Planetkill, page 11
‘Khalan-Ghol was ruined, there was nothing left of it.’
‘You could have built another fortress. Isn’t that what you Iron Warriors do?’
‘I could have,’ agreed Honsou. ‘But fortresses are static and when everyone on the planet has armies geared for siege, it’s only a matter of time until someone attacks you. I made a mistake going back to Medrengard. I should have stayed out in the galaxy and carried on the Long War.’
‘That war was ten thousand years ago,’ said Vaanes.
‘To you maybe, but to the Iron Warriors it was yesterday, the blink of an eye. You think the passage of years matters to something as powerful as vengeance? When you dwell in a place where time itself is a meaningless concept, the defeats and glories of the past are only a heartbeat away. I fought alongside warriors who once bestrode the surface of Terra and marched with the primarchs at their head, and it galls me to see the pale shadows the great Astartes have become. You are weaklings compared to what those warriors achieved.’
Honsou felt his anger threaten to overcome his composure and forced himself to calm down as he pondered the strength of his fervour. Before the battles on Medrengard, he had no such high notions of the warriors who had fought in Horus’s war, openly mocking Forrix and Kroeger for their misty-eyed reminiscences of a campaign he had not taken part in.
He took a deep breath and looked back to the glinting form of the orbital platform.
‘Cycerin!’ he shouted. ‘Give them something to worry about.’
The magos withdrew his crawling plugs from the back of the newborn’s head and turned to face him. The newborn slumped forward, supporting himself on his forearms as his breath came in ragged, wheezing gulps.
Without answering Honsou, the magos slid his morphing limbs into the lectern and a pulsing hum travelled the length of the strategium. The lights dimmed as the magos became one with the Warbreed and bent his unknown powers to the misdirection of their enemies.
‘What’s he doing?’ asked Ardaric Vaanes.
‘Watch and see,’ said Honsou.
The image on the viewing bay remained much as before, the station gently spinning before them as the Warbreed drifted closer, unseen and unknown. Then, slowly, the station’s guns and surveyor arrays came to life, swivelling in their mounts to train on a distant portion of space.
Honsou glanced down at the plotting table as a flickering icon appeared, representing the location the nameless Imperial servants had just targetted.
As they watched, the platform came alive with vox-chatter, the words of its occupants crackling the length and breadth of the strategium as they barked from a freshly formed amplifier unit on Cycerin’s chest.
The words were scratchy and overlaid with static, but the panic in them was unmistakable.
‘…tress one, three omega! Contact in grid delta-epsilon-omega! Auger signatures indicate hostile xenos life form! Request intercept. On present course, contact will be in range in two hours. Any ships capable of rendering assistance please respond!’
Vaanes watched as the phantom icon drifted slowly across the plotting table towards the platform and said, ‘That’s nowhere near us.’
‘Exactly,’ said Honsou. ‘And thanks to Cycerin’s deceptions, that’s where the planetary monitors will head. By the time they realise there’s nothing there, we’ll be long gone.’
Honsou turned from the image of the orbital platform and lifted his bolter.
‘They’re looking for help,’ he laughed. ‘So let’s go give them some.’
Alarm bells echoed along the bare metal corridors of Defence Platform Ultra Nine, ear-splittingly loud as First Officer Alevov raced towards the embarkation deck. Calling it a deck gave it a sense of scale it did not possess, the pressurised chamber where crew transferred onto docked ships simply a vaulted chamber with bare bronze walls and numerous pipes and locking wheels that led to the various umbilicals.
Imperial Guardsmen raced to prearranged choke points, ready to defend the orbital platform against boarders, though Alevov knew such precautions were likely unnecessary. Given the heightened state of alert the fleet had maintained since the initial invasion, it was unlikely that the lone enemy contact would reach the platform intact.
Even so, it had been a stroke of luck to have the nearby monitor on station. They hadn’t detected it, but as it was engine-on to the sun’s corona that wasn’t surprising. The Veritas codes were old ones, but were still genuine and permission had been granted for it to dock.
The captain’s offer of assistance had been gratefully accepted, for, as much as the soldiers on the platform seemed to know what they were doing, more bodies wouldn’t hurt in case something unexpected happened.
Alevov passed the turn in the defensive architecture leading to the embarkation deck and pushed past two blue-jacketed soldiers fixing a gun with a long, perforated barrel to a bipod.
He felt his ears pop as he entered the bronze chamber, making a mental note to have the enginseers check the pressure seals. A green light winked into life above a thick blast door and he breathed a sigh of relief.
The clank of metal on metal sounded from beyond the door as he took hold of the locking clamp and turned the wheel. Jets of stale atmosphere gusted from the door seals as air from different worlds mingled.
‘Glad to have you aboard,’ said Alevov as the door swung open. ‘Probably a bit unnecessary, but you can never be too careful, can you?’
‘No,’ said Honsou, stepping from the airlock, ‘but apparently you can be too stupid.’
Honsou raised his bolter and shot First Officer Alevov in the face.
