Here and there, a few Iron Hands worked in the guts of opened reactor casings, braving radioactive bleed-off and boiling, corrosive gases to keep a lid on the imminent reactor meltdown that would blow the Sisypheum to its component parts.
An explosion of such magnitude would destroy everything nearby.
Suddenly Thamatica knew how he too could fight the enemy.
The Iron Circle locked their shields together in a blunt wedge, like the prow of a Legion starship, and leaned into their charge. Gunfire ricocheted from their energy shields and heavily armoured plates. Driven by fibre-bundle muscles and power cores, their frame was thickened around the shoulders, heads and arms to better resist incoming fire, and nothing the Iron Hands could throw at the battle robots slowed their pace one iota.
An unstoppable juggernaut of burnished iron, gold and jet, they hammered the Iron Hands defence like a wrecking ball. A pair of Rhinos were smashed aside, sent skidding back fifty metres by coordinated swipes of their shields, and half a dozen Legion warriors were crushed beneath the unstoppable power of their siege hammers.
With machine precision, their shields parted and Perturabo surged from within their aegis with Forrix and Kroeger at his side. Forgebreaker swept out and hammered down onto the deck. Seismic shockwaves surged out in a radial pattern, flipping over armoured vehicles and sending debris flying through the air. Iron Hands were swept aside and hurled against the walls like leaves in a hurricane. Mobile gun platforms were smashed into their component parts and the emplaced weapon turrets went offline with the pressure differential.
The Iron Circle locked their shields to the deck and swung up shoulder-mounted weapons: rotary cannons, grenade launchers and quad-carbines. Overlapping fields of fire fanned out from their position, a horizontal sheet of trace and las that burned and blasted anything in its path.
‘My lord!’ shouted Forrix, dropping to one knee and bringing his combi-bolter up.
Perturabo saw a Rhino that had somehow managed to remain upright. Straight away, he saw its mass was considerably more than a standard-pattern APC. Vox antenna told him that this was a commander’s tank. A warrior of the X Legion sat in the cupola, aiming the slaved storm bolters.
‘He’s mine,’ said Perturabo. ‘Finish the rest yourselves.’
Forrix nodded and waved three of the Iron Circle to his side, pushing round to the flanks where the Emperor’s Children had fallen upon the reeling Iron Hands. Their slaughters were unseemly, but thorough. None of the X Legion warriors would be getting up again and none would be fit for gene-harvesting. Kroeger leapt a fallen bulkhead plate, his bolt pistol banging off rounds into the stunned defenders. Another three of the Iron Circle kept pace with the newest triarch, keeping the worst of the enemy fire at bay and adding the power of their own weapons to his charge.
Two of the Iron Circle took position ahead of Perturabo as a blitz of bolter shells blazed from the Rhino commander’s guns. The shields of the Iron Circle intercepted them in a storm of sparks and detonations. The battle robots skidded around and lowered their shields like a ramp before him, and Perturabo used them as a springboard to vault into the air with his hammer raised high. An arcing stream of rounds followed him up, detonating on his armour without effect. Forgebreaker arced down like an unstoppable piston and flattened the front half of the armoured vehicle entirely. The tank flipped up and somersaulted overhead.
Perturabo turned to watch the Rhino be slammed down with bone-crushing force by the integrity field. It rolled into a projecting stanchion, buckling what remained of its armour like foil.
More gunshots reached out to him, blasts of coldly accurate bolter fire and the spiralling contrail of a missile. An energy shield deflected the missile up into the roof space and another took the battering impact of the mass-reactive shells. He dropped his hammer to his side and swung his arm around, unleashing a thundering salvo from his gauntlet. Heavy, custom-fabricated rounds – fashioned by a machine of the Firenzii polymath – punched through Legion plate with plasmic armour-piercing warheads and used their victims’ body mass as bio-thermic fuel.
Warriors ignited like human pyres with every detonation, and Perturabo walked his fire through the Iron Hands as they rallied on their sergeants and officers. Each time Perturabo saw a ranked warrior establish control, he slew him with a lethally accurate round that punched through his centre mass and set him ablaze.
