Angel Exterminatus

Absolute and unrelenting, remorseless and unforgiving.

  ‘We can’t give the Iron Hands an honourable death,’ said Perturabo, ‘but I’ll take payment for their deaths from Fulgrim.’

  Forrix nodded and said, ‘Falk, teleport homers engaged. Get us out of here.’

  Atesh Tarsa struggled against the chemical poison keeping his limbs immobile, but it was like struggling against an implacable tide of webgun solution. The traitor Apothecary regarded him curiously, as though they were old friends who had recently been reconciled after a period of estrangement.

  ‘The device on the dead warrior’s chest,’ he said, his voice the hiss of parched dust in the desert. ‘It is old technology from the times before, is it not?’

  Tarsa shook his head. ‘It is of no use to you. It is keyed to Captain Branthan’s genome.’

  Fabius grinned and wagged a scolding finger before his face.

  ‘You Salamanders make such terrible liars,’ said Fabius, running a cracked and grimy fingernail along the line of Tarsa’s jawline, over his cheek to his eyes. ‘I blame Vulkan.’

  ‘Don’t you dare say his name,’ spat Tarsa.

  ‘Why not? Is there some tradition of Nocturne not to speak ill of the dead?’

  ‘Vulkan lives,’ said Tarsa, repeating the words like a mantra. ‘Vulkan lives. Vulkan lives!’

  Fabius laughed. ‘Such conviction for one so ignorant of the truth.’

  Tarsa gritted his teeth as he felt a painful, awakening sensation in his extremities. His fingertips twitched.

  ‘Kill him, Fabius,’ said the howl-faced warrior. ‘Take what you want and let us leave.’

  ‘In time,’ said Fabius, and Tarsa’s nerve endings danced painfully within his flesh. He was able to control the involuntary motions with an effort of will. He pulled his fingers into a fist.

  The arachnid machine on the traitor Apothecary’s back hauled Tarsa to his feet, propping him up against the stasis casket. Fabius stared through the glass with a ferocious desire, his hooded eyes alight at the prospect of plundering the Heart of Iron from Branthan’s body.

  ‘The things I will do with this device…’ he said hungrily.

  ‘You’ll kill him,’ managed Tarsa through gritted teeth.

  ‘And you think I–’

  Tarsa swung his arm in a perfect right cross and smashed his fist into Fabius’s face. Teeth broke and blood sprayed from the traitor Apothecary’s jaw as he reeled from the blow. The mechanised arachnid released Tarsa and he slumped to his haunches. He tried to push himself to his feet, but the blow had taken everything he had.

  Fabius stood above him, the lower half of his face a mask of red, his black eyes furious.

  ‘You will suffer for that,’ he said. ‘You will beg for death over the years I can keep you alive to endure my tortures.’

  Tarsa looked up and the ghost of a smile touched his lips.

  ‘Why do you smile?’ demanded Fabius.

  ‘Brother Sharrowkyn,’ said Tarsa. ‘Is there something wrong with the floor?’

  Fabius turned to see the Raven Guard drop from the tangle of cables and pipework on the ceiling. Two black-bladed swords plunged into Fabius’s chest, and oily black gore squirted from the wounds. The Apothecary fell back, his rictus features twisted in open-mouthed horror. Sharrowkyn wrenched the swords out and pivoted on his heel to hurl one of his blades. It spun in the air and punched through the helm of one of the Emperor’s Children, who dropped with a strangled shriek of dissonant sound that echoed painfully in Tarsa’s skull.

  Before Sharrowkyn could finish Fabius, the last of the monsters threw itself at him. The Raven Guard flipped up and over Ulrach Branthan’s casket, landing by the far wall with his slender-bladed gladius held high at his right shoulder. The creature smashed into the wall of the apothecarion, its body swelling before his eyes and crimson veins standing out on its muscles like hydraulic feeds on the verge of rupturing from the pressure. Whatever biological processes were at work within the beast, they were driving it into paroxysms of rage and strength. Blackened claws erupted from its fused hands and rippling bone spikes exploded along the length of its spine as hissing drool spilled from its elongating, crocodilian jaw.

  ‘Right now would be good, brother,’ said Sharrowkyn, though Tarsa had no idea to whom he was talking.

  The gene-maddened beast charged at the Raven Guard with a bellow of hatred.

  Sharrowkyn threw himself to the side.

