They were born from a world of seas, raised from it like the great horn-plated water-wyrms they name themselves after. To them, it is the embodiment of the Emperor, who they voyage space to serve. Wherever they go, they make this offering, the life-water of Ithaka, the blood of the Emperor. This place – called Rosetta on the arcane charts shown to them at briefing – this place is now consecrated. Water has anointed this vast landscape of heat and dust.
They are Iron Snakes. The double-looped serpent symbol stands proud upon their auto-responsive shoulder plates. They are Tactical Squad Damocles, charged with this holy duty. They stand in the ring, as Brother Memnes rises to join the circle, ten warrior-gods in the form of men, armoured and terrible. They sing, a slow ritual tune, and beat time in deadened clanks, slapping right hands against their thigh plates.
Their weapons have been made safe for the Rite of Giving of Water, as ready weapons would be disrespectful. The chant over, they move with smooth precision, clicking sickle-pattern clips into bolt pistols. Brother Andromak connects the power feeds to his plasma gun. Blue lightning crackles into life around Brother-Sergeant Raphon's lightning claw. He nods. The circle breaks.
The salt-pan glows like milk in the sunlight. Visor tints and nictitating bionic eyelids dim the glare to a bright blue translucence. The brothers are silent as they skirt the littered rocks along the edge of the depression, moving single file through the shadows.
Two suns have risen: one dull and fuzzy like an apricot, the other vast and sizzling and too white-bright for even their visors to negate. The third, a tiny spot of heat like a melta-flame, will be over the horizon in four minutes.
In line then, Brother-Sergeant Raphon, Brother Andromak, Brother Priad, Brother Calignes. A break of ten paces, then in file Brother Pindor, Brother Chilles, Brother Xander, Brother Maced. Another break, then Brother Natus and Brother-Apothecary Memnes. Brother Andromak carries the Chapter standard: the snake crest, double-looped, pinioned above his shoulder blades.
No words are spoken or needed. Visor arrays are matched by sharp senses. Ranges are judged and logged; terrain is assessed and scanned. Brother-Sergeant Raphon uses his auspex to watch ahead. They know why they are here and what they must do. And when they must do it.
A low wind rises in the east, shivering across the pan. It picks up salt dust as it goes, brushing the fine white powder into eddying cones. The dust seethes, flicking like foam off rock outcrops or churning in lines across the flat. The dust ripples look like snakes, Brother Priad thinks, or like waves breaking on a rocky shore. He nods at Brother Calignes: a good portent.
At the head of the snake of men, Brother-Sergeant Raphon sees it too. He knows the dust has been stirred up by a solar wind, precursor of the third sunrise. The third sun is small, but its radioactive force on Rosetta is fiercely powerful. Triple dawn is almost upon them.
With a gesture of his hand, he double-times them. They crunch on through the indigo shadows of scattered white rocks, bleached like teeth. The Iron Snakes pass into a canyon, starkly black and white with its division of shadow and light.
Shadow and light. The key to this.
Beyond, below, in a dimpled basin scoured from the pan, lies the target. Raphon sees it for the first time. Rosetta Excelsis Refinery Nine: a ten kilometre-square edifice of riveted black metal and orange pipe work, looking like a wasp crushed into the desert by a great heel. Oily girder work laces the structures and pouting, soot-mouthed stacks vent dark fumes and the occasional flame-bellied belch of smoke into the crystal-blue desert sky. Raphon looks at it for a while – a few seconds probably, but for him an eternity of contemplation. He knows, for he has been told, that this is a vital facility, sucking black fluid out of the porous rock buried deep beneath the salt-pan. Ten weeks ago, the pipelines that run from here to the cargo port at Alpha Rosetta sputtered dry. The precious supply of fuel had been staunched. Without its flow, the armoured battalions of the Imperial Guard on half a dozen neighbouring worlds had ground to a halt.
Raphon opens his comm, selecting the command channel. 'Damocles, I witness to you the target. We will begin on my word.'
Liberate, they were ordered. Brother-Librarian Petrok, great Petrok himself, had given the briefing. Liberate the facility and the fuel supply. Exterminate any who oppose.
