Thudding impacts spanked from the hull of the Stormbird, suppressing fire from Rhinos and static defences. The embarkation deck of a starship made an easy target from the point of view of getting assault craft on board, but they were well served by guns and defenders. Lucius scanned the placement of the Iron Hands in a heartbeat, a dispiriting lack of imagination in their arrangement. He saw Guilliman’s prescriptive influence in the defences, and sneered at the Iron Hands desperate urge to follow someone new.
A shot clipped his shoulder, sending a burst of pain through him. More and more, it felt as though his armour were becoming part of him, like a hardened skin with receptors for pain and pleasure in equal measure. It was a welcome idea. He jumped aside as a vicious burst of autocannon fire sawed the length of the assault ramp. Sheeting sparks poured down like neon rain as explosive shells detonated in the midst of the charging Emperor’s Children. A score of warriors were blown to shredded meat, another handful cut up with mechanical thoroughness. Blood sloshed from the ramp, but Lucius didn’t spare a thought for the dead.
Four Stormbirds had breached the embarkation deck alongside a number of boarding torpedoes, and a fuzzed overlay on his visor told him another three had broken through in other areas of the enemy ship. This vessel was doomed, and all that remained was to make sport of its crew. More Emperor’s Children were gaining the decks, but it was the tide of bestial monstrosities attacking the Iron Hands that demanded Lucius’s attention.
He grinned as he saw Fabius at the top of the torpedo’s ramp, like a proud parent watching his offspring. And what offspring! A wondrous menagerie of beautiful terata clearly crafted from the Legion gene-template: a tide of grotesquerie to match any carnivalia the Phoenician had yet mounted. They were terrible and incredible, and the scope of what Fabius had done was breathtaking.
A hulking brute whose smoking flesh was bright red and furnace hot slammed aside a Rhino like a paper toy, the vehicle’s entire flank caved in. Its muscles were enormous, and a swinging fist hurled the armoured vehicle through the air to land thirty metres away in a smashed heap. Bolter fire tore its flesh, cutting grooves through the solid meat of its body. It roared, its eyes were swollen with blood, its muscles lathered in stinking excretions that reeked of boiled fat.
The Iron Hands scrambled to get away from the giant as it smashed another Rhino to wreckage, wrenching the still-spinning driveshaft clear to wield as a giant club. Warriors worked in concerted groups to keep their distance while hammering it with explosive rounds from all sides.
Lucius sprinted into their midst, his swords cutting them to pieces with fluid, economical strokes. They turned to face him, all pistols and blades, but none were a match for him. He ducked a clumsy sweep of a chainblade, slashing his sword up through the warrior’s elbow and spinning around to drive a second blade through the back of his neck and out through the faceplate of his helm.
More Emperor’s Children joined the fight, a whooping, screeching band of maniacal killers led by Bastarnae Abranxe and Lonomia Ruen. Abranxe’s two swords were darting blurs of steel, but Lucius wasn’t impressed. Speed wasn’t skill, and more often than not, his blows inflicted clumsy wounds with no finesse. Ruen fought with his hollow daggers, slender-bladed poniards that drooled hissing tears of venom. Those he wounded were left spasming in toxic convulsions, but few of his victims were killed. Perhaps that was the point.
Lucius left them to it, slipping through the fighting with an assassin’s grace, his blades instruments of flamboyant murder. Bodies pressed in all around, but Lucius moved like smoke through the midst of struggling Iron Hands and Fabius’s monstrous killers. The Iron Hands fought with a kind of mechanistic doggedness and took a good deal of killing. Lucius felt a giddy excitement when a warrior who should have died from the high cut to his neck and a simultaneous thrust up into the chest cavity clubbed him to the ground with an iron fist like a piledriving hammer.
He reeled from the blow, but recovered quickly as the warrior closed to finish him. Viscous fluid poured from his terrible wounds, but its shimmering petrochemical sheen told Lucius the blades had only split some mechanised component.