  And the wall of the apothecarion exploded outwards in a cascade of sparking metal, snapped cabling, ribbed supports and coffered panels. A towering construction of bare steel and black-streaked warplate smashed through with powerful mechanised strides and pounding arms. A rotating fist of crackling energy and hyper-dense fibre-bundle muscles took hold of the brutish Space Marine mutant and slammed its head against the wall.

  Incredibly, the beast’s skull remained intact. It reeled from the blow and attempted to focus on the thing that had somehow managed to hurt it.

  Brother Bombastus, the Iron Thunder of Medusa, shrugged himself clear of debris and cable runs from the interior of the wall spaces. Too large to enter the apothecarion by any conventional means, Bombastus had made an unconventional entrance.

  Still bloating with rampant self-consumption, the mutant reared up on legs that cracked and swelled as they realigned themselves to some new and unfathomable genetic instruction. Its elongating arms slammed into Bombastus, its slavering jaw crunching down on his skull-stamped sarcophagus. Acid-drooling fangs tore deep gouges in his bare metal plates, and diamond-hard claws tore into his armour like plasma cutters on a Techmarine’s servo-harness.

  Bombastus took hold of the creature’s thickening neck and smashed the upper arc of his iron casket into its face. Bones shattered and fangs snapped as the entire front half of the creature’s skull became instantly concave. Just for good measure, the storm bolter slung beneath Bombastus’s fist roared. A mushrooming fountain of blood and brain matter sprayed the ceiling as the explosive shells detonated within the monster’s brain cavity.

  The creature flopped like a rag doll in the Dreadnought’s grip, and its shredded remains were dropped to the floor with a harsh grate of distaste.

  ‘Apothecary Tarsa,’ boomed Bombastus. ‘You called for help.’

  Tarsa almost laughed in relief as Sharrowkyn attended to him. His body still felt weak, but at least he had command of it again.

  ‘That I did, Brother Bombastus,’ he said, struggling to his feet and enclosing one fist in the palm of his hand. ‘Your assistance is most welcome.’

  Tarsa looked around for the Emperor’s Children who had come so close to killing him and disrupting Captain Branthan’s stasis casket. They had fled at the sight of Bombastus, and Tarsa couldn’t say he blamed them.

  ‘Are you all right?’ asked Sharrowkyn.

  ‘I am fine, or at least I will be soon enough,’ said Tarsa.

  Sharrowkyn nodded and moved off to check on the two fallen Morlocks. Tarsa took a moment to collect himself as Bombastus leaned over to look down into Ulrach Branthan’s casket. The captain’s immobile face stared up, unmoving and frozen in mid-sentence.

  ‘I offered to give him this body of iron and steel,’ said Bombastus.

  ‘And he refused,’ said Tarsa. ‘He would not take what is not his.’

  ‘It is not right that I exist and he does not.’

  Tarsa gestured to the rapidly decomposing corpse of the last mutant beast. ‘Right now, I am very glad that it is you that walks among us, Brother Bombastus.’

  ‘You are Salamander,’ said Bombastus. ‘You do not understand. Flesh is inherently flawed, and his will not long endure this drawn-out death. I have lived long enough in this iron shell, and it would better for a Captain of Battle to be abroad than a simple warrior.’

  ‘You are wrong,’ said Tarsa.

  ‘You presume too much familiarity,’ said Bombastus. ‘You do not know me, and I would die a thousand times over if it gave my captain life again.
’

  Tarsa had no answer for the Dreadnought, and left him to his melancholy. He helped Sharrowkyn lift Septus Thoic onto a listing examination gurney. The Morlock’s armour was torn and bent out of shape, but he had survived the beating he’d taken. Both his arms were bent at angles that suggested multiple dislocations.

  Ignatius Numen pulled himself to his feet, wearing a dazed expression that told Tarsa he was clearly concussed from the sonic barrage that had felled him.

  ‘Are you all right?’ he asked as Numen retrieved his weapons.

  Numen did not respond, and Tarsa reached out to place a hand on the Morlock’s arm.

  ‘Brother Numen?’

  ‘Are you speaking?’ asked Numen, his words coming too loud.

  ‘Yes,’ said Tarsa. ‘Can you hear me?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I said, can you hear me?’

  Numen shook his head. ‘I can’t hear you. You’ll have to shout.’

  Tarsa looked at the dried blood and tissue on Numen’s cheeks and knew that whatever rudimentary hearing had been left to him after the plasma blast on Isstvan was now gone.

  The Morlock was completely deaf.

