‘All the more reason to destroy it immediately.’
‘Permit me this one indulgence,’ pouted Fulgrim’s shimmering form. ‘If it were an Imperial Fists vessel, I doubt you would be so quick to arm the bombardment cannons. You would be aboard that lumbering Stormbird of yours and already looking for a breaching point.’
Perturabo cut the link between the Iron Blood and the Pride of the Emperor. He turned to Barban Falk and said, ‘As soon as you have a firing solution, destroy the enemy ships.’
‘My lord?’ said Falk. ‘Ships?’
Perturabo nodded, now understanding the substance of his suspicion, returning his gaze to the looping pict recording of the electromagnetic pulse. Yes, a shadow in the flare of light, a hint of darkness where no darkness ought to be.
A reflection in the mirror of the maelstrom where nothing should exist to be reflected.
‘One of them’s running,’ said Perturabo, ‘but there are two ships out there.’
The attack order went out and the Emperor’s Children responded with perfect speed.
The embarkation deck of the Andronicus was chaotic with warbands fighting to get to the Stormbirds and boarding-torpedoes. The caged raptors of attack craft were loaded on their guide rails, freshly-daubed in their new colours – shocking pinks, electric blues and neon yellows. Great banners of skin and silk billowed from the iron rafters in roasting thermals as engines thundered to life.
Lucius sprinted through the throng, heading for the nearest Stormbird.
A helpless enemy ship – the best kind of enemy ship – drifted in the void within reach of the picket and its crew were just waiting to be plucked. His swords practically danced in their scabbards, and though he told himself that their eagerness was just his imagination, he could no longer quite convince himself. His armour glistened with flesh-grease, and the blood from his fresh facial scars was still sticky on the defaced eagle at the centre of his breastplate.
Lucius vaulted onto the assault ramp of the Stormbird and, certain he had secured his place in the initial wave of boarding craft, turned to see who else would be joining him. The Legion’s warriors scrambled and fought to be the first to get to grips with the enemy. Their devotions had been turned inwards since Prismatica, and the chance to bathe in the screams of the enemy was too delicious to pass up.
Marius Vairosean blared a path to a waiting Stormbird, his Kakophoni roaring behind him with their madly skirling sonic cannons screaming and wailing like a chorus of the damned. Bastarnae Abranxe had fought his way to a craft, together with his consort Lonomia Ruen. Abranxe saw him and raised a sword. A challenge or a salute, Lucius didn’t care.
Lucius’s gaze was drawn to a boarding torpedo at the far end of the deck, isolated from the others like a plague victim. No one fought to reach this craft, for the solitary figure of Apothecary Fabius stood before it, calmly directing the motion of a heavy lifter rig as it manoeuvred a gigantic container from the depths of the ship. Labelled with all manner of biohazard symbols, even the sensation-seeking Emperor’s Children knew to keep away from the dreadful things birthed in Fabius’s bedlam chambers.
Flesh-hooded servitors guided the biological container forwards like the slaves of some ancient monument builder. They secured it within the torpedo’s interior and Fabius climbed in after it, sealing the blast shutters behind him.
‘What are you up to, you old necromancer?’ wondered Lucius, his interest piqued.
He heard the percussive booms of hatches sealing behind fully laden boarding torpedoes, and grinned as he ducked back into the red-lit interior of the crew compartment. Dozens of Emperor’s Children were lashing themselves to the gravity harnesses, cutting their palms with the teeth of their chainblades, rocking back and forth in pent-up excitement or howling like maddened wolves in the fold. The assault ramp swung up and Lucius felt the Stormbird strain against the clamps of its launch rail. Quickly he found an empty seat, and strapped himself in as the growling, vibrating attack craft was finally unleashed.
Powerful engines spat the Stormbird into the calm void between the Andronicus and its victim. Powerful G-forces pinned Lucius to his seat and he licked blood from his lips.
His swords were drawn, though he had no memory of unsheathing them.
He spat onto the blades, laughing as pleasure sang through his body.
Perturabo cursed as he saw the Andronicus swing around with a surge of corrective burn to put itself between the Iron Blood and the drifting vessel of the X Legion.