A desperate group of Iron Hands charged from the wreckage of a blazing vehicle, a kill team with meltaguns, plasma rifles and grenade belts. The carapace guns of the Iron Circle cut a handful down, who vanished in the blue fire of premature detonations. Perturabo stilled the violence of the battle robots with a thought and let the enemy come.
Fifteen hard, hungry warriors. Elites by the look of them.
He saw hate in the light of their helms, theirs and his own reflected.
Their armour was beaten and scarred. Their willingness to die was admirable.
His hammer took the first three, breaking them apart like porcelain dolls. A burst of gunfire ripped another two in half. Then they were upon him, swords cutting and high-energy pistols flashing with sun-hot brightness. The Iron Hands were a Legion of killers, men born into clashing tribes and violence; part of a warrior culture shaped by the ruined world upon which they grew to manhood.
They fought well, some even managing to land blows upon Perturabo’s armour. A plasma blast scored across his breastplate. He snapped the weapon in two and crumpled the wielder’s head with the broken barrel. A shriek of flash-burned air scorched his shoulder plate black before Forgebreaker turned the warrior to a mist of exploded body parts. His gauntlet spat death, each shot punching through its target like a fiery lance. Wherever he gestured, flames and screams followed.
The Iron Hands could not defeat him, could not even fight him, but they never faltered and did not let the absolute impossibility of the task distract them from its execution. Perturabo admired them for such single-minded devotion even as he killed them without mercy.
The last warrior dropped, his upper half a pulped mess while his lower half twitched at Perturabo’s feet. Even without looking up, it was abundantly clear that the battle for the embarkation deck was over. Forrix and Kroeger hounded the Iron Hands as the sounds of gunfire slackened. The last of the defenders were either dead or had fallen back behind metres-thick blast shutters that would take breaching charges to penetrate. The crew would be manning pre-prepared choke points throughout the ship, bottlenecks and killing grounds where their lack of numbers would not be a disadvantage.
The Emperor’s Children cavorted without honour among the fallen, looting the corpses and making sport of their burned and violated flesh. Valuable time was being wasted, and time was of the essence in any boarding action. The success or failure of such an assault depended on preventing the enemy from regrouping or rallying behind surviving commanders. Keeping the initiative in any fight was key to victory, and never more so than during the desperate struggle to wrest a starship from its crew.
Yet Perturabo hesitated to push the attack.
He took a moment to study the troops by which this victory had been won, a monstrous host of unnatural forms and nightmarish appearances.
A few dozen of the living creatures wandered as though lost, while the corpses of the dead lay strewn around the deck. Perturabo knew them for what they were: the terata wrought from the harvested gene-seed of Isstvan’s dead by Fulgrim’s flesh-alchemist. Perturabo’s heart hardened as he saw squad markings and Legion tattoos that surgery or cellular manipulation had not obscured. Those of the Iron Hands were in the majority, but there were Salamanders and Raven Guard aplenty too.
It sat ill with Perturabo that his brother’s Legion chose to violate the genetic structure of the Space Marines, even enemy ones, for once such a technology was unleashed, it would be impossible to contain. What other boundaries might such a man flout if given free rein with the Emperor’s genetic knowledge?
Nor had these disgusti
ng abominations been drawn only from the Legions still loyal to the Emperor. Here and there, Perturabo saw markings belonging to the Legions of Angron, Mortarion, Alpharius, Lorgar and even one of the Sons of Horus. He had known Fabius had plundered the dead of their enemies, but to know that no treachery was beyond him was a sobering thought.
If Fulgrim cared so little for the warriors of his brothers in rebellion, to what deeper betrayals might he yet sink?
Escorted by a capering, gibbering honour guard of drooling terata and Marius Vairosean’s Kakophoni, Fabius made his way through the corridors of the Sisypheum with single-minded haste. A maintenance postern left unsealed for a moment too long had granted them access to the guts of the ship and the mutant strength of his terata had broken them into its working heart.