‘There’s barely enough flesh on you to kill,’ he said, swaying aside from a clumsy chainsword sweep. Lucius spun on his heel and drove his elbow into the side of the warrior’s helm. He staggered, but still didn’t fall, even when Lucius rammed two swords into the warrior’s gut. The Iron Hand bellowed something, but the words were little more than an unintelligible gargle. A bubbling, red-flecked froth sprayed from the grille of his faceplate and Lucius tasted the oil-rich texture of the blood.
Already bored of this fight, Lucius wrenched out his blades and brought them together in a scissoring movement that cut the Iron Hand’s head from his shoulders. Lucius turned and ducked through the scrum of fighting, hoping for at least one warrior aboard this ship who might at least give him a moment’s distraction.
A nightmarish beast with the hooked arms of a gigantic mantis bounded into the midst of a scratch squad of Iron Hands and cut three down in as many sweeps of its powerful limbs. It howled as it killed, a plaintive cry that was part hatred, part anguish. Cybus swung the weapon-mount of his Rhino around and kept the floating reticule in his augmetic eyes married to its skull. A stream of guided bolter shells shredded its upper half in a confetti of rich red tissue.
Warriors encased in battle-plate the colours of fever dreams charged from smoke-wreathed assault craft. They bore the distinctive aquila upon their chests – albeit disfigured – which marked them as the Emperor’s Children, but no other sign remained to identify them as that once proud Legion. Their armour was bedecked with skin fetishes and bloody trophies of war, crawling with obscene symbols and welded hooks.
Though his body had long ago eschewed the weakness of flesh for the purity of iron, hate flared in his heart at the sight of the Emperor’s Children. These degenerate scum had murdered his primarch, and in that one moment, Vermanus Cybus had never felt more alive or been more human.
Before the betrayal at Isstvan, Cybus had fought beside the Phoenician’s warriors on numerous occasions. He had always respected their devotion to the attainment of perfection, finding much to admire in their martial ethos. Many years ago, he had argued long into the night with a young officer named Rylanor on the merits of organic strength against augmented power, mocking the legionary’s faith in his flesh while extolling the virtue of iron.
Was young Rylanor now among these degenerates? Would Cybus now have to kill a warrior he had once admired? The thought did not trouble him, and only served to vindicate his belief in the superiority of iron over blood and bone. The Emperor’s Children spread out through the deck, firing wildly and howling a strange battle cant that tore at Cybus’s augmetics and filled his skull with piercing static like a thousand screams.
Howls, shrieking blades and strobing flares of gunfire filled the embarkation deck as the Iron Hands fought the boarders in bloody close quarters. Mutant limbs and gene-spliced claws tore at war-forged battle-plate, and in return, chainswords and point-blank bolter fire ripped through the monsters’ hideous bodies. Cybus played the fire of his storm bolters over them, seeing that some were falling without wounds caused by his own men. He saw one distorted legionary collapse as his overwrought anatomy finally rebelled and combusted from within. Another simply exploded as rampant cellular mutation ripped him apart and transformed him into a writhing mass of jellied growths like a fleshy coral reef.
Cybus paused in his slaughter as he saw a figure in the midst of the beasts, an armoured warrior with a hideous contraption of blades, drills and clattering dissection tools at his shoulders like a surgical version of a servo-harness. He swung the cupola around, but the figure was obscured by his monstrous cohorts before he could fire.
Cybus dismissed the solitary figure and scanned the fighting with the calm awareness of a tactical planner in the barracks room. The monsters were contained for now, his warriors’ resilience and their own biological inst
ability keeping them from significant breakthroughs, but the Emperor’s Children were in danger of overrunning the deck.
‘First echelon, contain the right flank!’ ordered Cybus as warriors in purple and gold and stretched skin moved to surround them. ‘Reserve one, deploy now.’
The Rhinos swung around like a closing gate, moving in smooth support of their infantry while keeping punishing bursts of rounds chewing the Emperor’s Children. Static guns and emplaced turrets flensed the open areas of the deck, pinning the flanking force in place while the Iron Hands redeployed.
Cybus allowed himself a moment of grim satisfaction.
The Emperor’s Children would pay for their folly.
