Lords of Blood, page 22
‘And?’ said the sergeant.
‘We can scatter them and ride through. We can’t kill them all.’
Gallileon nodded and pointed at Dante. ‘Now that, young warriors, is a proper plan. Get to it. Brother-Sergeant Arael, if you’d be so good as to assign groups.’
Arael nodded and waved his Scouts to him.
‘Be confident, young blood,’ said Gallileon. ‘You are a Space Marine, the chosen of the Emperor of Terra. Feel it when you speak.’ He slapped Dante hard on his pauldron. ‘Now ready yourself for combat.’
Lorenz scanned the horizon, intent on the blur where Rora’s grey deserts met its blank sky.
‘He is in love with those magnoculars, I think,’ said Ristan sotto voce. The others in the squad laughed.
‘Shut up, Scout,’ growled Gallileon. ‘Let him perform his task. The Emperor has a use for good eyes, and none for a jester.’
The Scouts laughed harder for that.
‘They are coming,’ said Lorenz. ‘Dust plumes on the horizon.’
‘Numbers, boy!’ said Gallileon gruffly. ‘Always give as much information as you can. Information can mean the difference between victory and death.’
‘A hundred, maybe. Not a lot, but not a little.’
‘Now he sounds like an ork.’
‘I’ll not say “shut up” again, Neophyte Ristan,’ said Gallileon. ‘Next time I shall shut you up. You will find it hard to exercise your wit with a broken jaw.’
‘Sorry, sergeant.’
‘Well then?’ asked Gallileon of Dante. ‘Stop looking so surprised. It is your plan.’
Dante nodded and activated the vox-set attached to his ear. ‘Diversion group two, are you ready?’
‘Affirmative,’ voxed their leader, a Scout called Giacomus from Baal Primus. Dante and he had been in different training cohorts, and he was only just beginning to get to know him.
‘Sergeant Arael?’
‘We can see them, Scout Dante,’ said Arael. ‘Lorenz guesses right. We count seventy-two attack bikes, and twenty ork warriors in three transports.’ As part of the equipment they had to monitor the Scouts, Gallileon and Arael had complete control over the neophytes’ vox-sets. They could hear everything the younger Space Marines said at all times, if they wished. ‘What are your orders?’
Dante hesitated. They’d all run command-and-control exercises, but he had never been given command in a combat situation. ‘Maintain silence until they close? Open fire at medium range, to make sure of high kill ratio? As soon as they see you they’ll come for you… We need to split them up – get them angry so they won’t notice they’re dying. Sergeant?’
Gallileon crossed his arms and shrugged. ‘That is not my problem to solve.’
‘You are the one giving the orders this afternoon, Scout,’ voxed Arael. ‘But you know, if they were bad, Brother Gallileon or I would let you know. A word of advice – stop phrasing commands as questions. The Blood Angels do not operate as a committee. Arael out.’
Gallileon sat across his bike, his arms crossed, staring at Dante.
‘Sergeant?’
Gallileon goggled his eyes at Dante. ‘Neophyte?’ he mimicked Dante’s voice. ‘So, do you think we have all day here?’
‘No. Sergeant,’ said Dante. ‘Let’s ride up the ridge, close formation. Revane, keep on the inside of the formation. Stand ready to fire your grenade launcher when I order.’
‘Yes, Dante,’ said Revane.
‘Let us keep it slow, lure them in. We should split them closer to the tower than further out.’
‘Why?’ challenged Gallileon.
‘Greater concentration will provide a more target-rich environment for our snipers, sergeant, and they are more likely to ride straight onto the mines.’
Gallileon nodded approvingly. ‘It sounds like you have learnt something after all. Well then, what are you waiting for? You heard him, Scouts. Move out!’
Engines coughed into life and roared out white exhaust.
Dante led the way towards the approaching dust cloud, feeling proud yet nervous to be put at the head of the group. The bikes fanned out around him, Revane and his heavier weapon protected by the rest. Gallileon rode beside him, scrutinising his every move.
‘Make some dust of our own – get their attention and bring them in.’ Dante glanced to the far side of the pumping station. Four hundred yards away, their brothers rode out away from them.
