But Thiel can see its terminal injuries, however. A spiral of soot-brown stormcloud caps part of the sphere, and other areas look like bruises on the skin of a fruit. The atmospheric discolorations are immense. Behind the curved shadow of the daylight terminator, sections of the southern continent are suffused with a luminous orange glitter, like the hot coals at the bottom of a furnace grate.
Mag-locks in his boots keep him on the hullskin. Advancing, he extends his view. He can see across Calth nearspace with extraordinary clarity. He can see the orbitals glowing with wildfire energy as they are consumed by conflagration. He can see the closest of the planet’s natural satellites blackened and stippled with fire-spots.
Nearer at hand, there are ships. Thousands of ships. Ships on fire. Ships drifting, spilled and butchered, shredded and ruined; slow swarms of wreckage, silent clouds of glinting metal debris. Beams of energy lick and flicker through the void.
The starfield, the vast unending spread of the galaxy, looks down on it all, unengaged and unimpressed.
The starlight is cold. It is like a sharp, clear evening of tremendous luminosity. There is nothing to interrupt the cool blue-white brilliance of the Veridian sun. All shadows are hard-edged and deep. Around him, it is either painfully bright sunlight or pitch black shadow.
All legionaries are trained for hard-void and zero gravity combat. This is strictly neither. The flagship supplies a limited gravity source, and a skin of thin atmosphere – the atmospheric envelope – clings to the ship’s hull, maintained by the gravitic field generators to facilitate the function of open launch hangars and docking bays.
There is, still, little sense of up or down. The landscape of the ship’s port-side opens before them like a hive’s skyline. It is a dense and complex architecture of pipes and towers, vents and arches, blocks and pylons. The scale is huge. The kill squad advances in giant bounds from one surface to the next, extending down the side of the ship as though they were acrobats moving across an urban sprawl from rooftop to rooftop.
The low gravity amplifies their strength. One firm step becomes a bound of ten metres. The practical takes a second to master, despite the hours of theoretical and drill. It is too easy to overstep, to push too hard, to fly too far. Across the wider gulfs, the ravines of the port-side cooling vents and the immense canyons of the interdeck crenellations, members of the kill squad switch to quick burns of their void-harnesses, clearing the divides of adamantium and steel chasms.
The Word Bearers cruiser Liber Colchis, a vast scarlet beast, has clamped itself to the aft port-side of the Macragge’s Honour like a blood-sucking parasite. The hullspace between the two ships is solid black, all light from the star blocked.
There are, however, lights within the blackness. Advancing with his team, Thiel resolves the spark and glow of cutting tools and clamped floodlights. Evac-ready squads of Word Bearers are surgically opening the flagship’s hull in order to attach bulk airgates and allow their storm forces to cross directly.
Kill squads Four and Eight are supposed to be arriving from other evac points to combine against this invasion, but Thiel sees no sign of them. How long should he give them? In Thiel’s opinion, the threat of boarding has remained unaddressed for far too long.
He glances at Anteros, his second in command.
He makes the signal.
They go in.
They hard-burn with their void-harnesses, following the wide canyon of a brightly lit heat exchange channel, and passing under the stark shadow of a power coupling the size of a suspension bridge. Their tiny black shadows chase them along the hull.
One half of their target group stands on the flagship’s hull itself. The other half stands on the side of a docking tower at ninety degrees to the rest. Melta-tools are being used on the hull plates. Bulk cutting heads are being extended from the open cargo hatches of the clamped cruiser. From Thiel’s orientation, the cruiser is above them, and the extended cutters are hanging down from it, biting into the flagship’s hull. Plumes of white-hot sparks are sheeting off the cutting heads into the darkness.
Thiel fires his boltgun, and the shells burn away ahead of him on trembling blow-torch tails. There is no sound. They explode the chest plate of a Word Bearer who was standing guard on a heat exchange port but looking the wrong way. His torso erupts in a ball of flame, expanding shrapnel and globules of blood. The impact convulses him, and sends him tumbling backwards, end over end. Thiel streaks past the spinning corpse, firing again. His third shot misses, gouging a silent crater in the hull. His fourth takes the face off a Word Bearer, turning him hard in a spray of flame and sparks. Blood balloons out from his ruined skull, wobbling and squirming in the near-void.
