Engines of War (9 page)

Galenus learned of Chelaki’s fate over the vox-net.

He hadn’t known the Doom Eagle, but he would certainly mourn his passing; later, when he had the time. For now, he was just grateful for the gain that his sacrifice had bought.

He had lost three men from his own small force of ten, but the Apothecaries could probably save some of them, if they could reach them. On the other hand, the bodies of three of the seven Death Guard lay broken and half-buried in Fort Kerberos’s shifting rubble.

Galenus closed with another of them. As he did so, the Plague Marine’s hollow eyes darkened and he jabbered insanely to himself. Suddenly, a cloud of filth erupted around him, filled with hundreds of thousands of tiny flies. Galenus’s auto-senses went wild, warning him of the threat of infection, and, reluctantly, he fell back.

His battle-brothers nearby were having more luck. Brother Filion, with a sweep of his chainsword, opened up a fourth Plague Marine’s stomach, and, as the traitor sank to his knees coughing up black bile, Sergeant Thalorus sliced off his head.

Terserus broke away from his own opponent and stamped into the cloud of pestilence, which clearly held no fear for him. Galenus and Thalorus took over from him, flanking the traitor that the Dreadnought had been fighting. As Filion moved to join them too, the captain voxed him.

‘No. Deal with the diggers.’

Filion followed orders. He loped sure-footedly across the shifting wreckage, towards the spade-carrying zombies, which didn’t react to his approach at all. He announced his presence by sending a grenade ahead of him, pitching it into the heart of the largest zombie grouping.

That got their attention. The explosion scattered the ungainly creatures and put a stop to their labours at long last. Some of them were hurled up to a hundred metres away, and more than a few were brutally dismembered. Hardly any of them, however, stayed down.

The zombies climbed to their feet and came shambling towards Brother Filion.

He pumped them full of bolter fire, putting some down but only staggering most. The first zombies reached him and he greeted them with a screaming chainsword, but the zombies were almost as resistant to injury as the Death Guard themselves.

The zombies swarmed Filion, overwhelming him through sheer weight of numbers. They were scrabbling at his armour, seeking out its seams – or any fresh cracks – with grimy, splintered fingernails. They pinned his right arm to his side, impeding his use of his weapons. His chainsword blade was cutting into a zombie’s ribcage, but it didn’t seem to care.

Galenus planted his boot in his latest opponent’s stomach and pushed hard. Taken by surprise, the Plague Marine sprawled backwards. Galenus had the opening he needed to rush to Brother Filion’s assistance. The Plague Marine recovered faster than he had hoped and began to follow him, but found the massive form of Terserus blocking his path.

A rockcrete block shifted under Galenus’s foot, almost making him fall. His reaction time seemed a little off; his head felt light, but his stomach was heavy. He feared he might have been infected by the stinking cloud after all.

Then, his eyes flickered upwards to the purple storm raging high above him. The warp rift. He was directly underneath it now. He fancied that he could feel the foul horrors of the immaterium, scratching at the furthest edges of his mind, looking for a way in. He swallowed hard and told himself not to think about it. He had to be able to concentrate on the task ahead of him. He had to stop that rift from opening any further.

He had to hold the horrors at bay.

Galenus reached Filion’s side. He had sheathed his gladius and wielded his chainsword two-handed so that each blow would have the strength of two servo-assisted arms behind it. The zombies were easy enough to hit – they hardly made an effort to defend themselves – but, as Galenus had already seen, near-impossible to kill.

His best bet, clearly, was to carve them into small chunks.

He drove his whirling blade through rotten grey flesh and brittle grey bones. He had saved Brother Filion’s life; at least, for now. His one-man cavalry charge had kept his battle-brother from going under. The zombies still had a significant advantage of numbers, but it was much harder to surround two Space Marines – when each of them was watching the other’s back – than one.

Galenus risked a backwards glance, aware of the powerful enemy he had left behind him. He saw that Terserus was keeping the Plague Marine occupied, subjecting him to a sustained barrage of bolter fire. He had turned his back on his previous opponent, however – the one who had summoned the cloud, and who now aimed a meltagun at the Dreadnought’s back.