  Wayland watched the power levels rising in the engine cores and felt the iron fingers of his left gauntlet twitching. He wasn’t afraid, as such; it had long been his secret belief that they would all die out here in the northern marches, unremembered and alone, at best a footnote in the future histories of this war. What concerned him was the fact that they might be about to die by the reckless actions of an Iron Father many had considered unfit for the position, a dangerous rogue element in the Legion machinery.

  Thamatica was brilliant, no question of that, but the nature of his brilliance was that he learned more from his failures than he did from his successes.

  Wayland hoped the Sisypheum wouldn’t be the last of Thamatica’s failures.

  Blazing circuits of light flared around Forrix as the last of the teleportation energies dissipated into the damping coils encircling the chamber. Superconducting conduits bled the power required for teleportation into the energy soakaways, and a klaxon brayed in time with the pulsing bleed-off. Moments later, the teleport disc, a skull-etched podium of electrically-scoured iron plates, was thronged with armoured figures. Forrix felt the nauseous, stomach-punch dislocation of teleport and clamped down on the familiar sickness.

  ‘You don’t like teleporting, do you?’ said Kroeger.

  Forrix shook his head. ‘No. Being broken up like that, it’s like dying each time.’

  Kroeger nodded as though he understood, and they stepped down from the podium as the warriors of the Iron Circle buzzed and clicked inside their armoured chassis. Their onboard systems would take a moment to realign after the translation. Perturabo strode from the disc and made his way from the chamber through an irising doorway as the energy coils dropped into the floor.

  Kroeger and Forrix followed the Lord of Iron, feeling imminent violence in his silence as they made their way back to the bridge. Falk was at the command station, a hololith floating in the air before him that displayed readings from the Iron Hands ship and its unmistakable reactor overload.

  ‘How long?’ asked Perturabo.

  ‘Less than a minute,’ said Falk.

  Beyond the shimmering graphic, the main viewscreen showed the snub-nosed bullet of the enemy ship as it wallowed in space like the carcass of a brain-dead void whale.

  ‘Their manoeuvring jets are firing,’ said Forrix, noticing tiny corrective flares of thrust along the length of the ship. ‘They’ve some power back.’

  ‘Not enough,’ said Falk. ‘This is just a last desperate attempt to put themselves as close to us as possible before their engines explode.’

  ‘You’re moving us clear?’ asked Kroeger.

  ‘Of course,’ snapped Falk, staring at a portion of the wall behind Kroeger, as though seeing something in the faded paintwork of the bulkhead. ‘I had to wait until your return, but yes, we’re moving away.’

  ‘Will we be in the blast radius when that thing goes up?’ asked Forrix.

  Falk switched the floating graphic to one of concentric spheres of effect. The Iron Hands ship sat at the centre, with the Andronicus and the Iron Blood within the first impact ring.

  ‘Very much so,’ said Falk. ‘We’ll move away, but we’ll still likely take a beating.’

  Perturabo held up a hand, his head cocked to one side as he studied the readings flaring from the hull and reactors of the enemy ship. He flicked between the energy emission readouts and the slowly rotating form of the Iron Hands vessel.

  Forrix would relive this moment a hundred times or more in an attempt to interpret Perturabo’s expression. The corner of the primarch’s mouth twitched, as though in amusement, yet his eyes never lost their cold, calculating ice. His body language was tense, his battle-choler still to the fore, but with a sanguinity that took the edge from his raw aggression. The primarch was a mass of contradictions, but never more than at this moment.

  ‘Hold here,’ said Perturabo.

  ‘My lord?’ said Falk. ‘We’re still in the primary blast zone. An explosion at this range would do us some real damage.’

  ‘I said hold, Barban Falk, or do I need to repeat my orders to you every time?’

  ‘No, my lord,’ said Falk, swiftly cutting power to the engines and holding them in place. Forrix felt a growing apprehension, but he had no fear that Perturabo did not know what he was doing.

  ‘Armaments has a firing solution, my lord,’ said Kroeger.

  ‘Do not shoot,’ said Perturabo, moving to the front of the command deck and standing before the viewscreen. ‘I said that Fulgrim’s Legion would pay for the deaths we suffered. This is that payment.’

  The engineering deck was as close an approximation of the ancients’ idea of hell as could be imagined. A sweltering nightmare of scalding steam, superheated gases escaping from splitting conduits and glaring red light. The bodies of the dead lay strewn around the cavernous space, servitors whose innards had boiled and enginseers whose exo-armour had been breached by the crushing radiation bleeds and sudden thermal spikes.