The four creatures with him were the very best of his work, ones whose genetic structure had required the smallest amount of surgical modification. Superficially they still resembled Space Marines, albeit hideously bloated and overgrown, with whatever loose plates of armour he had been able to scavenge strapped to their bodies.
Yes, these were his greatest creations, but even these terata were consuming themselves.
Biological furnaces raged within them, voraciously devouring nutrient matter to sustain the physiological changes wrought upon their flesh. The chemical gruel they were fed should have been enough to keep them from immolating under the demands of their flesh, but too many had collapsed and died under the stresses of combat – enough to convince Fabius that something was very wrong with his underlying gene-coding.
Was it possible the data Alpharius had stolen from the Raven Guard had been flawed?
Unlikely, for none among the Alpha Legion had the necessary expertise to insert such a corrupting agent without his being able to detect it. No, the flaw was one of his own making, and the thrill of rooting it out was as potent as the frustration of its occurrence.
The sounds of battle echoed strangely through the corridors. They grew and receded as the defenders fought tooth and nail to hold onto their ship, not knowing it was already lost.
‘Where are we going?’ demanded Vairosean, his voice mangled by his raw screeching and distended jaws. The former captain of the Third Company was one of Fabius’s more successful surgeries, the bone structure of his skull augmented and reshaped to better allow his selected mutations to function. His unexpected pairing with the experimental instruments designed by Bequa Kynska had proved to be wholly beneficial.
‘The apothecarion,’ said Fabius.
‘Why?’ gurgled Vairosean.
‘Because there is something there I desire.’
‘What?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Fabius, irritated at being questioned.
‘You don’t know?’ growled Vairosean, and his axe-like weapon matched his ire.
Vairosean was still considered to be a captain of the Legion, and commanded respect. The way the Legion was fracturing, that wouldn’t last much longer, but while it did, even Fabius was bound by the chains of command.
‘There is a power source there, an ancient machine whose function resonates in frequencies I have never encountered. I do not know what it is, so I want it. You will help me get it.’
Vairosean grunted something unintelligible in reply and the three Kakophoni at his back loosed a grating bark of squalling noise. The low static burr of their weapons set Fabius’s teeth on edge, and their constant howling was only contained by the razor gags they wore. Those could be disengaged with a command from Vairosean, and the screaming killers would shred the faces of anything in their path with their sonic thunder.
Fabius put the Kakophoni from his mind as they penetrated deeper into the enemy ship via a circuitous route. They had not reached this far without cost, but the fury of his terata and the shockwave power of Vairosean’s warriors had swept aside the pockets of resistance they had encountered along the way.
The bare ironwork of the Iron Hands ship was drab and gloomy, quite without the splendour of the Andronicus. Though Fabius eschewed the gaudy theatrical vigour of his brother warriors, his labyrinthine domain was drenched in sensation of an altogether different kind. It was hard to remember a time when the fleets of the 28th Expedition had looked like this. A lifetime or more ago, thought Fabius.
One of the terata looked down at him, its mashed and spread features like that of a bloated gigantism sufferer. Its eyes were red with haemorrhaging and bulging with chemical reactions. Saliva drooled from between its swollen jaws and its breath was hot and animal.
‘What funny?’ it asked.
‘Nothing,’ said Fabius. ‘Don’t speak to me again.’
‘They speak?’ said Vairosean. ‘I hadn’t thought any of them retained the intellect.’
‘Some do,’ said Fabius, unwilling to admit that the loss of intellect was one of many problems to be rectified in the next batch.
Vairosean said, ‘You’re a long way from the next level of post-human evolution, Apothecary. These are a backward step to humanity’s primate history.’
‘I can’t produce the next great leap forwards in evolution without cost,’ said Fabius, his finger tightening on the haft of his medicae needle gun. ‘Every living thing is linked and part of a great chain that stretches back and forwards in time. Millennia from now there will be life-forms that look at us with a kind of horror that we were so unevolved.’
‘Speak for yourself, Apothecary,’ grunted Vairosean.