A concentrated blast of superheated air caused Terserus’s armour to shed blue molten tears. He didn’t skip a beat in delivering his retaliation. The storm bolter that had taken the place of his right forearm swivelled vertically, a hundred and eighty degrees, to point behind him. It spat hot metal at the Plague Marine, punching new holes through his armour.

Galenus had one ear tuned to the voice of a southbound Stormtalon pilot. He was on the edge of vox range, fading in and out, but the captain picked up the salient details of his report. The pilot had just laid eyes upon the Death Guard’s Thunderhawks.

There were two of them, as the
Quintillus
’s scans had suggested. There was something else too. Another daemon engine – the same as the first two, dragon-like in appearance – had been clinging to one of the transporter’s hulls, which was why the scans had missed it. It had disengaged now and was coming at the Imperial Stormtalons, breathing fire.

The pilot’s voice cut out altogether then, drowned in static.

Galenus tried to contact the
Quintillus
, but received no reply. He spoke to Terserus over their private channel instead. The Dreadnought confirmed that, no, he couldn’t raise the battle-barge either; the fault wasn’t with the captain’s equipment.

‘The warp rift,’ Galenus muttered. ‘It’s directly between us now. It must be interfering with our vox signals.’ He wondered, for the first time, if Captain Fabian had been right. Should he have stayed in orbit? He didn’t like being out of touch with his forces like this.

‘You’d rather be up there,’ asked Terserus, as if the captain had voiced his thoughts, ‘not knowing what was happening down here?’

This happened sometimes: a glimmer of his old self surfacing from the mist – the Sergeant Terserus of old, who knew Galenus better than anyone ever had – and, as usual, he was right. The captain had made his decision. He had to fight and win the battle he had chosen to fight.

He swung his blade and cut both legs off a zombie at the knees. It fell, but dragged itself back towards him on its stomach and elbows. It tried to bite Galenus’s ankle; he kicked it in the head repeatedly until the last of its mouldering teeth fell out.

There was more help on the way too. Another battle-brother had broken through the Plague Marines dwindling ranks.

Galenus only wished he knew what was happening elsewhere on the planet.

He wished he knew for sure why Death Guard gunships were headed towards Fort Garm. He wished he knew how the effort to slow them down was going. He wished he knew the condition of Fort Kerberos’s Great Seal, still buried somewhere beneath his feet – was it intact or wasn’t it?

He just wished he could be certain that he wasn’t fighting for nothing.

Below the wreckage of Fort Kerberos – a long way below– a figure stirred.

His bones were broken. He was pinned to the ground by heavy debris. He had thought himself dead, and, perhaps, for a short time, he had been.

The last thing he remembered, he had been locked in mortal combat with a single foe; no match for him, or so he had believed at the time.

Naracoth had been arrogant and careless, and the memory of it shamed him.

His enemy – Artorius, the Space Marine, although he had been battered and bloodied – had first taken his hand and then swept his feet out from under him.

He had snatched up a weapon from the ground and plunged it into Naracoth’s skull with all his fading strength, penetrating his brain. He
should
have been dead.

It seemed, however, that his god was not yet done with him.

The roof of the shrine – the shrine in which he had fought, beneath the fort – had mostly collapsed. An obstinate pillar had held, sparing Naracoth the full force of the cave-in. His opponent had not been as blessed by his own paltry deity. A silver gauntlet protruded from beneath a hunk of rockcrete.

Artorius’s head, throat and chest had been utterly crushed.

Naracoth lifted his own bloated head with effort. The sodium torches that had lined the smooth walls had been extinguished. The shrine, however, was bathed in a bright, flickering purple light, the source of which he couldn’t see.

His eyes searched for the artefact that had drawn him to this backwater world: the first of the two Great Seals. The shrine had been built around it: a gleaming, crystal rod plunged into a raised stone platform like a key pushed into a lock.

It had been impervious to Naracoth’s strongest blows – but not to the sorcerous power of his unclean lord. The blood of one of the Great Seal’s keepers had broken the Seal. A shard of it, however, had remained stubbornly intact.

