Lords of Blood, page 24
I have instructed Captain Sendini to accompany me to Diamor, along with the full strength of the Daemonbanes. I petition you to directly send as many warriors to me as can be spared to aid in the defence of Diamor. Should the Great Enemy break free of the Gate, Abaddon has enough vessels and warriors to drive for Terra.
I realise this puts the Baal System at risk. However, I judge that the presence of our Chapter will have a large beneficial effect upon the morale of Imperial forces gathering to repel the traitors. This war was begun by our forebears. We should finish it.
The decision is yours alone to make, my lord, yet I hope you trust my counsel, and have faith enough in the wider brotherhood of Sanguinius that they might keep Baal from harm.
I await your reply as soon as it may be delivered.
Your obedient servant,
High Chaplain Astorath
Dante’s soul withered in him. Another choice between two evils. He had thought his earlier years full of hard-won victories. The difficulties of those times were nothing compared to the dilemmas that tormented him daily.
As he read and reread the missive his composure broke. Dante howled in fury, ran at the wall and slammed his perfect golden fist into the mosaic there, destroying a portion of ancient artwork a yard square and denting the metal beneath. Shattered tesserae tinkled to the floor.
The doors burst inwards. A pair of Dante’s Sanguinary Guard came in, weapons raised. Arafeo came after them.
‘My lord!’ said Arafeo.
‘Commander?’ asked one of the Sanguinary Guard.
Dante swayed back from the wall, his hand up. ‘It is nothing, Brother Dontoriel. Return to your post.’
‘As you command it.’ The Sanguinary Guard scanned the room a last time and left.
Arafeo did not leave, but approached carefully. ‘What is it, my lord?’
‘Dire news from Astorath. A new threat as bad as the Devourer.’ Dante’s armour felt unbearably claustrophobic, and he sank into a crouch. He had a fleeting memory of a boy who had sat like that habitually, but he could not remember his name.
‘Will you convene your brothers, my lord? You have but to ask and I shall pass on your summons.’
Behind Sanguinius’ mask, Dante closed his eyes and bowed his head in reflection. The purring whine of his armour systems irritated him. He longed for the dry silences of Baal.
‘I must think on this a while. I shall speak with them after we are free of the Aegis. We can do nothing for the time being but fret at the problem, and I need to consider this carefully before I make any decision.’
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
RED THIRST
471.M40
Lost colony
Ereus V
Ereus System
Jet turbines roared upon Dante’s back, arcing him over the rough barricades surrounding the orreti camp. Dante crashed through leafless trees and came down firing. His bolt pistol kicked satisfyingly in his hand. Every shot ended the life of a scavenger. Dante slammed into the ground at the centre of the camp, denting the packed earth. The orreti brandished their odd-looking guns at him. In return he gunned his chainsword. The small xenos scattered shrieking. Gathering their weapons under them in their mismatched belly appendages, they loped away at surprising speed, knuckling along on their long forelimbs, powerful thrusts from their single back limbs accelerating them away. Dust puffed up from the dry ground behind their hoofs. Long grasses rattled frantically as they sped through then fell still.
Dante scanned the sparse woodlands. The xenos had supposedly overrun the colony of Ereus, but they seemed too few in number to have done so, and the planet looked undisturbed for decades. His helm overlays revealed nothing. The orreti had gone.
Jump packs howled as Lorenz landed next to him, Ristan coming next. Giacomus, Arvin and Sergeant Basileus completed their squad. They spread out, peering into the dirty tents of the orreti. Arvin lifted piles of rags with the end of his chainsword distastefully.
‘Filthy xenos,’ he said. ‘Look at this place. Worse than animals.’
‘The area is clear,’ said Giacomus from one end of the camp.
Dante knocked down a hut roofed with fabric. Besides a few bones around a dead fire, it was empty. ‘Nothing here either, sergeant,’ he said.
Their jump engines whined down. Chainswords purred to a stop. An unnatural quiet fell. The myriad animals of the bush held their silence.
