‘Perhaps you should wait, lord,’ August had suggested. ‘We have word that a Blood Angels force is en route to relieve Captain Frome, and the Luna Wolves are but four days away. Combined, perhaps, you might better—’
That had decided it. Tarvitz knew Lord Eidolon had no intention of sharing any glory with the Warmaster’s elite. His lord was relishing the prospect of demonstrating the excellence of his company, by rescuing the cohorts of a rival Legion… whether the word ‘rescuing’ was used or not. The nature of the deed, and the comparisons that it made, would speak for themselves. Eidolon had sanctioned the drop immediately.
TWO
The nature of the enemy
A trace
The purpose of trees
THE MEGARACHNID WARRIORS were three metres tall, and possessed eight limbs. They ambulated, with dazzling speed, on their four hindmost limbs, and used the other four as weapons. Their bodies, one third again as weighty and massive as a human’s, were segmented like an insect’s: a small, compact abdomen hung between the four, wide-spread, slender walking limbs; a massive, armoured thorax from which all eight limbs depended; and a squat, wide, wedge-shaped head, equipped with short, rattling mouthparts that issued the characteristic chittering noise, a heavy, ctenoid comb of brow armour, and no discernible eyes. The four upper limbs matched the trophy Lucius had taken in the first round: metal-cased blades over a metre in length beyond the joint. Every part of the megarachnid appeared to be thickly plated with mottled, almost fibrous grey armour, except the head crests, which seemed to be natural, chitinous growths, rough, bony and ivory.
As the fighting wore on, Tarvitz thought he identified a status in those crests. The fuller the chitin growths, the more senior – and larger – the warrior.
Tarvitz made his first kill with his bolter. The megarachnid lunged out of the suddenly vibrating stalks in front of them, and decapitated Kercort with a flick of its upper left blade. Even stationary, it was a hyperactive blur, as if its metabolism, its very life, moved at some rate far faster than that of the enhanced gene-seed warriors of Chemos. Tarvitz had opened fire, denting the centre line of the megarachnid’s thorax armour with three shots, before his fourth obliterated the thing’s head in a shower of white paste and ivory crest shards. Its legs stumbled and scrabbled, its blade arms waved, and then it fell, but just before it did, there was another crash.
The crash was the sound of Kercort’s headless body finally hitting the red dust, arterial spray jetting from his severed neck.
That was how fast the encounter had passed. From first strike to clean kill, poor Kercort had only had time to fall down.
A second megarachnid appeared behind the first. Its flickering limbs had torn Tarvitz’s bolter out of his hands, and set a deep gouge across the facing of his breastplate, right across the Imperial aquila displayed there. That was a great crime. Alone amongst the Legions, only the Emperor’s Children had been permitted, by the grace of the Emperor himself, to wear the aquila on their chestplates. Backing away, hearing bolter fire and yells from the shivering thickets all around him, Tarvitz had felt stung by genuine insult, and had unslung his broadsword, powered it, and struck downwards with a two-handed cut. His long, heavy blade had glanced off the alien’s headcrest, chipping off flecks of yellowish bone, and Tarvitz had been forced to dance back out of the reach of the four, slicing limb-blades.
His second strike had been better. His sword missed the bone crest and instead hacked deeply into the megarachnid’s neck, at the joint where the head connected to the upper thorax. He had split the thorax wide open to the centre, squirting out a gush of glistening white ichor. The megarachnid had trembled, fidgeting, slowly understanding its own death as Tarvitz wrenched his blade back out. It took a moment to die. It reached out with its quivering blade-limbs, and touched the tips of them against Tarvitz’s recoiling face, two on either side of the visor. The touch was almost gentle. As it fell, the four points made a shrieking sound as they dragged backwards across the sides of his visor, leaving bare metal scratches in the purple gloss.
Someone was screaming. A bolter was firing on full auto, and debris from exploded grass stalks was spilling up into the air.
A third hostile flickered at Tarvitz, but his blood was up. He swung at it, turning his body right around, and cut clean through the mid line of the thorax, between upper arms and lower legs.