Skidding his bike purposefully from side to side, Dante sent up a cloud of dust. His comrades copied him, and soon a column of it was lifting skywards.
‘You have their attention,’ voxed Arael. ‘Half have broken off. They are coming towards your position.’
‘Everyone, forward half a mile, double back. Goad them into the chase. Group two, prepare your envelopment.’
The other group of Scout bikers accelerated obliquely towards the ork outriders. The orks saw them late, making them peel further away from the main line of the ork reconnaissance group’s advance.
Dante’s group moved forwards, approaching the wall of ash and oily smoke thrown up by the orks’ half-tracked bikes. Dante got a fleeting glimpse of silhouettes in the smoke. Huge, brutish creatures hunkered over the handlebars of crude machines.
‘Fire!’ he ordered.
Boltguns mounted on the bike fairings chattered, sending streams of bolt-rounds at the foe. The magnesium line of tracer rounds flared bright in the choking air. Orks exploded, bikes detonated. The orks fired back, but their weapons, though powerful, were shorter ranged than the Space Marines’ boltguns. Overpowered for their bikes’ small mass, the ork guns sent their vehicles slewing about, and their rounds went whining past. The battlefield was a roaring confusion of engine noise and airborne particles. Dante stole glances left and right. His squad mates maintained perfect formation. Then the orks drew near, and their guns came into effective range.
Despite the unbalancing effect of the guns on the bikes, and the orks’ natural inclination to fire without aiming, the sheer number of bullets the xenos’ weapons put out meant some were bound to hit. Heavy slugs smacked off Dante’s bike’s bulletproof tyres and rang off the shield. His comrades ducked low, using their bikes’ considerable armour to shelter behind. Phaerist spat a guttural, nomad’s oath as a round nicked his shoulder, but none of the Scouts fell.
The bikes roared past one another, like feral world warriors jousting on horseback. Dante ducked a swing from a madly grinning ork, its long tongue lolling from its mouth.
‘Spread!’ ordered Dante. The combat bikes opened up their formation. Heavier ork vehicles were coming towards the Scouts, a pair of heavily armed halftracks flanking a stripped-down transport crammed with whooping greenskins. Revane’s grenade launcher huffed twice, blasting a crater in the dust. The second smashed straight into the halftrack, reducing its driver to paste and blasting off its front wheel. The contraption snagged on the wreck of its front portion and flipped, becoming a tumbling ball of scrap and fire. Bolt-rounds punched orks from their handrails on the transport.
‘About!’ ordered Dante. In unison, the bikers braked, slammed their left feet down and turned sharply about, back towards the pumping station. They accelerated, gunning down the orks that had charged past them from behind, killing a dozen and causing them to scatter. Dante’s squad rushed through.
‘That should have made them sufficiently annoyed,’ voxed Gallileon.
‘To the tower, round and back!’ voxed Dante.
They sped towards the pumping station, now a dark shape behind wreaths of sand and ash. Orks fired indiscriminately at them.
Air cracked over Dante’s head, just audible through the rumble of engines and guns. Arael’s men had opened fire. Dante risked a look back. Orks were tumbling from their machines, neat holes punched in their manic faces.
The pump station came close.
‘Single file!’ he ordered.
The bikes closed up, rushing one after the other along a narrow predefined path back to the station. The orks maintained a wide formation, gaining as the Scout bikers decelerated to fall into single file.
The ground bucked as the orks rode over the cluster mines the Scouts had planted around the tower. Dante’s squad jinked and wove through the minefield, the neophytes relying on their superlative memories to guide them through safely. The orks had no such chance. The brighter of them tried to follow the path described by the Scout bikes, but most ended in fiery ruin.
The Scouts roared past the station’s buried reservoir tanks, and arced around the back. Giacomus’ bike group arrived a moment later. The Scout units crossed paths, blasting apart the few pursuing orks who had made it through the minefield. Lorenz whooped with laughter. Dante smiled. The plan, his plan, had worked.
