‘Imperator, that hurts...’ grunted Coyne as Abrehem hauled him upright. Blood soaked Abrehem’s hands as he and Coyne staggered down the length of the mega-dozer. More whickering gunfire and ricochets chased them, but amazingly none of it touched them. Abrehem looked back over his shoulder.
‘Crusha! Come on!’ he shouted, seeing the ogryn wasn’t fleeing with them.
‘Crusha fight!’ bellowed the ogryn, beating a meaty fist against its swelling chest. ‘Crusha kill Emperor’s enemies!’
Abrehem paused, reluctant to simply abandon the creature.
‘What are you doing?’ gasped Coyne. ‘Let’s go!’
‘Come on, you bloody idiot!’ shouted Hawke from the shadow of a blast shutter that had miraculously not sealed the deck off, leaving them a way out. Scattered groups of bondsmen were also running for the opening, ducking between heavy machinery and lifter gear to escape the slaughter. The shutter rattled in its frame, the mechanism trying to close, but for some reason unable to descend. It could drop at any moment, trapping him in the middle of a firefight, and Abrehem knew he didn’t have a choice but to keep going.
Blasts of weapons fire filled the space behind him. Abrehem didn’t dare look back and kept going, dragging Coyne’s increasingly limp body beside him.
‘Come on, for the Emperor’s sake!’ he yelled. ‘Help me out, Coyne! Stay awake and use those bloody legs of yours!’
Coyne’s eyes flickered open and he nodded, but blood loss and shock was turning him into a dead weight at Abrehem’s side.
‘Help me!’ he yelled at his fellow bondsmen. They ignored him, but then – seeing who was shouting – a few turned to help take Coyne’s weight. They grabbed his legs and his other arm, dragging him into the safety of the arched passageway beyond the blast shutter. Abrehem looked for Hawke, seeing him still frantically searching through the gunny sack.
Abrehem heard a roar of anger and pressed himself against the bulkhead of the juddering doorway. He glanced up to see the blast shutter cranking down a few centimetres at a time, as though fighting some unseen force that was keeping it open.
‘Abe, can you get that damn door shut?’ shouted Hawke.
Abrehem took a breath and sought out the door lock, but recoiled from the violence in the mechanism, a blood-red haze of data occluding it from any attempt he might make to interfere with its workings.
‘I can’t,’ he shouted back. ‘It’s jammed or something.’
‘Figures,’ said Hawke. ‘Aha! Here it is.’
Abrehem turned away from Hawke and looked back the way they had come.
Back at the mega-dozer, he saw Crusha surrounded by the eldar warriors. They filled the air with lethally sharp discs, tearing chunks of bloodied meat from the ogryn’s body, dancing away from his ponderous fists with impunity. They moved with inhuman speed, darting in to slash at Crusha with delicate blades that looked far too thin to be combat-capable, but which sliced through the ogryn’s thick skin with energised ease. They were like mutant dockside rats attacking a drunk stevedore, too small to bring down their prey alone, but working together...
One eldar moved a fraction too slow and caught a clubbing blow to its helm that staggered it. Even as it righted itself, Crusha gripped the warrior’s armoured tunic and slammed him into the mega-dozer, breaking every bone in his flimsy body.
The bloodied ogryn roared in triumph and hurled the body into the mass of his attackers. Most spun away from the corpse missile, but a handful were knocked flat by the impact. Crusha was on them a second later, stamping one to paste and breaking another’s neck before the rest could rise. Its fist swung out and caught an eldar warrior who’d dared approach too close to put its gun to the ogryn’s neck. The alien was hurled ten metres through the air, landing in a crumpled heap that told Abrehem his spine was a concertinaed mess of shattered bone.
The other eldar backed away from Crusha, now realising it had been arrogant to get close to so powerful an opponent. Abrehem waited for them to open fire, but the volley of razor discs never came. A second later he saw why.
A blurred shape, like a figure moving too fast to be seen with the naked eye, rounded the edge of the mega-dozer. Abrehem’s enhanced optics made out the contoured outline of a shimmering ghost, a graceful form of lithe perfection that carried a long sword with a blade of palest white. Armoured in azure plates and with a plumed helm crested in red and gold, the sublime warrior flickered in and out of view as its image was splintered and thrown out around it in a haze of mirrored light.