The rest of the kill squad fires. They streak across the target area like a strafing pack of Thunderbolts, and Word Bearers die as the bolter fire drums across them and punches through them. Bodies tumble and bounce. Some disintegrate, releasing clouds of blood beads that ripple like mercury. One Word Bearer is hit with such force his body flies away at great speed, dwindling as it leaves the flagship behind. Another is hit by a blast that causes his own void-harness to malfunction, and he lofts on a fork of fire, colliding brutally with the armoured hull of the cruiser above them.
Four Word Bearers die without breaking the magnetic anchor lock of their boots, and they simply remain standing on the hull, arms limp, like statues, or like bodies sunk to a seabed with their feet weighted.
The environment is full of drifting, swirling blood masses. They splash against Thiel, burst into smaller blood beads, slicking across his armour. For one second, his visor is awash and visibility is lost.
He brakes hard, jets back, makes a landing.
He clears his vision in time to see a Word Bearer bounding at him across the hull. They are both on the side of the docking tower, their ‘ground’ at ninety degrees to the level of the ship. The Word Bearer’s motion, assisted by the light gravity, seems exaggerated, almost comical. He fires his weapon. A bolt burns past Thiel. Thiel fires back. Silent, streaming shots blow the enemy’s right leg off and shred both of his shoulder guards. The impacts immediately and violently alter his course, turning his forward leap into a severe backwards tumble and spin. He cannons off a thruster mount and rebounds at a different angle.
Thiel turns. He barely avoids a power axe that slices out of the darkness. He kills the wielder with a single shot that smacks the figure backwards out of shadow into light. But there are two more. Both come at him with cutting tools: a particle torch, fizzing hot, and a power cutter. The Word Bearers bound at him, in big, slow leaps.
Thiel carries his electromagnetic longsword. He draws it from the scabbard, and puts two bolter rounds into the chest of the Word Bearer with the cutter, creating a shoal of dancing blood beads. Then he meets the torch as it flares at him.
It can slice through void hulls. It can certainly slice through him.
Thiel uses the reach and sharpness of the longsword to maximum effect. He cuts through the torch fairing, and the arm holding it. Blood spills out of the severed arm, and energy roasts out of the ruptured torch. Caught in the ball of white fire, the Word Bearer struggles backwards, thrashing, melting, incinerating. Thiel risks one hard kick to the enemy’s chest to launch him clear. Immolating, too bright to look at, the Word Bearer rotates as he falls away. The unleashed energy reaches the torch’s power cell, and ignites it. Blast-shock and light, both silent, surge up the docking tower, channelled by the hull. The fireball hits the skin of the cruiser, and ripples outwards, exhausting its fury.
Thiel is rocked back. His armour sensors white-out for a second, and he gets a burst of static and crackle.
He tries to lock down on the hull, to re-anchor.
The blast light fades. He makes a swift assessment of the combat. He’s lost two men, so far as he can see, but the Word Bearers force has been crippled. There are drifting, broken bodies all around him, surrounded by a sea of quivering, non-symmetrical blood droplets. There is still, however, no
sign of the other kill squads.
Thiel jets down to the bulk cutting heads. They are huge instruments, each one bigger than a Rhino, extended on titanic articulated servo arms from the interior of the enemy cruiser. Thiel signals to Bormarus, who is one of the men assigned to carry the mag-mines. They start to clamp them onto the first of the cutting heads. Thiel leaves Bormarus working, and jets up the servo arm to a control platform mounted halfway up. If he can retract the mechanism into the enemy ship...
Like a comet shower, mass-reactive shells blizzard down around him. Some hit the platform and the guard rail, exploding with bright flashes. The deluge of fire is immense. In what is, to him, below, half a dozen of his men die, cut down. Blue-armoured bodies start to drift alongside the red-armoured ones. All the gleaming, trembling blood beads are the same colour.
He looks ‘up’.
His kill squad’s strike has not gone unnoticed. A main force of Word Bearers are making evac from the open cargo hatches of the cruiser. They emerge firing, their own void-harnesses flaring.
Thiel and his men are outnumbered eight to one.