The headless body slammed against the bronze walls of the airlock and the gun’s report echoed deafeningly in the confined chamber. Honsou moved swiftly forward, seeing two open-mouthed soldiers at the chamber’s exit with a heavy calibre weapon.
Shock and horror had paralysed them for a moment, but it was all Honsou needed. His bolter roared again and the soldiers were torn in two by a sawing arc of bolter shells.
‘With me!’ he yelled, slamming his back into the wall at the chamber’s door. He ducked his helmeted head through the doorway, seeing more of the blue-jacketed soldiers manning defended positions further around the curving corridor.
Honsou rolled around the door; his bolter raised to his shoulder and pumping out lethally aimed shots directed by his augmetic eye. Three soldiers flopped back, their chests pulped to ruptured craters by three shots.
Iron Warriors moved past him, deploying with grim, wordless efficiency to secure the passages leading to the platform’s hub. Honsou was pleased at the accuracy of his shots, for it had taken him a little time to retrain his body to fire the bolter left-handed and sync it to his newly grafted eye, but the results spoke for themselves.
Cadaras Grendel and Ardaric Vaanes moved past him, moving anticlockwise around the rim of the orbital and firing as they went. Grendel’s underslung melta gun trailed smoke and Vaanes’s lightning claws threw off arcs of blue lightning, making the air taste of ozone.
He smelled the newborn before he saw it, despite the case of armour it wore about its body. Even his own helmet’s filters couldn’t keep the stench of it from him.
‘Stay with me,’ ordered Honsou. ‘Kill anything that isn’t ours.’
The newborn nodded and they set off after the sound of gunfire.
Cadaras Grendel grinned like a madman as he charged down the curving corridor, his teeth bared and his heart beating wildly in his chest. It had been too long since he had killed something and he itched to fight something worthwhile, though he suspected there would be precious little sport on this grubby little platform.
But Cadaras Grendel wasn’t fussy; he’d kill whatever came his way.
He and Vaanes pounded down the corridor, its walls strobed by red warning lights and ringing with blaring klaxons. It was the symphony of battle and needed only the bark of gunfire and the screams of the dying to make it complete.
As if in answer to his thoughts, a ragged squad of soldiers rose from a defensive position before him and opened fire. Their weapons spat bright bolts of energy, daggers to fight a Titan, and Grendel laughed as he opened fire, the vox-unit on his armour broadcasting his demented, psychotic amusement as a howling yell of rebellion.
One soldier crumpled, his shoulder blasted away and his face shredded by exploding fragments of bone. Another ran screaming from the barricade, while the rest stood with grim stoicism in the face of Grendel’s onslaught.
Las-fire spat, the impacts against his armour insignificant. His bolter fired again, a bark of shots that cut down a handful of the men in sprays of blood and shattered armour.
Vaanes had eschewed his jump pack for this close and dirty fight, but Grendel had to admit his speed was impressive nonetheless. The former Raven Guard was faster than Grendel and reached the barrier first, leaping forward in an arcing dive that took him over the barricade and into the midst of the soldiers.
Actinic blurs of silver steel flashed and squirts of blood sprayed the walls as Vaanes rolled to his feet, striking left and right with his lightning claws. Arms flopped to the metal decking and torsos sheared from bodies as the energised edges cut through armour, meat and bone with an electric hiss and spit.
Screams of pain and terror echoed from the walls, and in seconds the skirmish was over.
Grendel nodded in approval as he rounded the barricade to see Vaanes standing in a circle of blood, chuckling as he found it impossible to tell how many had died given the profusion of dismembered body parts.
His amusement turned to glee as he saw a pair of soldiers huddled in the shadow of the barricade, clinging to one another and weeping in terror. Their blue uniforms bore the wreckage of their fellow soldiers’ deaths and they were little more than mindless sacks of blood and pain now.
Grendel reached down and hoisted one of the soldiers from the ground, letting him dangle above the deck as his wrist was slowly crushed.
‘Don’t seem like much, do they?’ he asked.
Vaanes didn’t answer immediately, his helmet fixed on the carnage his deadly claws had wrought. For all the motion Vaanes displayed, he might as well have been a statue.
‘Vaanes?’
‘I heard you.’
Grendel shrugged and dropped the wailing soldier, who crawled away holding his shattered wrist close to his chest. Grendel let him get a few metres away before turning his weapon on him and unleashing a superheated blast of energy from the underslung melta gun.
The protective senses of his helmet dimmed momentarily as the white-hot blast engulfed the soldier and Grendel laughed as the glow faded and he saw the stumps of feet and charred skull lid that was all that remained.
He turned to Vaanes and said, ‘I’ll leave the last one for you.’
Fighting alongside the newborn was much easier when it wore a helmet, for Honsou was not forced to look upon the face of Ventris in the midst of a battle. The fight for the outer ring of the orbital platform was virtually over, the soldiers defending it no match for the relentless ferocity of an assault of the Iron Warriors.
Few soldiers were.