‘We should not be here. These things are no threat,’ growled Lorenz, toeing the shredded remains of an orreti. There wasn’t much left but a few jointed, insectile limbs and rag. Its blood stained the ground. The sight made Dante’s lips tingle.
‘They are pathetic foes. One bolt-round and there is nothing left of them,’ said Giacomus.
‘Quiet,’ said Sergeant Basileus, holding up his hand irritably. He pulled his auspex from his belt and bent his head to the screen. Far off a beast roared. The Space Marines fanned out into a defensive circle without thinking. Arvin lifted his pistol to cover the shadows. Dante shifted his grip on his chainsword.
‘Sounds big,’ said Giacomus.
‘Sounds angry,’ said Lorenz. ‘Let us go and fight that instead. There is more honour there than exterminating these weaklings.’
‘I will kill them all, weak or not!’ said Arvin fiercely. Dante and Lorenz turned to look at him, such was his vehemence.
‘I said silence!’ said Basileus. Lorenz made a dismissive noise, but obeyed. Arvin growled. The quiet chirruping of the auspex filled the clearing. The camp was small, three interlinked circles around campfires, fenced by barricades of scavenged metal.
‘The colonia is that way,’ said Basileus, gesturing to the north with his auspex. ‘Spread out. Stay low to the ground.’
‘We should be fighting a better war,’ Lorenz voxed Dante. ‘This scale of action is beneath us. How many colonists were there here? Two thousand? Send more, is what I say.’
‘We are obliged to defend every world of the Emperor, brother,’ said Dante. ‘No matter how small. If they send more people and there is insufficient military presence, they will die.’
‘Commander Milonus should be more selective in responding to requests for aid,’ grumbled Lorenz. He kicked over a charred log in a fit of pique, scattering ashes.
‘Dante, Lorenz, concentrate.’ Basileus cut into their private conversation. ‘No talking, anyone. You’re not so long into your black carapace that I can’t knock you down, and I will if you don’t stay alert.’
Basileus’ suit was artfully decorated where the others’ plate was plain. The style suggested a considered artist. In truth, Basileus was, but he was also an exceptionally angry man. He had to be, to keep the impetuous young Space Marines in check. There had been one older brother in their squad, acting as battle squad leader when the unit split, but as their campaign had proceeded he had been reassigned to other duties, leaving Basileus with a band of hotheads to chaperone alone.
‘I don’t see why we can’t fly,’ muttered Ristan. All of them yearned to. Flight was in their blood, a legacy of Sanguinius’ gene-seed.
Basileus halted. With swift battlesign, he sent his squad out wide either side of him, Lorenz with Dante and Ristan on the right, Giacomus with Arvin on the left. Arvin ran forwards brashly.
‘Easy,’ voxed Basileus.
Runes blinked up on Dante’s faceplate as Basileus took temporary control of the display. A cartograph overlaid the view through his lenses.
The colonia, Basileus communicated via vox-text reinforced with battlesign. Expect resistance. Dante and Lorenz, scout ahead. Provide suitable attack point. Stealth, brothers. Do not alert the enemy.
Dante and Lorenz signalled their affirmatives and stole forwards, sharp orange grasses rasping on their power armour. Despite their heavy armour, their stealth was commendable, the Blood Angels dropping their shoulders so that their jump packs did not knock on the branches of the dwarf trees, the footfalls of their heavy boots close to silent.
A wall of creepers appeared between the trees. Leaves rustled in the warm wind, flashing glimpses of crumbling plascrete.
‘The colonia wall,’ said Dante.
Dante signalled he would take the primary position. Lorenz nodded, took shelter by the earthen spires of some communal creature’s nest and covered his brother with his pistol. Dante approached the covered wall, pulling away the vines. Chunks of plascrete came away with it; the roots had penetrated deeply. The metal fence that would have continued the barrier another five metres upwards had fallen, rusted strands of it providing a framework for plants to climb. Dante crumbled the decaying material between his fingers. On Baal Secundus, structures that had been ruined twelve thousand years were periodically uncovered by the sand, perfectly preserved at the moment of their destruction. Less than twenty years had passed on Ereus V since the colony had gone quiet. Already the stamp of man upon the world was melting away. The power of vital worlds fascinated him. Life was potent.