[mark: 12.40.22]
Oll Persson steps off the skiff onto the landing. He’s got his lasrifle.
One flick of his calloused right thumb flips off the safety and arms the gun. Oll’s not even looking at the weapon. He’s looking straight ahead, looking up the length of the landing, looking at the figures gathered there. His face is set grim. It makes the care lines harder. His frown gives him a squint as though the sun is out and it’s too bright.
He doesn’t hesitate. One pace, two, and then he’s jogging, then running, running straight up the landing, bringing the armed rifle up to his shoulder, pushing it into his cheek, taking aim as he runs.
Shot one. A knife brother, in the spine between the shoulder blades, just before he stabs the screaming Krank in the neck. Shots two and three. A knife brother, in the face, the man pinning Krank down. Shot four. A knife brother, in the lower jaw as he turns, knocking him backwards into the water. Shots five, six and seven. Two knife brothers turning with their rifles, the trio grouping punching through both of them.
Two more start firing back down the landing stage.
Shot eight. One of the shooters, wings him. Shot nine. Kills him. Shot ten. The other shooter, top of the head.
Shot eleven. Misfire. Clip’s out. He’s been shooting a lot today. Ejects, still running up the landing, drops the empty cell thump onto the decking. Slams home the fresh one.
He reaches them, he’s in amongst them. Close combat. Oll swings a block, smacks the gun stock into a face. Trench war style, like they were taught all those years ago in the mud outside... Verdun? Oh, for a bayonet! The bare gunsnout will have to do. It cracks a forehead.
A sideways stamp breaks an ankle, another stock-smash fractures a cheek. He blocks a knife-thrust with the rifle like a quarterstaff, turning it aside. He shoots again. Point blank. Through the sternum. Blood sprays out the back.
Las shots rip past him in the dark. He doesn’t flinch. Four knife brothers are scrambling over the jetty-end railings to join the fight, to get at him.
Oll turns, lasrifle at the hip, thumbs to full-auto. One burst, muzzle-flash ripping like a strobe light.
There’s a bone-crack behind him. Oll whips around. A cultist he hadn’t spotted is laid out in a spreading pool of blood. Graft has punched him with one of his hoist limbs.
‘Thank you,’ says Oll.
‘He was going to hurt you, Trooper Persson.’
At times like this, Oll wishes he could have taught the old work servitor to shoot.
At times like this...
How many times has he prayed there would never be any more times like this? The sad truth of the matter, there is only war. There’s always another war to fight. Oll knows this. He knows it better than just about anyone.
Maybe this is it. Maybe Grammaticus was right, for once. Maybe this is the end war. Maybe this will be the last fight.
Krank’s trying to get up. He’s shaken. Oll looks for Rane. He sees the boy being dragged into the shadows by something.
‘It got him, it got him!’ Krank is gabbling.
‘It’s all right,’ Oll tells him, not looking at him, just looking at Rane. ‘Grab the water. Get to the skiff. We’re going.’
The boy might be dead. Might just be passed out. A lasgun won’t do any good now. The thing that’s got him has stepped right out of the warp. Oll doesn’t know what Rane or Krank are seeing. Probably something out of an illuminated bestiary. Oll sees it for what it is. Filthy matter, fused into a humanoid shape, clothed in the trappings of a nightmare. It’s real enough, real enough to kill, but it’s not real all the same. It’s just a reflection in the energy of this world of something out in the Immaterium. Something hungry, and agitated, and impatient to get in.
Call it a daemon, if you like. Too specific a word, really, though maybe that’s all that daemons are.
Oll glances down at the bodies he has killed, the ragged warriors in black. They knew about warp-magick. Not much, but enough to tinker with it. Enough to believe they’d found the unbearable truth. Enough to form a cult, a religion. Enough to lose their minds. Like the idiot Word Bearers. Warp-stuff is pernicious. Once you touch it, it sticks. Hard to ever get it off you again.
The black knives of their brotherhood. Ritual knives. Athames. He picks one up, the nearest, and wedges the pommel of it into his rifle’s barrel. An improvised plug bayonet will do in a pinch. He managed well enough at Austerlitz.