Such simplicity. Raphon smiles again, feeling the hungry weight of his bolter in his right fist, the warmth of the lightning claw that encases his left.
The third sun rises. A brief and extraordinary phenomenon striates the desert salt-pan. The three opposing suns, with their trio of conflicting intensities and directions, fill the stark whiteness with a startling criss-cross of shadows. The desert becomes a chequer-board of darkness and light, grey sidelong slants, fathomless pools, intersections of harsh glare as stark as snow. It is called the Risings, Raphon knows. Librarian Petrok was quite specific. At this hour, for four and three-quarter minutes, the conjunction of sunlights make a shadow maze of the landscape.
'Damocles: move!'
Their window of opportunity.
Ten armoured warriors descend the dimpled slope at a run, crossing shadow and light, lost like sifting sand in the complexity of the flickering cross light.
II
Brother Raphon reaches a sloping wall of iron-buffered siding. He scales it, ripping hand-holds with his claw, sliding over the top to bring his bolter to bear.
Two men guard the parapet, two men dressed in refinery overalls augmented with sections of body armour. The backs of their tunics are marked with sprayed stencils showing the vomitous sign of the Ruinous Powers, of Tzeentch. The skin of their faces is dark and knobbed, like the hides of crocodiles. They have injected fluid tars under the skin to taint it, and buried metal piercings, girder rivet heads, in the flesh. A mark of honour, so Librarian Petrok said, of membership to their foul cult. They stand by their pintle-mounted autocannon, watching the sun rise, feeling the warmth on their lumpy, black faces.
Raphon fires twice. One drops without a head; the other reels, his spine removed in an explosion of blood, gristle and bone shards.
Brother Andromak reaches another part of the perimeter. The alternating light and dark flicker of the three suns is confusing him, but Sergeant Raphon explained how this would be to their advantage. He kicks open a shutter door and enters the gloom, squeezing the grip of his plasma gun. Things with bright eyes set in black faces look up for a second and then die, screaming.
Brother Priad leads the assault over the north wall. Grenades loop from his hand and scatter like seeds across the grilled deck-way. Explosions rattle the length of the wall line. Somewhere, an alarm starts to whoop.
They are in.
Pindor crosses an open space between derricks, blasting freely. Huddles of bleary enemies stumble outside in confusion, and are cut down as they flee. Calignes enters a service vault by the north wall and finds three cultists struggling with the tripod of a storm bolter. He saves ammunition and butchers them with his knife.
Chilles and Xander catch a dozen of the enemy as they panic. They impose a crossfire that pulverises all. More emerge, firing back with lasguns and autocannon. A searing shot marks Xander's shoulder guard with a denting scorch. Memnes moves in around them, setting up a third part to the crossfire. Like the three suns with their inescapable shadows, the three tracing lines of their bolter fire pummel into and explode corrupted bags of flesh. Memnes chuckles as he does the Emperor's work.
Calignes moves from bunker to bunker, slaughtering. Through one doorway, he turns to face the stained features of a screaming heathen who opens up on him with an autocannon. Thumped backwards three paces by the succession of impacts to his carapace, Calignes grunts. His boltgun has been blown from his fist and his smallest finger has been vaporised. The autocannon cycles suddenly on empty, and as the cultist gropes for a reload, Calignes rushes him, exploding his head with a clap of his augmented fists.
The Iron Snakes move deeper into the facility. Between two low concrete blockhouses, Mac
ed is rushed by twenty cultists who stream over him like ants, bludgeoning him with girder strips and wrenches. He laughs as he kills them, crushing necks, splintering limbs, punching his fists through bodies. His battledress now dressed with blood, he churns through the gore into the control room and tears the cultist he finds at the primary console into two twitching pieces.
His laughter rolls through the comm. The other Snakes rejoice in it. Raphon kills as he laughs with a shot from his bolter. Priad fires on full auto. Andromak scorches. They kill and kill again.
Something stops Chilles in his tracks. He pauses, almost thoughtful, trying to make sense of things, struggling to overcome his clinically trained battle hunger. He stands on a derrick walkway, with a good view of the control centre. He looks down.
There is a hole clean through his torso, a hole that passes right through him. As his legs give out, Chilles screams in rage. He was not finished. His face hits the grille deck, denting it.