Pale liquid spattered into the air, and the top of the alien fell away. The abdomen, and the half-thorax remaining, pumping milky fluid, continued to scurry on its four legs for a moment before it collided with a grass stalk and toppled over.
And that was the fight done. The stalks ceased their shivering, and the wretched grubs started to whistle and buzz again.
WHEN THEY HAD been on the ground for ninety hours, and had engaged with the megarachnid twenty-eight times in the dense thickets of the grass forests, seven of their meagre party were dead and gone. The process of advance became mechanical, almost trance-like. There was no guiding narrative, no strategic detail. They had established no contact with the Blood Angels, or their lord, or any segments of other sections of their company. They moved forwards, and every few kilometres fighting broke out.
This was an almost perfect war, Saul Tarvitz decided. Simple and engrossing, testing their combat skills and physical prowess to destruction. It was like a training regime made lethal. Only days afterwards did he appreciate how truly focussed he had become during the undertaking. His instincts had grown as sharp as the enemy limb-blades. He was on guard at all times, with no opportunity to slacken or lose concentration, for the megarachnid ambushes were sudden and ferocious, and came out of nowhere. The party moved, then fought, moved, then fought, without space for rest or reflection. Tarvitz had never known, and would never know again, such pure martial perfection, utterly uncomplicated by politics or beliefs. He and his fellows were weapons of the Emperor, and the megarachnid were the unqualified quintessence of the hostile cosmos that stood in man’s way.
Almost all of the gradually dwindling Astartes had switched to their blades. It took too many bolter rounds to bring a megarachnid down. A blade was surer, provided one was quick enough to get the first stroke in, and strong enough to ensure that stroke was a killing blow.
It was with some surprise that Tarvitz discovered his fellow captain, Lucius, thought differently. As they pushed on, Lucius boasted that he was playing the enemy.
‘It’s like duelling with four swordsmen at once,’ Lucius crowed. Lucius was a bladesman. To Tarvitz’s knowledge, Lucius had never been bested in swordplay Where Tarvitz, and men like him, rotated through weapon drills to extend perfection in all forms and manners,
Lucius had made a single art of the sword. Frustratingly, his firearms skill was such that he never seemed to need to hone it on the ranges. It was Lucius’s proudest claim to have ‘personally worn out’ four practice cages. Sometimes, the Legion’s other sword-masters, warriors like Ekhelon and Brazenor, sparred with Lucius to improve their technique. It was said, Eidolon himself often chose Lucius as a training partner.
Lucius carried an antique long sword, a relic of the Unification Wars, forged in the smithies of the Urals by artisans of the Terrawatt Clan. It was a masterpiece of perfect balance and temper. Usually, he fought with it in the old style, with a combat shield locked to his left arm. The sword’s wire-wound handle was unusually long, enabling him to change from a single to a double grip, to spin the blade one-handed like a baton, and to slide the pressure of his grip back and forth: back for a looping swing, forwards for a taut, focussed thrust.
He had his shield strapped across his back, and carried the megarachnid blade-limb in his left hand as a secondary sword. He had bound the base of the severed limb with strips of steel paper from the liner of his shield to prevent the edge from further harming his grip. Head low, he paced forwards through the endless avenues of stalks, hungry for any opportunity to deal death.
During the twelfth attack, Tarvitz witnessed Lucius at
work for the first time. Lucius met a megarachnid head on, and set up a flurry of dazzling, ringing blows, his two blades against the creature’s four. Tarvitz saw three opportunities for straight kill strokes that Lucius didn’t so much miss as choose not to take. He was enjoying himself so much that he didn’t want the game to end too soon.
‘We will take one or two alive later,’ he told Tarvitz after the fight, without a hint of irony. ‘I will chain them in the practice cages. They will be useful for sparring.’
‘They are xenos,’ Tarvitz scolded.
‘If I am going to improve at all, I need decent practice. Practice that will test me. Do you know of a man who could push me?’
‘They are xenos,’ Tarvitz said again.
‘Perhaps it is the Emperor’s will,’ Lucius suggested. ‘Perhaps these things have been placed in the cosmos to improve our war skills.’