The battle ebbed and flowed below him, a swirling, heaving mass of rampaging fury, clinical tactical nous and theatrical flamboyance. As an exercise in different modes of fighting, it would have made a fascinating study, but Sharrowkyn was more interested in locating the nodal points of the enemy attack where a sudden strike would cause the most discord. He swung through the upper trusses and service gantries of the embarkation deck, always in motion and pausing only to assess the tactical situation.
Vermanus Cybus was an uncompromising man of little personal charisma, but he had a secutor’s grasp of the methodology of combat. His warriors were reacting to every thrust of the Emperor’s Children with alacrity and swift logic – even if the attackers were not fighting with logic as their guide.
If the architects of this assault had hoped to break the defenders in one punishing blow, they were to be sorely disappointed.
The monstrous things were being slowly beaten back, hot animalistic fury no match for the icy calm and unbending nature of the Iron Hands. Sharrowkyn saw a number of Emperor’s Children in the thick of the hardest fighting, and a brutish killer with two blades who bludgeoned a path through the defenders. A warrior in armour bedecked with spikes followed in his wake, fighting with a pair of daggers that were clearly envenomed.
But there was one warrior Sharrowkyn saw again and again who drew his attention the most, a swordsman of sublime skill. This warrior knew the gaps between life and death like no other, passing between blades and bullets as if he was wraith-slipping, as easily as another man might cross a room. His blades wove in and out of the spaces occupied by the living and in so doing, ended them.
This was the man he needed to kill.
Lucius saw the shadow bearing down on him an instant before it struck.
He twisted to avoid whatever was coming at him, but even he wasn’t fast enough.
The impact was like being hit by a siege hammer and the air was driven from his lungs as the swooping warrior slammed him into the deck. He rolled as a black-bladed sword sliced down, and he blocked another with instinctual speed. Lucius saw a figure in black lunge at him, and rolled his wrists to bring his blades together in a blocking cross. He twisted his grip and spun on his heel to deliver a killing strike to his opponent’s throat.
His blade struck razor-edged steel, and only a desperate parry kept his own head on his shoulders as a silent blade came at him. Lucius was impressed, pleased to have found a warrior who knew which end of a sword to use. Most other opponents would have lost their weapons in his first block.
‘You have some skill,’ he said as they circled one another.
The warrior didn’t reply, and only then did Lucius notice that this was no Iron Hand.
‘Raven Guard,’ he said, recognising the grip, stance and angle of blades favoured by Corax’s shadow warriors. ‘That explains why you’re still alive.’
The Raven Guard attacked in a darting series of blinding feints, high cuts and dazzlingly fast thrusts that Lucius parried, dodged and backed away from in an increasingly swift-paced duel. The warrior wasn’t just skilled, he was talented too. Gifted, even.
‘I haven’t killed any little black birds in a while,’ giggled Lucius. ‘Since Isstvan, at least.’
The warrior didn’t react to Lucius’s goading, which marked him as even more skilled than he’d thought. Realising he would not easily get a rise out of the Raven Guard, Lucius put aside his need to humiliate his opponent as well as defeat him. Time and time again they came at each other, spinning like dancers locked in a routine that could only end in the death of one of the performers.
Lucius studied the warrior as they fought. His movements were like oil in the air, a slick progression of flowing poise. His bladework was flawless, technically perfect, but empowered by an innate understanding of the art form of the sword. With a start, Lucius realised that this warrior was almost the equal of him.
A jolt of uncertainty flooded Lucius at the thought that the warrior had a chance of besting him. He laughed, giddy at having finally met a worthy foe, his every nerve surging at the idea of defeat, even if the possibility were so remote as to be next to impossible. That such a possibility existed at all was reason enough to revel in it.
‘My friend,’ he said, parrying a low strike to the groin and riposting with a playful strike to the head. ‘Your name, I must know it.’
The warrior responded with a viper-swift lunge to the neck and a spinning cut to the throat. Angry now, Lucius batted away the strike and slashed at the Raven Guard’s wrist. A black blade turned the blow aside and a counter-strike of uncanny speed cut a groove in the eagle on Lucius’s plastron.