They emerged around the front to find the ash dunes dotted with smoking bikes and dead orks. The survivors were retreating at speed, falling from their saddles as Arael’s snipers calmly picked them off.
Dante slowed and stopped, scanning the area for threats. Gallileon rode up beside him.
‘Arael! Get your Scouts down and mounted. We are moving on the front!’ bellowed Gallileon.
The Scouts in the tower broke down their sniper rifles quickly and rappelled to the desert floor. Moments later, the first of them came roaring out of the pumping station on their bikes, joining Gallileon’s squad.
Gallileon waited for both units to assemble, then nodded at Dante.
Not bad, Dante, he signed with one hand. Not bad at all.
The roar of battle reached the Scouts long before they crested the rise overlooking the plain: the thunderous reports of whirlwind rockets; the buzz-saw rattle of Baal-pattern Predators’ guns; the rippling, popping bang of exploding mass-reactive shells intermingled with the gruff chatter of ork stubbers and the weird singing of their energy weapons. A flight of Stormtalons rushed over the Scout bikes, tipping their wings in salute. They disappeared over the brow of a hill, which the Scouts summited shortly afterwards.
Gallileon brought them to a halt at the top, Arael pulling up beside him. He shut off his engine, and the Scouts followed suit. A long, shallow declivity swept down to a plain of baked mud, so similar to parts of Baal Secundus that Dante could almost believe they were home. In the far distance the hollowed-out bulk of Rora’s Hive Quintus smoked. It was devoid of life now, and had been burning for three years. The air smelt of burned oil and blood. Dante’s eye-teeth twitched in his gums at the scent, and he had to swallow away a flood of saliva.
Tanks billowing oily smoke dotted the hillside. The corpses of orks lay thick in clusters where smaller parts of the greater battle had been fought and decided, their apish limbs entangled. The fight had started on the hill before moving to the plain. A wedge of Blood Angels were driving deep into a sea of orks. The gunships unleashed streaking missiles at an ork heavy tank, destroying it in a spectacular mushroom of fire.
Gallileon made a disapproving noise in his throat.
‘The position does not look good,’ said Dante.
‘It is not. You witness the effects of the rage of our lord, the greatest of angels. Look upon it. Ask yourselves, my Scouts, are you ready to control such fury and bend it to your will?’
‘They are in the grip of the thirst?’ said Dante.
Gallileon nodded. ‘Our brothers are outnumbered, and close to being overwhelmed. They have felt the thirst call, and have answered.’
‘They may lose because of it,’ said Lorenz.
‘It may seem so,’ said Gallileon. ‘But at times such as these, the thirst can be our greatest weapon. They shall prevail.’ He pulled up his breathing mask and spat gritty saliva into the dust.
‘Surely it will not be enough,’ said Dante. ‘They will be slaughtered.’ The line of red was very thin, and the orks near numberless.
‘Have faith, young one,’ said Arael. ‘For wonders grace the sky.’
The younger sergeant pointed to a golden figure streaking through the heavens. The figure wore a jump pack fashioned in the shape of spread white wings, a sword held out in front of it that glittered with the blue fire of a disruption field. It dropped like a hawk into a mass of orks. The Scouts held their breath, for the aliens piled onto it in their multitudes.
A second later, the figure exploded out of the melee, leaving a crowd of dead orks behind.
Dante gasped and leaned forwards, squinting. At that distance his enhanced vision gave him but the fleetest glimpse of the warrior’s mask, but he knew it.
‘Who is that warrior? I did not know any of the guard had come with us,’ said Ristan.
‘Not joking now, Ristan?’ said Gallileon. ‘That is no ordinary brother – that is the Sanguinor, the Herald of Sanguinius, the true angel. It appears when the sons of the Great Angel are sore beset, coming from nowhere, departing as mysteriously. The situation is dire indeed if we witness its presence.’
‘The Sanguinor’s real?’ said the Scout Lethael. ‘I thought it was a metaphor, Sanguinius looking over us from beyond the grave.’