‘Damn you, brother,’ hissed Perturabo.
‘I have a firing solution,’ said Barban Falk.
Perturabo shook his head. ‘You’d hit the Andronicus,’ he said.
‘Fulgrim ordered his ship to block our shot,’ growled Forrix.
‘Almost certainly,’ agreed Perturabo.
‘He knew we were going to open fire,’ said Kroeger. ‘I say we shoot anyway. It’s their own damn fault if their ship gets hit.’
Perturabo chewed the proposition over, the greater part of him wanting to give the order and damn the consequences. Fulgrim had descended into terrifying depths of egomania, and who knew what his newfound beliefs in daemons and gods might compel him to do if he felt he was being attacked. Such narcissists could twist any accidental or imagined slight into the grossest insult, and lighting the spark of a void war between two whole Legions in the Eye of Terror probably wasn’t wise.
‘No,’ said Perturabo. ‘Such an act will break our fragile alliance for certain, and I’ve still to learn what my brother is really after.’
‘He defied you!’ snarled Forrix. ‘He has earned retribution.’
‘Enough,’ said Perturabo, drawing Forgebreaker from its shoulder harness. ‘If Fulgrim wants to capture this vessel, then we will not let him have all the glory.’
Kroeger was the first to grasp the implication of his words.
‘I will ready the Stormbirds,’ he said, heading for the armoured doors to the bridge. ‘We’ll be ready to launch within ten minutes.’
‘No,’ said Perturabo. ‘This will be over by then.’
‘What about that second ship?’ said Forrix.
‘It’s already gone,’ said Perturabo. ‘Whoever it was, they don’t want any part of this fight yet. If we want to take the iron to the stone, we have to do it now.’
‘My lord,’ said Forrix, a note of warning in his voice as he realised what Perturabo intended. ‘So close to the edges of warp interference? Without fixed lock points? The risks are too great.’
‘Fulgrim may have started this, but we’ll damn well finish it,’ said Perturabo, turning to Barban Falk. ‘Bring us in above the enemy ship and power up the teleport chambers.’
FOURTEEN
Here be Monsters
You Wounded Me
The Circle is Complete
The impacts were deafening, filling the superstructure of the Sisypheum with ringing echoes of metal on metal. Interior bulkheads crumpled like sheet foil with the force of the boarding torpedoes slamming into the wallowing ship’s flank. Layered steel and ceramite broke apart as the blunt snouts of the torpedoes tore into the greatest void within the Iron Hands ship: its embarkation deck.
Magna-melta blasts exploded from the torpedoes’ frontal sections, and assault launchers scattered cones of red-hot shrapnel before them. Little additional damage was caused, as Cadmus Tyro had ordered the deck emptied of trans-atmospheric craft in anticipation of such an attack. The rotating razor-cogs of the boarding-torpedoes ground to a halt and their locking bolts blew off in sequence.
Vermanus Cybus issued the attack order with a synapse pulse through the MIU implant in his skull. No sooner had his orders been received than the blast shutters at the edge of the embarkation deck slammed up into their housings, and two dozen Rhinos of ebony and iron raced towards the boarding torpedoes. Cybus would mount no static defence of his ship, but a stinging counter-attack.
He rode atop his heavily modified command Rhino, secured in the cupo
la by the magnetic clamps on his mechanised lower body. He mashed the firing triggers of the pintle-mounted storm bolters, sending chugging streams of contrails playing over the worm-like maws of the torpedoes. Streams of bolter shells blistered the scorched outer armour of the torpedoes as shielded storm-turrets rotated clear of their housings and returned fire.
Up-armoured and driven over the debris of the torpedoes’ entry at engine-shredding speed, none of the racing vehicles were stopped. Internal blast shutters blew out from the torpedoes and a roar of animalistic hatred echoed from within, like the hideous, cave-dwelling ferro-drakes of Karaashi. Cybus slewed his Rhino to a halt as the snouts of the torpedoes fell away and assault ramps slammed down onto the blasted deck plates.
‘Incoming!’ he yelled across a variety of wavelengths. ‘The iron endures!’