Tarvitz was proud that he didn’t even begin to understand how xenos minds worked, but he was also confident that the purpose of the megarachnid, if they had some higher, ineffable purpose, was more than to give mankind a demanding training partner. He wondered, briefly, if they had language, or culture, culture as a man might recognise it. Art? Science? Emotion? Or were those things as seamlessly and exotically bonded into them as their technologies, so that mortal man might not differentiate or identify them?
Were they driven by some emotive cause to attack the Emperor’s Children, or were they simply responding to trespass, like a mound of drone insects prodded with a stick? It occurred to him that the megarachnid might be attacking because, to them, the humans were hideous and xenos.
It was a terrible thought. Surely the megarachnid could see the superiority of the human design compared with their own? Maybe they fought because of jealousy?
Lucius was busy droning on, delightedly explaining some new finesse of wrist-turn that fighting the megarachnid had already taught him. He was demonstrating the technique against the bole of a stalk.
‘See? A lift and turn. Lift and turn. The blow comes down and in. It would be of no purpose against a man, but here it is essential. I think I will compose a treatise on it. The move should be called “the Lucius”, don’t you think? How fine does that sound?’
‘Very fine,’ Tarvitz replied.
‘Here is something!’ a voice exclaimed over the vox. It was Sakian. They hurried to him. He had found a sudden and surprising clearing in the grass forest. The stalks had stopped, exposing a broad field of bare, red earth many kilometres square.
‘What is this?’ asked Bulle.
Tarvitz wondered if the space had been deliberately cleared, but there was no sign that stalks had ever sprouted there. The tall, swishing forest surrounded the area on all sides.
One by one, the Astartes stepped out into the open. It was unsettling. Moving through the grass forest, there had been precious little sense of going anywhere, because everywhere looked the same. This gap was suddenly a landmark. A disconcerting difference.
‘Look here,’ Sakian called. He was twenty metres out in the barren plain, kneeling to examine something. Tarvitz realised he had called out because of something more specific than the change in environs.
‘What is it?’ Tarvitz asked, trudging forwards to join Sakian.
‘I think I know, captain,’ Sakian replied, ‘but I don’t like to say it. I saw it here on the ground.’
Sakian held the object out so that Tarvitz could inspect it.
It was a vaguely triangular, vaguely concave piece of tinted glass, with rounded corners, roughly nine centimetres on its longest side. Its edges were lipped, and machine formed. Tarvitz knew what it was at once, because he was staring at it through two similar objects.
It was a visor lens from an Astartes helmet. What manner of force could have popped it out of its ceramite frame?
‘It’s what you think it is,’ Tarvitz told Sakian.
‘Not one of ours.’
‘No. I don’t think so. The shape is wrong. This is Mark III.’
‘The Blood Angels, then?’
‘Yes. The Blood Angels.’ The first physical proof that anyone had been here before them.
‘Look around!’ Tarvitz ordered to the others. ‘Search the dirt!’
The troop spent ten minutes searching. Nothing else was discovered. Overhead, an especially fierce shield-storm had begun to close in, as if drawn to them. Furious ripples of lightning striated the heavy clouds. The light grew yellow, and the storm’s distortions whined and shrieked intrusively into their vox-links.
‘We’re exposed out here,’ Bulle muttered. ‘Let’s get back into the forest.’
Tarvitz was amused. Bulle made it sound as if the stalk thickets were safe ground.
Giant forks of lightning, savage and yellow-white phosphorescent, were searing down into the open space, explosively scorching the earth. Though each fork only existed for a nanosecond, they seemed solid and real, like fundamental, physical structures, like upturned, thorny trees. Three Astartes, including Lucius, were struck. Secure in their Mark IV plate, they shrugged off the massive, detonating impacts and laughed as aftershock electrical blooms crackled like garlands of blue wire around their armour for a few seconds.
‘Bulle’s right,’ Lucius said, his vox signal temporarily mauled by the discharge dissipating from his suit. ‘I want to go back into the forest. I want to hunt. I haven’t killed anything in twenty minutes.’
Several of the men around roared their approval at Lucius’s wilfully belligerent pronouncement. They slapped their fists against their shields.