  Shadows moved in the sepulchral red gloom, monstrous beings with multiple arms and claws; the lords of this abode of the damned. Yet these were no daemons, but Iron Hands, the masters of this vessel and the very souls trying to save it.

  Thamatica wrestled with multiple system outputs at once, letting the cognitive architecture scaffolded onto his brain by the Martian priests balance the woven threads of data at a speed beyond that which even the most gifted mortal could manage. To say that what he attempted was a delicate procedure was to say that advanced bio-augmetic neuro-surgery would be somewhat challenging to a feral world savage. The reactor loads were a hair’s breadth from breaching their containment fields and turning the ship into an expanding cloud of radioactive dust.

  The way Thamatica looked at it, if he were able to wrangle the colossal energies correctly then they might have a way out of this mess. If he couldn’t, then they might at least do some damage to their attackers. The Emperor’s Children vessel was pulling back from them, a swarm of firefly-bright traceries describing the arcs of escaping Stormbirds and recalled boarding torpedoes on magnetic tethers.

  Curiously, the Iron Warriors vessel was no longer in retreat.

  Did its captain suspect what he planned?

  Perturabo was aboard the Iron Blood, so it was entirely possible.

  But why hadn’t he told the Emperor’s Children?

  Freeing his mind from thoughts of the past, Perturabo watched the gently rolling form of the Sisypheum with profound admiration for its crew. The Iron Blood’s data engines had finally identified the Iron Hands vessel, its up-armoured and heavily modified silhouette causing the pattern matching and energy signature algorithms numerous recognition errors along the way. Such were the differences in its structure and emissions that several iterations had even quantified it as a warship of the greenskins.

/>   Perturabo had recognised the vessel long before, its underlying structure clear to him beneath the upgrades, modifications and patch repairs effected by its crew. The Iron Hands ship was an ugly thing now, a prison shank compared to the gladiator’s blade of the Andronicus. But a blade was a blade, and even the crudest could still kill.

  And the crew of the Sisypheum had murder in mind.

  A too-bright halo of nuclear reactions pulsed from its over-burdened engines. A tsunami of electromagnetic radiation bloomed from the Sisypheum to engulf the Iron Blood and Andronicus. Dozens of consoles blew out in a barrage of sparks and flame as unshielded systems fused and overloaded.

  ‘Bones of Lochos!’ Falk swore as his command console erupted in flames.

  ‘Kroeger, do you still have a firing solution?’ demanded Forrix.

  ‘Not a chance, weapon auspex is blind.’

  ‘Get it back,’ ordered Forrix.

  ‘Give me a minute,’ snapped Kroeger, struggling with the few fire control systems that remained intact.

  ‘We don’t have a minute!’ snarled Forrix, pushing Kroeger out of the way. The panel was a blackened mess, but enough systems remained active to launch an unguided spread of torpedoes and a mesh pattern barrage.

  ‘Do nothing,’ said Perturabo.

  ‘But–’

  ‘I said do nothing!’ shouted Perturabo, but by then it was too late to do anything anyway.

  A searing fireball of incandescent energy exploded from the Sisypheum’s engines like the tail of a comet approaching too close to a super-dense star. The vessel shot forwards like a missile fired from a shoulder launcher, accelerating from a virtual standstill to escape velocity in the blink of an eye.

  The Sisypheum closed the distance to the Andronicus in a streak of laser brilliance and lanced into its flanks at a point just behind the beauteous vessel’s plough-shaped bow. Gilded and ornamented as it was, the Andronicus was still a fighting vessel of the Legiones Astartes, and was armoured to withstand missiles, torpedoes and explosive ordnance.

  Against the speed, mass and prow weapons of the Sisypheum, it had no chance.

  The hull of the Emperor’s Children vessel crumpled in the face of the tapered missile of the Iron Hands ship, the impact a punching thrust through its guts that sent billowing scads of ignited oxygen blossoming into space. The blazing wake of the Iron Hands ship ignited the atmosphere within the Andronicus and sheared the prow from its body as keenly as a guillotine. The bow spun away on a spiralling wake of burning oxygen, and armoured plates along the entire front half of the vessel buckled and warped as internal explosions cascaded along its length. Fire spurted from ruptures in the hull and beams of brilliant light speared from compartment breaches as the cataclysmic damage burned the Emperor’s Children vessel from the inside.