The crew doors of the Rhinos slammed back and black-armoured warriors disembarked from their vehicles, nearly two hundred battle-brothers moving forwards to occupy positions of cover amid fallen stanchions, ruptured deck plates and toppled bulkheads.
A howling mass of twisted flesh and sutured armour vomited from the interior of the torpedo that had impacted first, a hundred or more… things that were unlike anything Cybus had ever seen. His artificial eyes were capable of rendering visual information in multiple spectra and with incredible clarity, but right now he wished they were not.
No two of the monsters were alike, hybrid things of glistening flesh, distorted anatomies and swollen muscle. Their limbs were elongated, bladed and chained with whirling hooks. They moved with astounding speed, some on limbs like organic piston springs, others with the ruddy haunches of powerful beasts of burden. Like wax effigies left too close to a heat lamp, their plasticised bodies were molten amalgams of a hundred conjoined anatomies, genetically manipulated abominations that should never have been given life.
But worse than all their deformities and abnormalities was the stark fact that their bodies had clearly once been Space Marines. No mortal flesh could have borne such torturous cellular mutilation and survived. The gunfire from the Iron Hands slackened as that awful truth slammed home, and the monsters seized that momentary lapse in discipline to close the distance between the two forces with terrifying speed.
Perhaps a score were cut down in a stuttered volley of fire as the Iron Hands recovered from their shock. Explosive fire and close-range missile blasts reduced the dead to component organs, but it was nowhere near enough to stop the tide of aberrant flesh.
The monsters struck the Iron Hands in knots of stone-hard muscle and bone.
The terata, Apothecary Fabius’s foul and twisted creations
Cassander had been gene-crafted to dismiss the debilitating effects of fear. His physiology was engineered to block the chemical and neurological responses to the emotion and his mind had been trained to resist its touch. He had waged the Emperor’s wars for hundreds of years and had never let the many terrors of the galaxy keep him from his mission.
But nothing had prepared him for this.
This was fighting against the warriors he still called brothers.
In the wake of his failed vengeance on Fabius, the demented slave servitors had hurled him into one of the sepulchral, iron-walled chambers with a host of snuffling, stinking beasts. He expected them to attack, to fall upon him with their anatomically impossible weapon-limbs and tear him apart.
Instead they had accepted him as one of their own.
Only then had Cassander understood that these abominations had once been Legion warriors like him. Whatever Legion they had once been, they were now appalling monsters with drooling, fang-filled mouths and ragged talons. Surgical and genetic deviants, monsters with only the last vestiges of their humanity remaining.
Only then had he seen how ravaged and distorted his own body had become.
Bloated beyond recognition and discoloured from the poisonous filth and biological agents injected into his body, his flesh was now a mockery of its once proud perfection. He saw the swelling in his muscles, the hardness of his skin and the distended protrusion of his bones at every joint.
The monsters didn’t attack him, because he was one of them.
Kept like exotic beasts in a menagerie, they were fed a nutrient-rich gruel that Cassander alone seemed to understand was laced with growth hormones and gene-triggers that enhanced their aggression and strength. Fights and bloodshed were endemic after each serving, and numerous times Cassander was forced to defend the portion of the chamber’s floor upon which he curled up to sleep.
He had ignored the gruel, though his stomach rebelled at his fasting. His reforged physiology demanded feeding, and he could feel its hothoused metabolism beginning to devour itself. This was a good thing. It meant an end to his suffering.
He would die and this nightmare would end.
Then he remembered his words to Navarra and the credo of the Fists, each of Rogal Dorn’s tenets hammered through his skull as though driven by the fist of the Emperor himself.
Determination, self-reliance and steadfastness.
Honour, duty and the ability to endure anything.
Cassander ate sparingly, digesting only enough to keep his strength up and fighting to control the sudden urges to do harm to those around him. His moods swung violently, and it took every last scrap of his mental fortitude to hold onto the things that made him who he was – a warrior of the Legiones Astartes and a proud son of Rogal Dorn.