The figure spun and danced around Crusha in a series of stepped images, each moment where Abrehem was able to perceive the figure like a snapshot of motion caught in a strobe light.
And then it was over.
The dance was ended and Crusha was on his knees, blood gushing from a series of lethal cuts that had opened every major artery in his body. He looked suddenly small, like an idiot child brought low by scholam bullies. The sublime warrior made one last spinning leap and Crusha’s head flew from his shoulders, severed cleanly by a single, perfectly balanced strike.
The warrior looked up from his killing, and Abrehem felt its distaste at the act. Not at the killing itself, but that it had been forced to wet its blade in the blood of so a crude an opponent. He met the cold, warlike stare of the warrior and felt the icy calm of its perfectly distilled martial skill. This was a warrior who embodied death in its purest form.
The contact was broken, and the eldar warrior’s form blurred into shimmering silver light as he ran towards the stubbornly open shutter.
‘Oh, crap,’ said Abrehem. ‘We need to go. Right bloody now!’
Kul Gilad’s gauntlet slammed into the flaming daemon, and he felt the heat of its molten body through the heavy plates and crackling energies of his fist. Iron buckled and dribbling spurts of blazing ichor oozed from the cracks like light-filled blood. The avatar roared and brought its blazing spear around in a crushing arc. Encased in Terminator armour, Kul Gilad was too ponderous to evade, and he leaned in to the blow, taking it on the curved plates of his shoulder guard.
White heat of the hottest furnace imaginable cut through ceramite and the Reclusiarch bit back a cry of agony as he felt the skin beneath char to blackened ruin. He stepped away from the daemon and unleashed a stream of explosive mass-reactives at point-blank range. Most ignited before they impacted on the creature, their warheads flashing with premature detonation in the intense heat that surrounded the monster. A few shells penetrated the brazen plates of its body, but the furnace of its interior destroyed them before they could explode.
Tanna’s shouting voice echoed in his helmet, but he had not the breath or time to answer the frantic cries of his sergeant.
The daemon creature towered over him, and Kul Gilad felt his own anger rise to match the star-hot gaze of burning, eternal fury that blazed in its alien eyes. A storm raged around him, a swirling hurricane of light and unnatural energies that spat and bit with searing discharges. The vast plates of his armour were proof against that lightning, but the bridge crew were not so fortunate.
He could hear them dying around him, flensed to the bone by the witch woman’s lightning storm or slaughtered like livestock by the green-armoured warriors. He’d seen none of them fall, but their sudden silence was proof enough that they were all dead. The eldar witch was at the heart of the storm, her slender body englobed by a radiant halo of power.
Her bound daemon came at him again, quicker than anything of such bulk and monstrous fire should be able to move. The weapon it carried danced in the heat haze surrounding it, sometimes appearing to be a vast sword, sometimes a great war-axe or a screaming spear. Kul Gilad batted the weapon aside with his power fist and stepped in to deliver a thunderous hammerblow to the creature’s midriff.
‘All-conquering Master of Mankind, be pleased with this war’s tumultuous roar!’ he sang, his voice booming from the vox-grille of his helm. His fist broke an armoured plate, and magma-hot gouts of its inner fire poured over his
fist. Kul Gilad ignored the searing pain and drew back his fist to strike again.
A flash of red and a burning pain in his gut told him he’d been hit. The bridge spun away from him and he felt himself leave the deck. He slammed into a support stanchion, feeling it buckle with the force of impact. Bones broke inside him, and his body surged in heat as its self-repair biology went into overdrive.
He fell, slamming into the deck with force enough to dent the plates.
‘Reclusiarch!’ said Tanna, and this time Kul Gilad paid heed, knowing it would be his last chance to speak to his warriors.
‘Sergeant,’ he hissed through blood-flecked spittle. ‘Get to the Speranza. Go now and never look back.’
‘What is happening up there?’ demanded Tanna urgently. ‘We’re disembarking from the Barisan and coming to you.’
‘No,’ said Kul Gilad. ‘Get to the Speranza. Now. This is my last order and you will obey it.’