They all feel his death. Through the rapport of inter-fed life signs, they all feel it. The Iron Snakes mourn Chilles even before he has fallen. And they see his last sight: the Traitor Marine. The hulking, pustular form of a Dark Tusk warrior, cackling over the smoking muzzle of his weapon.
Eyes wet with anger, Priad turns to find another Dark Tusk mere paces from him, charging with a rusty, barbed lance. Priad can smell the rot in the air, the foetid stench of corrupting matter.
A bolter is not enough to cleanse this filth. Priad bowls the primed grenade in his hand with such fury it smacks the Dark Tusk off his feet as it strikes him in the gut. He falls, almost comical, spread-eagled around the impact. Then the grenade ignites.
Priad is drenched in mauve fluid. It clogs his vents for a moment and he falls, choking with the stench. As he gags, he sees the feet beside him, the great steel-bound boots of another Dark Tusk who is standing over him, whooping and sucking with liquid laughter, about to fire.
Raphon kills it. He squeezes the trigger of his boltgun until the entire sickle clip is empty and a hurricane of rounds have hammered the Chaos Marine into a heap of organic and metal wreckage wreathed in a mist of blood.
Raphon pulls the choking Priad to his feet. 'More than we thought.’ he rasps.
'Is it not the way?'
'The way of killing?'
'Just so... give me more, make them lethal, make the fight worth fighting.'
Raphon clips Priad on the shoulder in respect and encouragement as the younger brother reverses the cycle of his helmet vents to expel the ichor clogging his intakes.
They turn. There is another scream. Maced is dead. Poisonous splinter barbs from some inhuman Dark Tusk gun have blown his legs and lower torso to shreds. A dirty, toxic knife has silenced his screaming rage.
Vengeance burns in their throats, making them as dry as the saltpan. As he strides forward with Priad, Raphon uses his auspex to judge the deployment of Damocles. The surgical precision of their strike is melting as the men turn back to avenge their fallen brothers. The assault is hesitating.
Raphon will not allow this. Keying open his comm again, he barks off a string of orders that redirects and fortifies the ebbing wash of his men's advance. He quotes the motivational sermons on the use and abuse of vengeance in battle that they all heard during tactical indoctrination on the fortress-moon, Karybdis.
Memnes supports him, cutting in on a sub-channel, singing the battle dirge of Ithaka that glorifies the dead in the Emperor's name. Raphon and Priad meet with Andromak and Xander at a railed walkway by one of the facility's well-head arrays. There is a fog of liquid oil in the air. Xander finds Maced's corpse, sprawled in pieces in the shadows of a ductway. He signals Memnes to it.
The Apothecary arrives, opening his belt pack for the reductor and the other tools of removal. Maced himself is beyond the help of Memnes's narthecium. The bright steel tongs of the reductor are already slick with Chilles's blood. With deft but reverential hands, Memnes strips open Maced's chest armour and begins to dig the flesh apart for the sacred progenoid gland. Such rare treasure, the genetic wellspring of a Space Marine's power, cannot be abandoned. He pulls it free, a glistening thing, drops it into a chrome bowl, cleans it with a spray from a sphyxator, then places it carefully into a self-locking, sterile tube. He stoppers the tube and slides it back into the rack in his narthecium, next to the one already holding Chilles's gland. There are eight empty tubes just like them.
Bestial wails and calls reverberate the ironwork. Andromak and Xander have cornered a Dark Tusk. The exchange of fire is brief but intense. Xander takes a hit that rips a thermal waste dissipater off his backpack. In return, he puts a bolter round in through the Dark Tusk's left visor socket. As the Chaos servant falls, thrashing, Andromak roasts him slowly with his plasma cannon.
Raphon and Priad skirt the vaulted bunkers a hundred metres west. Sharp slabs of sunlight interlace long shadows thrown by the buttresses. Priad sees where the etched inscriptions on the Imperial iron facings, eulogies to the Golden Throne, have been defaced and overwritten with dripping blasphemies. He starts to repeat the dirge to soothe his mind.
Raphon silences him. Drips of something like tar soil the white sand in the sunlit openings. They think they have another of the Tusks, gone to ground between two pump station units but the pulsing machinery is fogging Raphon's auspex.