Tarvitz had been trying to contact Lord Eidolon again, or anyone else, but the storm was still blocking him. He was concerned that the few of them still remaining should not separate, but Lucius’s bravado had annoyed him.
‘Do as you see fit, captain. I want to find out what that is,’ he said to Lucius, petulantly. He pointed. On the far side of the cleared space, three or four kilometres away, he could make out large white blobs in the far thickets.
‘More trees,’ Lucius said.
‘Yes, but—’
‘Oh, very well,’ Lucius conceded.
There were now just twenty-two warriors in the group led by Lucius and Tarvitz. They spread out in a loose line and began to cross the open space. The clearing, at least, afforded them time to see any megarachnid approach.
The storm above grew still more ferocious. Five more men were struck. One of them, Ulzoras, was actually knocked off his feet. They saw fused, glassy craters in the ground where lightning had earthed with the force of penetrator missiles. The shield-storm seemed to be pressing down on them, like a lid across the sky, pressurising the air, and squeezing them in an atmospheric vice.
When the megarachnid appeared, they showed themselves in ones or twos at first. Katz saw them initially, and called out. The grey things were milling in and out of the edges of the stalk forest. Then they began to emerge en masse and move across the open ground towards the Astartes war party.
‘Terra!’ Lucius clucked. ‘Now we have a battle.’
There were more than a hundred of the aliens. Cluttering, they closed on the Astartes from all sides, an accelerating ring of onrushing grey, closing faster and faster, a blur of scurrying limbs.
‘Form a ring,’ Tarvitz instructed calmly. ‘Bolters.’ He stuck his broadsword, tip down, into the red earth beside him and unslung his firearm. Others did likewise. Tarvitz noticed that Lucius kept his grip on his paired blades.
The flood of megarachnid swallowed up the ground, and closed in a concentric ring around the circle of the Emperor’s Children.
‘Ready yourselves,’ Tarvitz called. Lucius, his swords raised by his sides, was evidently happy for Tarvitz to command the action.
They could hear the dry, febrile chittering as it came closer. The drumming of four hundred rapid legs.
Tarvitz nodded to Bulle, who was the best marksman in the troop. ‘The order is yours,’ he said.
‘Thank you, sir,’ Bulle raised
his bolter and yelled, ‘At ten metres! Shoot till you’re dry!’
‘Then blades!’ Tarvitz bellowed.
When the tightening wave of megarachnid warriors was ten and a half metres away Bulle yelled, ‘Fire!’ and the firm circle of Astartes opened up.
Their weapons made a huge, rolling noise, despite the storm. All around them, the front ranks of the enemy buckled and toppled, some splintering apart, some bursting. Pieces of thorny, zinc-grey metal spun away into the air.
As Bulle had instructed, the Astartes fired until their weapons were spent, and then hefted their blades up in time to meet the onrushing foe. The megarachnid broke around them like a wave around a rock. There was a flurried, multiplied din of metal-on-metal impacts as human and alien blades clashed. Tarvitz saw Lucius rush forwards at the last minute, swords swinging, meeting the megarachnid host head on, severing and hacking.
The battle lasted for three minutes. Its intensity should have been spread out across an hour or two. Five more Astartes died. Dozens of megarachnid things fell, broken and rent, onto the red earth. Reflecting upon the encounter later, Tarvitz found he could not remember any single detail of the fight. He’d dropped his bolter and raised his broadsword, and then it had all become a smear of bewildering moments. He found himself, standing there, his limbs aching from effort, his sword and armour dripping with stringy, white matter. The megarachnid were falling back, pouring back, as rapidly as they had advanced.
‘Regroup! Reload!’ Tarvitz heard himself yelling.
‘Look!’ Katz called out. Tarvitz looked.
There was something in the sky, objects sweeping down out of the molten, fracturing air above them.
The megarachnid had more than one biological form.
The flying things descended on long, glassy wings that beat so furiously they were just flickering blurs that made a strident thrumming noise. Their bodies were glossy black, their abdomens much fuller and longer than those of their land-bound cousins. Their slender black legs were pulled up beneath them, like wrought-iron undercarriages.