Oll jams it in, then steps forward and rams the black blade into the thing pawing at Rane. Black light spurts in all directions. There is a stink of bad eggs and rotten meat, a cloud of smoke.
The daemon-thing screams like a woman, then dies, and the matter of it collapses into black slime. The stuff is all over Rane, and the boy is out cold. But he’s still got a pulse.
Oll looks around. The girl, Katt, is standing behind him, staring at Rane.
‘Give me a hand carrying him,’ Oll says.
She doesn’t say anything, but she takes hold of Rane’s feet. Zybes appears, fear in his eyes, and helps her with the boy.
Oll yanks what’s left of the knife out of his gun, and tosses it into the soiled water. He touches the symbol at his throat, and murmurs a thanks to his god for deliverance. Adrenaline is spiking in his old limbs. He hates the rush, the burn of it. He thought he was past that nonsense.
He turns back to the skiff. The shooting will have attracted attention, but he reckons they’ve got time to pull clear and head out into the channel.
He sees the knife brother Graft felled. A commander, an officer, the leader of the pack. A majir. Face down. Blood everywhere from that head wound. There’s a knife on the decking beside him, another athame.
But the leader’s is a good one. A crafted one. A special one to mark his authority and significance. It’s a finer thing than the crude ritual spikes the others are wielding, if something so inherently warped and evil can be said to be fine.
It may not be exactly what Oll’s looking for, but it’s the closest he’s seen yet, and he’d be a fool to leave it.
He picks it up, wraps it in a rag, and stuffs it into his thigh pouch.
Three minutes later, the skiff engine rumbles into life, and the boat edges out into the dark water, away from the landing.
Criol Fowst snaps awake. He sits up, pulling his face off the cool, damp decking. There’s blood everywhere, blood all over him. He fingers his scalp, and finds a patch of skull that hurts really badly and shouldn’t be quite so mobile.
He is sick several times.
He knows something’s been taken from him, something very special and precious, something given to him by Arune Xen. Fowst’s future depended on it. He needed it to get all the power and the control he dreamed of possessing.
Someone’s going to die for taking it.
No, worse than die.
[mark: 12.41.11]
Muffled pounding. A
s if his ears are blocked. As if everything’s foggy. Like blood thumping in his temples.
A noise. A scratchy, reedy noise. It’s a vox. The vox in his helmet. A transmission. What’s it saying?
Ventanus tries to answer. His mouth is numb, slack. He’s upside down. He can smell blood. It’s his.
What is that transmission? What is the message? So tinny, so far away, so muffled.
He struggles to hear. It starts to get louder, louder, sweeping up through the layers that muffle it, like sound coming up through water, until it becomes clear and loud and comprehensible.
‘Samus. That’s the only name you’ll hear. Samus. It means the end and the death. Samus. I am Samus. Samus is all around you. Samus is the man beside you. Samus will gnaw on your bones. Look out! Samus is here.’
‘Who’s talking? Who is this?’ Ventanus stammers. ‘Who’s on this channel? Identify yourself!’
He is lying on the ground, on his back, on a slope of rubble and chewed-up lawn. He’s in the grounds of the palace of Leptius Numinus.
He gets up. Two Ultramarines are dead nearby, one crushed, one torn in half.
Ventanus remembers. He remembers Cxir changing.
He looks around.
The daemon is huge. It’s got immensely long arms, thin and bony, and it walks on them the way a bat uses its furled wings to walk. The twin horns on its head are immense.
It is attacking the palace. It is ripping the front walls down. The collapsing sections spew out in great, dust-thick torrents of stonework and plaster.
Battle-brothers and Army are retreating ahead of it, blasting up at it with everything they have: bolters, las, plasma, hard rounds. The shots pepper and puncture the thing’s grotesque black bulk, but it doesn’t seem to feel the damage inflicted. Ventanus can hear its voice in his ear, gabbling over the vox.
‘Samus. It means the end and the death. Samus. I am Samus. Samus will gnaw on your bones. Look out! Samus is here.’
Ventanus sees Sullus. Sullus has picked up his sword, the sword he used on Cxir. Ventanus knows, he simply knows, that Sullus is trying to make amends for the evil his mistake has unleashed.