisitor, her brows knotted like a thunderhead, face blood-flecked. None of it was her own. Her chosen warriors followed a step behind her, one of their number more imposing and seemingly more grizzled than the rest.
‘Hold here, Utri,’ she growled, her voice like grit.
The warrior, Utri, halted at once, his armoured feet planted like menhirs. He glowered at Rostov and his comrades, seemingly unconcerned by the proliferation of readied hellguns from the storm troopers.
Why should he be? thought Rostov. Look at the army at his back. At once he saw the potential for a highly valuable alliance, but far from appearing pleased at the Imperials’ intervention, the kâhl looked on the edge of violence.
‘Well met,’ said Rostov, crafting a short bow and offering his hand to the kâhl.
She slapped it away – not hard, but hard enough – and spat at the inquisitor’s feet. He felt Antoniato flinch at his side but Rostov’s furtive hand signal kept the veteran in his place.
‘You are Rostov?’ she said, rolling the name around her tongue awkwardly.
Rostov nodded.
She scowled and threw the cultist leader before him. ‘I hear this filth is of value to you.’
Rostov’s studied gaze fell upon the traitor Navy captain, appraising every inch. The mark of the Hand stood out, cut into the man’s skin.
‘He is indeed.’
She muttered something, a word of her native tongue Rostov didn’t catch, and two of her warriors came forward to take the cultist.
‘Wait…’ Rostov edged forwards but found the indomitable wall of Utri in his path. Rather than balk at the hulking warrior, he craned his neck to look past him to address the kâhl. ‘I have business with that prisoner.’
But the kâhl had turned her back on him and was walking away.
‘Name your price,’ declared Rostov, and thought of the deal Yamir must have brokered.
At this, she paused and turned around. For the first time since their meeting, something approximating a smile brightened the kâhl’s face. Her flinty eyes sparkled in the dim light, revealing her true motivation.
The smile became an avaricious grin of shiny white teeth.
‘I am listening.’
Chapter Fifteen
unnumbered no more
not all knives are made equal
falsehood
Areios stood listening to the low whine of his armour systems. His internal chrono told him he had been in this hallway for over six hours. Despite his training, he felt a mild tremor of unease run through his body at the prospect of what would happen next.