The Tusk comes on them from the rear, grabbing Raphon from behind with great armoured limbs that lock around his throat. It drives a barbed and rusted spike through his left hip. Priad turns and dives into them, so that the three sprawl, locked, armour grinding and scraping together. The Tusk is half as big again as either of them, ancient armour black and shiny like a great scarab, dressed with filthy loops of chain. Priad twists, fighting to get his bolter close to the vile thing's face.
Blood in his mouth, Raphon fights the Tusk, fights the grip, fights the pain. He writhes to give Priad a clean shot. The spike breaks. It shatters inside Raphon. He blacks out.
The Tusk gets a hand around Priad's wrist and hauls him over, but this is a mistake. It has cleared the shot. Though still gripped, Priad fires twice, the point-blank shots shattering the Tusk's helmet and skull and igniting its power pack.
The blast lifts Priad and Raphon and tosses them ten paces. By the time Priad is on his feet again, they are lying in a wide pool of blood which is streaming from the spiked hole in Raphon's armour. The wound is huge. Blood drizzles out from under him, through the buckled puncture in the plating. Wordlessly, for to speak would be to scream, Raphon shudders and uncouples his lightning claw.
Priad wants to argue, but knows this is not the time or the place. Raphon has been grooming Priad for command responsibilities since Priad's induction into Damocles five years earlier. Priad has always hoped that such an inheritance would be a long time coming. He pulls off his own left gauntlet and arms himself with the claw.
He plugs the power lead into a rune-shaped socket on his elbow. Gold leaf traceries etch the knuckle backs of the ancient weapon, recording its history and uses. The commander of Damocles squad has always worn the claw. Priad flexes its fingers as the electrical charge shimmers around it. On the ground, a stiffening island of metal in a lake of blood, Raphon opens his command channel and begins his eulogy, his passing over, instructing them all to answer to Priad.
He is finishing, his voice fading, when Memnes arrives. The Apothecary clasps Raphon's naked hand once as a gesture of honour. He opens his narthecium for medical tools.
'No time.’ Raphon murmurs.
Memnes scans, concurs. Raphon's pelvis is shattered and his lower abdomen is laced with metal fragments from the shattered spike-haft still impaling him. With a ship's infirmary, care, time, and bionics it would be repairable but there is no time, and the spike was venomed. Filth and toxins permeated the Traitor Marine's weapon, plague spores that blister and chew their way through Raphon's body, despite his superhuman, implanted metabolism. Soon he will be a tainted slab of decaying flesh, the progenoid gland too.
Memnes removes the gland. He doesn't wait for Raphon to die. Despite the pain of the extraction, Memnes believes that all Marines would rather die knowing their legacy had been saved. The surgery wounds, rending and deep, kill Raphon. They are perhaps a blessed relief from the toxic wave that sweeps over him.
Another tube for the rack.
III
Priad opens the command channel and speaks to his men. They hail him with grim solemnity and utter devotion. Raphon will be mourned later. Natus reports the southern perimeter secure, and Pindor and Calignes add that all opposition has ceased. In thirteen minutes, they have killed three hundred and eleven of the foe, including the Dark Tusks. For the loss of three. It has been a costly victory.
The Iron Snakes regroup at the main gantry as Memnes and Andromak torch the corpses of the foe, and lay out the three dead
Iron Snakes with honour and ceremony. Working from stored instructions in their helmet memories, Priad and Natus toil to reengage the pipeline so that fuel pumping may recommence.
Calignes searches the scrappy and incomplete log entries of the refinery's control personnel. He draws Priad across and shows him what he has found: listings of anomalous core samples and petroleum spectrographs. Three months before, to the day, Rosetta Excelsis started to suck something other than oil up from the desert aquifer.
'There is something down there,' Calignes says. 'Something foul and ancient that has slumbered in the oil reserves for...' He does not finish his sentence. Time passages of that length are beyond his ability to guess or articulate.
Priad is silent, numb perhaps. Their mission here, the directives of which he has inherited and intends to carry out with loyal precision, were to recapture this valuable well-head. It was assumed that the forces of the enemy had overtaken this place to disem-power the Imperial Army.