Fabius wanted to kill Vairosean, success or not, but before he could act on that sudden impulse, the terata’s heavy head snapped up and its enlarged nostrils twitched as it sifted a cocktail of scents.
Fabius caught them a second later: lapping powder, gun oil and expended munitions, and the cold, caustic stink of an apothecarion.
A rabble of Iron Hands appeared at the end of the corridor, weapons drawn. Fabius wasn’t worried; he’d known they wouldn’t make it all the way without running into some opposition.
‘Kill them,’ he said.
And the terata sprang to obey him.
‘Thamatica!’ shouted Cadmus Tyro. ‘For Medusa’s sake, answer me!’
He threw down the vox-horn and made fists on the edge of the command lectern. The few systems available to him all told the same dispiriting story of defeat and failure. The embarkation deck was lost and the enemy would be through the blast doors in a matter of minutes. And once that happened, the ship was lost.
Tyro refused to accept that.
‘Wayland,’ he said. ‘Tell me you have some power.’
‘A little,’ said Sabik Wayland, moving between the various bridge stations as reports flooded into each of them. ‘I’ve diverted most of that to the weapons.’
Tyro nodded; he’d felt the vibrations through the Sisypheum’s super-structure.
‘We’re hurting them?’
‘Some, but not enough.’
‘So why are they not firing on us?’
‘I don’t know for sure, Cadmus,’ said Wayland. ‘Maybe because there is a primarch aboard. Whatever the reason, be thankful for that small mercy.’
Tyro knew he should be thankful that the Andronicus wasn’t shooting at them, but it felt like an insult that they were being boarded, a spiteful knife in the guts that smacked of arrogance and a disregard for the abilities of those aboard.
‘Any word from Cybus?’
‘No,’ said Wayland. ‘Not since Perturabo teleported onto the embarkation deck.’
Tyro felt his flesh crawl at the idea of being boarded by so terrible a foe. In any war scenario, having one of the Emperor’s demigod sons take to the field immediately shortened the odds, and he was finding how bitter it tasted to be on the opposite side.
‘Then he’s dead,’ said Tyro.
‘Is the ship lost?’ asked Varuchi Vohra. ‘Will the enemy take us alive?’
Tyro looked into Vohra’s face. Though his words were spoken calmly, Tyro saw naked terror lurking behind the guide’s eyes. He feared being ta
ken by the enemy, which was entirely reasonable, but he saw something else, a fear that had nothing to do with whatever fate the Emperor’s Children or Iron Warriors might have in store for him.
Garuda flapped down from the rafters and landed on the engine control station. The bird let out a warbling caw, and danced its claws over the metal edging. A chatter of binary jabbed at the base of his neck like an insistent tapping, and he bent over the console to see what had attracted the bird’s notice.
A cascade of information scrolled across the slate, the specific substance of which was beyond Tyro’s expertise. He understood the gist of it, however, and his anger at Thamatica’s dabbling soared to new heights.
‘Wayland!’ he called. ‘Is Thamatica up to what I think he’s up to?’
The Iron Father scanned the data, his cognitive augmetics parsing the data into manageable chunks of digestible information. From the look on his face, it was clear that Thamatica was doing exactly what Tyro thought he was doing.
‘He’s not venting the excess energy any more,’ said Wayland. ‘He’s drawing it all into the engine core. They’ll go critical in under four minutes.’
‘Can you stop him?’
‘Not from here, captain,’ said Wayland.
‘Then get down there,’ ordered Tyro. ‘Get down there and stop him.’
He saw the hesitation in Wayland’s eyes and said, ‘Did you hear me?’
‘I heard you, captain,’ said Wayland.
‘Then why aren’t you en route to the enginarium?’
‘Because I think this might be the only option left to us.’
‘Destroying the ship?’ snapped Tyro. ‘Never. While we still have breath and bolters, we’ll fight these bastards to the end. Ulrach Branthan entrusted the command of his ship to me and the Land of Shadows will be noonday bright before I let Thamatica blow it up.’
Wayland rushed over to the captain’s station.