He looked back to Lorenz and signed that he should shadow him, then proceeded along the wall. Through gaps in the fortification’s length he saw tumbled ruins similarly covered in vegetation.
It was quiet. The landscape lived gently. The sounds of growth and small animals rustling in the undergrowth were crisp in his ear beads. His breathing mask was open, admitting the healthy scents of a vibrant ecosystem. Soft wind played over his armour; the temperature was forty-two degrees. He saw all of this as read-out runes, but felt none of it. Caution forbade him from taking off his helmet. The energy weapons the orreti carried were too weak to penetrate Adeptus Astartes power armour, but they would easily hollow out a bare head.
They came to the gates. A road, made of prefabricated rockcrete sections, led away into the scrub, its flat surface broken up by the actions of tree roots and crowded with waving grasses. Finding the road’s position without the reference to the gates would have been impossible.
Lorenz joined Dante.
‘We have reached the gates, sergeant,’ voxed Dante. ‘We proceed.’
‘Understood,’ said Basileus. ‘Keep vox to a minimum. I am detecting no electromagnetic informational traffic, but prudence is the ward of life.’
The vox clicked out.
‘Basileus doesn’t like us,’ said Lorenz. He kept his voice low, but there was an edge to it through his suit vox-grille that helped it carry.
‘Do you think?’ said Dante. ‘It’s nothing personal. I hear he’s been a sergeant to Assault Marines for a century and a half. If his humours were better balanced, he would have been promoted to captain.’
‘I’ll be a captain one day,’ said Lorenz.
‘We’ve been full brothers for less than four years. You’re getting ahead of yourself,’ said Dante.
They skirted the overgrown road. Avians cawed from their roosts in the wrecked colonia buildings. The rusting hull of a Taurox military transport blocked the road. Dante pointed to blast damage in its side.
‘That’s heavy projectile weaponry damage. The orreti didn’t do that.’
‘How do you know?’ said Lorenz, leaning around the tank and tracking his pistol across the terrain. ‘Nobody knows anything about them. They’re not in the Chapter records.’
‘Because all we’ve seen them wield are weak particle beams.’
‘Maybe they’ve got something stronger.’
‘You were the one that said they were feeble,’ said Dante.
‘That they are,’ said Lorenz. ‘Lord Milonus knew that, otherwise he would have sent more than two squads to deal with them. They’re just another beggar race, picking over the rubbish of better species. This is a waste of our time.’
‘Doesn’t their lifestyle remind you of anything?’ said Dante. They jogged down the street. The purr of their armour blended into the hush of the day.
‘They’re not like the Baalites,’ said Lorenz. ‘Our life made us hard. It made us fit to be angels. These things are weak. We’ll kill them all, and it will be as if they never were.’
The colonia was laid out to a standard settlement pattern dredged out of an STC. A grid of streets with designated areas for industry, governance and habitation. Neatness was inherent to its conception.
‘Hard to believe a hive world can spring from a seed like this,’ said Dante.
‘Maybe they all start out like this. Some must. But this seed died on stony ground. There will be no human domination here for some time,’ said Lorenz.
Dante took a deep breath of the fragrant air. Such clean atmosphere, free of the taint of chemicals. He had recently visited his first hive world and, beneath inculcated indifference, found it profoundly shocking. He struggled to regret the colony’s failure.
‘The centre.’ With his bolt pistol. Dante gestured to the crumbling edifices of Administratum buildings.
‘I see something!’ said Lorenz. ‘There!’
Dante caught a flash of movement darting across the street.
Lorenz raised his gun and sent a spray of bolts shooting after it.
‘By the wings of our lord, I missed the little kreck,’ said Lorenz angrily. Without warning he wrenched his chainsword from his belt, ignited his jump pack and flew down the street. The silence of the ruined town shattered.