Gallileon would ordinarily greet such an utterance with a blistering remark, but he stared out over the battlefield, watching the lord of the hosts do its bloody work. ‘No, Scout, it is real enough. You will find there is a lot that is strange and terrible in this universe. The Sanguinor is one of those things. Be glad it is on our side.’
Gallileon turned his engine on. ‘Our brothers need our help as much as they need the Sanguinor. We are going into the thick of battle. Follow me. Do exactly what I say, and you will make it out alive today. Hit-and-run, short bursts, strafe the edge of the foe. Draw some off if we can, but do not engage in melee, no matter how strongly Sanguinius’ blood calls for you to fight close. You will slay many of them in your fury, but you will be swamped and cut down. This light armour is not good for protracted hand-to-hand combat against the likes of orks.’
The Scouts readied themselves for the ride onto the plain, but Dante stayed rooted to the spot, watching the flashing of gold as the Sanguinor swooped low to strike at the orks.
‘Dante! Do not let success go to your head. Move out!’
‘Sergeant, I have seen it before,’ he said, pitching his voice so that the sergeant alone could hear him.
‘What?’
‘The Sanguinor. I’ve seen it before.’
‘I do not recall reports of a manifestation from any of your engagements. What’s this, your twenty-third?’
Dante nodded.
‘It does not show up just like that, Scout,’ he said, snapping his fingers. ‘This is a great wonder you bear witness to, not a commonplace happenstance.’
‘No, sergeant, before. I mean I saw it before I was chosen. On Baal Secundus. I was dying of… lack of water.’ He couldn’t bring himself to use the word thirst any more for something so prosaic. ‘On the way to Angel’s Fall. It appeared in a vision, and pointed the way to water.’
‘You are serious?’ said Gallileon. He looked at Dante with new eyes.
Dante nodded. ‘I do not lie. I swear it by the Blood.’
The sergeant shrugged uneasily and looked around to see if they were overheard. The other Scouts continued to prepare, too excited to pay attention to the conversation. ‘If that is true, then it means something. Best speak with the Chaplains. See what they have to say. It is their task to divine the meaning of such mysteries, not mine, thank Sanguinius.’
‘I have spoken with them. I was told not to speak of it.’
‘Then you have already said too much. The Chaplains do not make such bans lightly.’ He became thoughtful, and looked out over the maelstrom engulfing the plain. ‘None of that will matter one drop of blood if we lose this battle. Ready your steeds!’ Gallileon shouted. ‘The orks die today!’
He twisted his throttle, making his bike roar off, drawing his chainsword as he sped at the foe.
Gallileon leading the way, the Scout squads thundered down the hillside into the raging battle.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
DUTY’S BURDEN
998.M41
Interplanetary space, en route to the Aegis Diamondo
Cryptus System
Ordamael finished his reading and snapped shut the Book of Sanguinius, the volume that contained the most profound epithets of their primarch. Music, beautiful but dolorous, played from behind the fretted screens either side of Sanguinius’ statue.
He rejoined his Chaplain brothers and Dante took the podium. Rows of brothers in their full wargear, repaired and repainted after the events of Cryptus, looked up to him. Dhrost and Amity Hope were small figures at the front. The broad space before the podium was occupied by dozens of biers. On each one was the corpse of a fallen brother, shrouded in tight winding sheets from head to foot. Their necks were covered with white bandages pinned in place with gold blood-drop badges, covering the wounds where their progenoids had been excised. They lay like the ancient mummies of Old Earth, awaiting a resurrection that could not come. They were each as dead as their progenitor.
Though every Space Marine in the strike force was present, Flesh Tearer and Blood Angel, along with all the mortal humans they had rescued and all the blood thralls not on duty, the chapel was only half full. Dante had never seen it fully occupied, not even back in his earliest days when the Chapter was mightier. Every turn he took in the ship confronted him with another truth of the failing Imperium. The days of the Legions were so immeasurably distant he could not imagine seeing the room full. In those days the assembled Chapters would have filled the hall fifty times over; there would not have been enough space on the Blade of Vengeance to accommodate them. He wondered fleetingly if the ship remembered those times, and if under the surging violence of its machine-spirit it regretted their passing.