‘Answer me, damn you,’ snapped Lucius, and another stinging cut slipped past his defences to open a deep gash on his cheek. Astounded, Lucius broke the circle of the duel and lowered his weapons in astonishment. Blood dripped from his face and his anger vanished in an ecstatic burst of happiness.
‘You wounded me,’ he said, amazed and thrilled at the same time. ‘You actually wounded me. Do you know how rare that is?’
Before the warrior could answer – not that Lucius really expected him to – another figure burst into the circle of the duel and barrelled him to the ground. Lucius fell hard, losing his grip on his swords and striking his head on a buckled deck plate. Through a haze of blood and dizziness, he saw a blur of pink and gold throw itself at the Raven Guard swordsman.
The new arrival swung a pair of swords in a beheading cut, and even through a red veil of blood Lucius recognised the clumsy bladework of Bastarnae Abranxe. The Raven Guard ducked below the blow and spun around his attacker. His swords plunged into Abranxe’s midriff in the gap between his back plate and culet. Abranxe grunted in pain, but before he could do more than spin to face his attacker, his throat was opened by one blade, and the top of his skull by another.
Abranxe fell dead and Lucius laughed to see him so humiliated. He doubted even Fabius could undo that kind of damage.
The Raven Guard didn’t pause to enjoy his kill and sprang forwards to finish Lucius.
But the Fates, it seemed, had purpose yet for him.
A blue-hot dome of electric fire exploded in the centre of the embarkation deck, sending a booming thunderclap of displaced air through the arched chamber like the shockwave of an atmospheric munition. The Raven Guard stumbled and Lucius tasted the bitter metallic taste of teleportation energy. He blinked away the after-images of multiple light sources and phantom echoes of things that had never existed.
The fighting in the embarkation deck ceased as the blue light vanished.
In its place stood Perturabo within a circle of robotic guardians.
FIFTEEN
Another Way to Fight
Iron Within
Rally to the Captain
Thamatica ran the length of the enginarium, moving between reactor vent controls through streaming plumes of escaping gases. Hot enough to flense bare flesh, each superheated blast scorched his armour of paint and made the interior feel like a furnace. He sweated through his bodyglove, the perspiration stinging his eyes and blurring the reams of information flickering past on his visor.
Emergency vents were draining power from the reactors as quickly as they could. He paused by a venting station and watched the ivory numerals on the display click a
nd clack as they spun down like the altimeter of an aircraft in freefall. The newly limbered servo-harness on his back worked red iron flow-wheels on the pipework higher up, and a data inload spike stabbed into an open terminal port nearby. His bloodstream surged with synaesthetic heat from the protesting reactors.
‘Still far too high,’ he said. ‘Tyro’s not going to like that. No, not one bit.’
Voices cried in his ear, demanding updates, but he ignored them. What could he tell them that would matter? The power levels in the ship’s reactors were spiralling out of control, and no matter how many null rods he deployed, they were on the verge of going critical.
‘And once that happens…’ He left the sentence hanging.
Thamatica moved on through the engine spaces, watching dying servitors whose skin bubbled and peeled in the intolerable heat as they worked. Exo-shielded enginseers fought with the venting controls, diverting power into redundant systems and looking for additional ways to bleed off the excess safely. A futile task, but one which might buy the captain some time to fight the enemy boarders. That was all Thamatica could give him, and it galled him that he had brought them to this.
‘I should be down in the decks, fighting,’ he said, diverting a portion of his attention to study the tactical feeds from the ship’s data engines. The embarkation deck was holding – just – though reports on the nature of the enemy made little sense, but it wasn’t the fighting there that concerned Thamatica.
A number of splinter groups had broken into the Sisypheum on the levels above the embarkation deck. Quick reaction forces were even now moving to intercept, but more and more it looked like the initial attack was intended to pin the defenders in place while some other objective was the true goal of the attack.
Thamatica shut off the feed. While he was as fearsome and indomitable in battle as any warrior of the X Legion, he knew this was where he could do the most good. He disengaged his inload spike and moved back towards the control station at the end of the engine spaces. Shapes moved in the fog of irradiated steam: servitors who would be dead within the hour from atomic poisoning and lexmechanics whose higher brain functions would already be degrading in the chemical backwash.