‘Reclusiarch, no!’
‘Until the end, brother,’ said Kul Gilad softly before severing the vox-link.
Smoke billowed around him and he pushed himself to his feet, lifting his gauntlet-mounted storm bolter and loosing another burst of shots. The daemon stood over him, and this time his shots appeared to wreak some harm. It reeled from the force of his barrage and threw up a red-gold arm that bled light into the air and smoked with sulphurous yellow fumes. Kul Gilad’s visor scrolled with danger indicators.
‘Delight in swords and fists red with alien blood, and the dire ruin of savage battle,’ he said, drawing himself up to his full height.
The storm of light was gone, and he saw the red ruin of the bridge crew.
Captain Remar lay on his back, his body scorched with numerous electrical burns and a canyon of flesh opened up in his body from neck to pelvis. His sword was bloody, and at least one eldar warrior had fallen to his blade before they had killed him. The captain’s uniform caught light as the daemon crushed him beneath its blazing tread, and the deck plates were scorched black by its every footstep. The meat stink of burned human flesh waxed strong.
‘Rejoice in furious challenge, and avenging strife, whose works with woe embitter human life,’ roared Kul Gilad, hurling himself at the monstrous god of war. Storm bolter blazing with the last of his ammunition, this was the moment he had been waiting for all his life, a last charge against impossible odds in service of the Emperor. He recalled what he had said to Mistress Tychon.
Eventually everything must die, even Space Marines.
Time compressed, the motion of his fist moving at the speed of tectonic plates, every spinning warhead ejected from his storm bolter perfectly visible to him as its rocket motor ignited. His fist struck the daemon in the centre of its chest and he unleashed every last iota of his zealous fury and righteous hate in that blow.
His fist shattered the hideously organic metal of the daemon’s armour and he felt his arm engulfed in searing, unendurable heat. The daemon’s roar of pain was a symphony to his ears, and he rejoiced that the Emperor had seen fit to grant him this last boon of death. Flames billowed around him and he felt a sickening impact on his midsection.
Kul Gilad felt himself falling, and the deck slammed into his helmeted head as he rolled onto his back. His arm was a mangled, burned ruin, a stump of fused meat, bone and metal that only superficially resembled a human limb. Black smoke and dribbling gobbets of skin ran down the sagging plates of melted armour and though he knew he should be horrified at this nightmarish injury, he felt utterly at peace.
He felt a burning pressure of heat coiling inside him, his biology shrieking in the agony of attempting to repair the damage done to him. A shadow fell across him, and Kul Gilad looked up into the face of the daemon, its fiery chest buckled and torn open, but reknitting even as he watched. The mortal wound he had struck it had been nothing of the sort and despair touched Kul Gilad at the thought of his failure.
The leering daemon towered over him, terrible in aspect and horrifying in the single-minded violence it represented. He hated it with every breath left to him. The black paint of his armour peeled back at its proximity and he struggled to rise. With the one arm left to him, he raised himself onto his elbow and saw why he couldn’t move.
He was cut in two at the waist.
His armoured legs lay across the deck from him and he lay with the looping meat coils of his packed innards slowly oozing from his scorched, bifurcated body. The daemon stood in the pool of his blood, and he tasted the chemical-rich stink of its hyper-oxygenation as it burned. It lowered its flame-wreathed weapon to touch his chest, and the tip of the blade sank into the Imperial eagle mounted there in one last insult.
Kul Gilad’s life could now be measured in breaths. Not even Space Marine physiology could survive such a traumatic wound without an Apothecary nearby. Even Brother Auiden would be stretched to the limit of his abilities to save him now, and Kul Gilad’s heart broke to know that his body would not be laid to rest within the crypts of the Eternal Crusader.
The eldar witch woman knelt beside his dying body, and he wanted to swat her away with the last of his strength, but the burning daemon held him pinned flat like a specimen on a dissection table. She reached up and removed her helmet, revealing a tapering oval face with hard eyes and a mane of red hair entwined with glittering stones and flecks of gold. Her lips were full and blue with cosmetic paint.