Naracoth had been forced to seek out another sacrifice.

His dry, scabby lips parted. A wheezing laugh bubbled up from his blackened, shrivelled lungs. He hadn’t failed in his mission, after all. He may have fallen to his enemy, but he had surely dealt him a mortal blow in the process; the shrine’s collapse had only finished the job. Artorius’s blood had spilled out of his dying body. Its stain must have spread to the remaining crystal shard; thus the required sacrifice had been made.

Of the first of the Great Seals of Orath, nothing remained; nothing but crystal fragments. The platform into which it had been plunged had shattered too, and it was from somewhere beneath this that the purple light now streamed.

Naracoth reached up with his remaining hand. He gripped the shard of the Great Seal, still lodged within his brain. He closed his fingers tightly around it and yanked it free. The agony was incredible, almost making him black out again, and he screamed.

The fragment was brittle now, and he crushed it in his fist.

The purple light grew brighter, as if it was collecting around him, as if the shard had been keeping it at bay until this moment.

And now, the light was tearing savagely through Naracoth’s body. A thousand phantom blades were slicing into his organs; his blood was on fire and he screamed again, longer and louder than before. He had faith, however, that he could endure any pain.

Had he not earned Nurgle’s favour, after all?

The Plague God had received his loyal servant’s gift, and had chosen to bestow the greatest of all possible rewards upon him. The purple light was tearing Naracoth apart, but at the same time he knew that it was putting him back together.

He could feel the corrupting energy of the immaterium pouring into his veins. His every muscle was mutating, growing larger, more grotesque, more powerful by the second. The rubble pressing down on his legs didn’t bother him any longer. He knew he could lift it easily.

The warp was flooding into Naracoth’s mind too. His last fragile strand of sanity finally snapped. He neither noticed nor would he have cared. He had spent his whole life working towards this moment and he had no intention of backing away from it now.

He cast his old persona, his old life, aside with casual glee.

It had been nothing.
He
had been nothing. He could see that more clearly than ever now, as he felt himself, his blackened soul, becoming elevated in the eyes of his approving god, at last becoming something… something
more
…

That burning smell was growing stronger, more pungent.

The
Scourge of the Skies
had its stabilisers planted, but its engine was still idling. Corbin had said that if he turned it off and they had to move in a hurry, he couldn’t guarantee being able to start it again. Arkelius had ordered Iunus to target the enemy’s well-armed and well-armoured Vindicators and to fire at will. For now, there wasn’t much else he could do.

Around him, three dozen metal leviathans jostled ponderously for the best offensive positions. Their tactical options, however, were severely limited. The battle would be decided primarily by the relative strengths of the participants’ weapons and their armour plating; factors over which Arkelius had no control.

He couldn’t see what was happening ahead of him any longer. The Chaos tanks were pumping out thick clouds of poisonous smoke, forcing most of the Ultramarines on the ground into a tactical withdrawal.

Arkelius found even the vox-chatter difficult to follow. Breathless reports were cut off or contradicted in mid-flow. He heard that a Predator Destructor had been blown apart, then, immediately afterwards, that it hadn’t, then, finally, that it had been, after all.

Iunus fired at another Vindicator. Arkelius’s rune panels reported a direct hit; however, they couldn’t tell him what the damage to the enemy tank had been. He told Iunus to fire again, but then belayed the order as he struggled to filter one voice out of many in his earpieces: the commander of a Predator up ahead of them.

‘It sounds like… Yes, we did it. We destroyed their main turret. They’re helpless.’ Iunus acknowledged the sergeant’s information, and adjusted his sights in search of another target.

In the meantime, more reports of damaged and destroyed Vindicators were coming in. The Imperial Stalkers, it seemed, were the most effective against them, with their armour-piercing stormcannons. Along with the Hunters, they could hang back, out of range of those powerful Demolishers. That was about to change, however.

Arkelius relayed the news to his crew, ‘They’re starting to pull forwards, four of them, two Vindicators from each of the enemy’s flanks.’

‘I have them, sergeant,’ said Iunus. ‘Should I–?’

Arkelius nodded. ‘Make them our primary targets.’