‘Wait!’ shouted Dante. But Lorenz was frustrated and his blood was up. He landed, sending up a spray of powdery rockcrete from the road, and charged around the corner firing. The fizzing pop of orreti weapons welcomed him.
Dante opened full vox-channels. ‘Basileus, this is Dante. I have found the rest of the orreti crew. They’re in the colonia centre, these coordinates.’ He sent a datasquirt from his suit’s cogitator.
‘Hold and wait for reinforcement,’ voxed Basileus back.
‘Negative, sergeant. Lorenz is engaged. I am following.’
Not wishing to receive the inevitable order to wait, Dante ignited his jump engines. He welcomed the push of them as they lifted him from the ground. So powerful, the thrust tugging at his shoulders and waist. His annoyance at Lorenz vanished in the roar of turbines. Both his hearts pumped hard; the anticipation of combat fired the gifts of the Emperor, flooding his system with synthetic hormones. The flight from Angel’s Leap ten years ago was nothing to jumping into combat. By the time he landed his teeth were clamped hard together in a wild grin. He jumped again, daring to burn the pack’s limited fuel reserves to attain something close to true flight. With consummate skill, he swerved around the moss-draped statuary of a building shell and landed in the town centre.
The orreti had laid out large sheets of fabric in the square. Upon them the components of deconstructed machines were set out neatly. Such work suggested the creatures were not aware of the destruction of their scows in orbit, or maybe they were, and this salvage had been intended for a defensive purpose he could not divine. It was pointless trying to second-guess xenos. They were by their nature unknowable, and contemptible.
Lorenz was embattled on the plaza. Dozens of orreti were firing on him from windows. Their energy slashes scorched his armour around his head, turning the yellow of his helmet brown and black. There were larger things in combat with him, three beings twice the height of a Space Marine. They had the same overall shape as the lesser orreti – two long forearms, a stumpy limb-tail and an array of specialised limbs on the chest – but where the lesser things were covered by loose robes, the larger creatures wore plates of iridescent armour. Helmets covered their long heads. They brandished a variety of pistol-type weapons with their chest arms that discharged particle beams. These were as inoffensive to battleplate as the fusils carried by the lesser orreti, but the creatures’ powerful forelimbs were tipped with gleaming blades that did pose a threat.
The aliens reared up on their thrusting limb-tails to drive down and strike at Lorenz. He dodged between their blades. A pair of swords slashed at him and he caught them on the edge of his chainsword. Sparks flew from the weapon. With a grunt he threw the creature back, and was immediately set upon by the other two larger creatures before he could finish the first.
Dante thundered down among them, bolt pistol blazing. Five bolts hammered into the side of one of the creatures, punching through its gleaming armour as if it were paper. Multiple explosions blew out craters the length of its body. Subsidiary arms flew everywhere. It rocked back on its muscular limb-tail, exposing pulsing organs within its ruined torso, threw its head back and died.
Loosing bolts in every direction, Dante slammed into the melee.
‘Brother!’ shouted Lorenz. ‘I may have been hasty.’
‘We should have waited!’ said Dante, aiming a blow at an alien leg. The Space Marines twisted around each other until they were back to back, facing one creature each. He meant to chastise his squad mate, but he was joyous. He did not mean what he said. Who would want to wait when battle beckoned?
‘What by the pits of Baal are these things?’ said Lorenz.
‘Warrior forms? The little ones could be the males and the big females, or vice versa. Does it matter? They’re all trying to kill us.’ Dante raised his gun. A knock from a limb-blade sent his shots wide and jarred it from his hand. Anger seized him at the affront to his wargear. Taking up his chainsword, he roared and threw himself forwards, beating back the alien with a flurry of violent blows.
Lorenz ducked a blade that hummed as it parted the air.
‘These are the females?’ he shouted. ‘Ha! I like this better – their women fight properly!’
Jump packs roared. Arvin slammed into the middle of the fight. If Dante felt fury, it was nothing to Arvin’s rage.