She reached down and unclipped his skull-masked helm from his gorget and released the pressure seals holding it to his armour. With surprising gentleness, she lifted the heavy helmet clear and placed it beside his head. Kul Gilad tasted the subtle perfumes wreathing her body, a musky odour of cave-blooming flowers and smoky temples where decadent psychotropics were consumed.
‘Strange,’ she said in a hateful musical voice. ‘You die here, and yet the futures are still unclear.’
‘You have no future,’ spat Kul Gilad. ‘This vessel is doomed and you with it.’
She fixed him with a curious stare, as though unsure of what he meant.
‘You are the war-leader, yes?’ she said.
‘I am Kul Gilad,’ he said. ‘Reclusiarch of the Black Templars, proud son of Sigismund and Dorn. I am a warrior of the Emperor and I know no fear.’
She leaned in close and whispered in his ear. ‘Know that everything you are and all you hold dear will die by my hand. I will slay your warriors and the dream of the future will live again. I will not let you kill my daughters before their birth, even if it means the extinction of the stars themselves.’
Kul Gilad had no idea what she was talking about, but let only defiance rage in his eyes.
He coughed a mouthful of bloody foam, feeling his organs shutting down one after another.
Greyness closed in on him, and he struggled to give voice to one last curse.
‘There is only the Emperor,’ whispered Kul Gilad. ‘And He is our shield and protector.’
Abrehem and the bondsmen who’d made it out of the engineering chamber ran through the tunnels in blind panic. The lumens had failed, and the only light came from the flickering emergency sigils that winked dimly in the hissing, claustrophobic gloom. Abrehem’s eyes compensated for the lack of illumination, but he was the only one with any sense of the geometry and layout of the tunnel through which they fled. It was narrow and lined with convulsing pipework that rippled like a troubled digestive system processing a particularly difficult meal. Alpha-numeric location signifiers passed by on the walls, but they were ones Abrehem hadn’t seen before. He had no idea where he was and that didn’t bode well for any hope of escape.
The creak and groan of grinding metal was stronger here as the Speranza twisted and flexed in the Halo Scar’s powerful grip. Steam vented from ruptured pipes and Abrehem felt mists of oil and hydraulic fluids squirting him as they blundered onwards. Terrified screams of fear echoed from the walls, and Abrehem tried not to imagine how close the eldar killers might be.
‘Hawke!’ shouted Abrehem. ‘Where are you?’
> If Hawke bothered to answer, his voice was lost in the tumult of barging, shouting men and women. Their flight brought them out into a vast, cylindrical chamber with gently curving walls and an enormous rotating fan blade turning slowly above them. Updraughts of hot, carbon-scented air gusted through the mesh decking below them, and Abrehem realised they were in a portion of the ship’s air scrubbers; the Speranza’s lungs. Bondsmen milled in confusion, the darkness and the scale of the space in which they now found themselves serving to rob them of any notion of which way to run. They couldn’t see the arched exit passageway on the far wall, but Abrehem could.
‘This way!’ he shouted. ‘Follow me, I can see a way out.’
Hand grabbed for him, and he led a frightened gaggle of people towards the far side of the chamber. Some held fast to his coveralls, some to the sound of his voice, but as a stumbling, shambling mass they moved with him.
‘Thank the Emperor you have your father’s eyes,’ said a voice at his shoulder.
‘Hawke?’
‘None other, Abe,’ said Hawke, one hand gripping tightly to his shoulder. ‘I don’t suppose Crusha made it out?’
Abrehem shook his head, before remembering that Hawke wouldn’t be able to see the gesture.
‘No, the eldar killed him,’ he said. ‘A swordsman took his head off.’
‘Damn, but that’d have been a sight to see,’ mused Hawke, utterly without remorse, and Abrehem felt his dislike of the man raise a notch.
‘You’ll likely get your wish, he’s the one that’s after us.’
‘Don’t worry about him, I’ll take care of that fancy bastard.’
Abrehem wanted to laugh at Hawke’s insane bravado, but he had none left in him.
His mob of terrified bondsmen reached the exit to the air scrubbing chamber and the containment shutter rattled up into its housing as they approached. Abrehem didn’t know what to make of that, seeing a cackling fizz of code vanish into the aether of the ship’s datasphere from the lock.