Time held even less meaning for him in this twilight world of savagery, and then came the moment when the bulkhead doors had been thrown open and they had been herded into an electrified channel that led to a hot tube of iron that boomed and shook as though being shot from the barrel of an artillery piece.
Thunderous impact, an ultra-rapid deceleration. Sequenced blasts of super-heated air forced them to the front of the tube in a crammed mass of howling rage. Ceiling-mounted atomisers filled the air with chem-stimms that made Cassander’s eyes bleed and his blood pulse in time with a booming thunder in his chest. Both his hearts were now beating. He felt light-headed and the oxygen-rich soup of his altered bloodwork was making him dizzy with fear and anger. The potent mix of shrieking emotions swelled his already fearsomely proportioned musculature with adrenal boosters and rage-inducing stimulants.
The bulkhead wall that penned them in rose up, and bright light flooded the iron tube in which they had been confined. A stampede of howling monsters charged from the interior, mindless and fuelled by alchemical rage. Ahead, warriors in black warplate fired heavy guns that tore through the first monsters to escape their captivity. The smell of their blood and their bodies’ interior cavities filled Cassander’s newly awakened senses with a need to tear the flesh from their bones.
He fought against the sensation, but was carried into the warriors in black despite his reluctance to approach them. He knew he should recognise them. He knew they were not his enemy, that they were brothers, yet what his brain was telling him and what his body demanded were two very different things. Cassander watched his fellow monsters kill with sweeps of taloned paws or with a toxic vomit of bilious fluids.
This was not warfare as waged by the Legions, it was degenerate slaughter. All around Cassander, bolter fire was wreaking a bloody toll on the monsters, blowing out plugs of flesh or mushrooming from spines in gouts of stinking blood. He fought to keep clear of the swirling melee, but inevitably he found himself face to face with a warrior in gleaming black plate and a fist of purest silver steel. Cassander threw up his arms, fighting down the urge to rip this warrior’s head off.
‘Iron Hand!’ he yelled. ‘I am of the Legions!’
His words were mangled by the genetic reshaping of his jawbone, and if the warrior understood him, he gave no sign. The legionary’s bolter erupted with flame, and Cassander buckled as the shot struck him square in the centre of his chest. The pain was incredible, but instead of blowing him apart from the inside, the shell deflected from his freshly ossified bone carapace.
&
nbsp; Cassander roared and plucked the bolter from the iron grip of the Space Marine. He snapped the weapon in two and hurled away the broken halves before leaping at the unarmed warrior. One blow broke his helmet open, another ripped it from the gorget. Pneumatic gases hissed around the revealed features, part augmetic, part flesh.
Cassander’s rage faltered in the face of his opponent’s hatred.
The Space Marine suddenly had a long combat blade in his hand and drove it into Cassander’s flank. The tip scraped along the bone shield before finding a weak spot and punching into one of Cassander’s lungs. Bloody spittle sprayed the Iron Hands legionary’s face. Cassander reached down and took hold of the warrior’s throat, pulling it out in a welter of glistening tubes and squirting arterial blood. With the last of his life the Space Marine stabbed Cassander twice more, but there was no strength behind the blows. The blade slipped from his fingers as the life went out of him.
Cassander rose to his feet, watching the coagulating blood fall from the ruin of tracheal tissue in his grip. He hurled it away, disgusted and horrified at what he had done. A servant of the Imperium was dead by his hands, and the enormity of the deed struggled to find a place in his mind where it could be understood.
Felix Cassander, captain of the Imperial Fists, had murdered a warrior of the Iron Hands. Oily tears streamed down his face, and his stomach lurched with revulsion. He threw back his head and howled as the battle swirled around him in bloodshed and violence.
Alone in the midst of the rampaging monsters, Cassander knew the true horror of what Apothecary Fabius had done to them.
The sudden shock of deceleration. The boom of locking bolts slamming back and the heat wash from a magna-melta. Stark light poured into the Stormbird as the ramp pistoned down, and Lucius waited until a good dozen of his fellow warriors had stormed into the teeth of the Iron Hands guns before launching himself into the fray. No sense in being the chaff cut down in the first withering hails of gunfire, after all.