Honsou watched his champion kill their enemies without mercy, fighting with a skill and familiar style that took him a moment to recognise. The blows it struck were practiced and precise, the very image of those taught to the Adeptus Astartes… exactly how a warrior of the Ultramarines would fight.
The challenge of killing mortals with his bolter had grown stale, and Honsou now fought with his axe, cleaving a screaming path through his enemies. Truth be told, there was little more challenge in fighting them in close quarters, but it had the virtue of being bloody.
Honsou’s axe growled as it slew, the monstrous entity within it feeding on the souls of the dead even as it feasted on the blood of their burst bodies. His blade reaped a fearsome tally, the blue-jacketed soldiers fighting on despite the impossibility of their victory. Honsou admired their courage, if not their ability.
He wrenched his axe from the golden breastplate of some kind of officer, the axe protesting with a ripple of dead eyes across the blade’s glossy surface. A tremor of rage passed along his arms from the weapon and Honsou snarled as he exerted the force of his will to quiet the daemon within.
The sounds of battle were diminishing throughout the station and Honsou knew the battle was almost won. Even as he relished the victory, he saw a ragged scramble from the end of one of the spoke passageways that led to the central hub. One soldier carried a stubby tube on his shoulder, into which another man stuffed a finned missile.
Honsou wanted to laugh at the desperation of the weapon, before realising that the detonation of such a missile would explosively decompress the entire outer ring and send everyone within hurtling into space.
He tried to move, but his limbs would not obey his commands and he looked down in anger at the axe that shuddered in his grip, its will to dominate pushing back against him.
‘Now is really not the time!’ he snarled through gritted teeth, fighting to force the essence of the daemon back into the darkly shimmering depths of the blade.
A bloom of noise, light and smoke erupted from the soldiers and, though it was surely impossible to see such a fast moving object, Honsou saw a needle-nosed missile streaking towards him.
Honsou felt the daemon withdraw into the weapon and end the battle for control, but knew it was far too late to avoid the missile. He threw his arm up before him in an instinctive gesture of defence.
The force of the impact hurled him from his feet and he felt a terrible, leeching power within him, as though a loathsome, dark force tapped into his life-force. His head slammed against the wall and he looked down to see the smoking, hissing fins of the missile embedded in the rippling silver of the arm he had taken from the Ultramarines sergeant.
Light pulsed in the depths of the arm, flitting fireflies of energy that spoke of technology wrought in an age long forgotten and a race of such malice that his own petty evils were insignificant when measured alongside theirs. Even as he watched, a fiery orange line hissed around the circumference of the portion of the missile that protruded from his arm and it fell to the deck with a clatter of metal.
Honsou stared in wonder at the unblemished surface of his arm, looking up as the equally astounded soldiers reloaded the weapon.
He scrambled to his feet, but quickly saw there was no need for haste as the newborn launched himself towards the soldiers and began their butchery. Until now, Honsou had only seen the newborn kill with the mechanical precision of the Adeptus Astartes, albeit employed with a vicious joy no Space Marine would condone, but his champion now fought with brutal savagery, every blow excruciatingly mortal and delivered with fluid economy of force.
No movement was wasted, no blow more powerful than required and no opening left unexploited. Within seconds the soldiers were dead and the battle over.
Honsou joined the newborn at the scene of the slaughter as more Iron Warriors secured the spoke corridor. Specialists with shaped charges moved down its length and prepared to blow the doors to the central hub. Within moments, the orbital platform would be theirs.
Honsou put a hand on the newborn’s shoulder, feeling his hostility towards his new champion diminish in the face of the obvious relish taken in causing death.
‘Ardaric Vaanes is training you well,’ he said.
Ardaric Vaanes inclined his head to the last trooper. The man’s face was a mask of tears and blood, his eyes glazed as his head shook back and forth in terror. Cadaras Grendel stood with his shoulders squared, the threat and challenge of his body language plain.
‘He’s dead already,’ said Vaanes.
‘What?’
‘I said he’s dead already. He’s no threat to us anymore.’
‘So? What’s that got to do with anything?’ said Grendel, moving to stand inches in front of him. ‘You not got the stomach for killing a man unless he’s got a gun pointed at you?’
‘I just don’t see the need anymore.’
‘The need?’ said Grendel. ‘Who said anything about need? Kill him. Now.’
Vaanes met Grendel’s angry stare, the challenge and hostility evident even through the masks of ceramite that separated them. The sound of battle surrounded them, the fighting pushing ever closer to the hub of the orbital platform, but Grendel was ignoring it, intent on pushing Vaanes and seeing what he was made of.
‘I don’t think you’ve got the guts, Vaanes,’ said Grendel. ‘I think maybe you’re still working with the Imperials. Honsou thinks so too, I can tell he doesn’t trust you.’
‘He doesn’t trust you either,’ pointed out Vaanes.
‘No, but I don’t try and pretend like I won’t betray him someday. He and I, well, we got ourselves an understanding.’
Grendel turned away from Vaanes and scooped up the last surviving trooper. He held him up before Vaanes and said, ‘Go on. Kill him. Kill him or I’ll kill you, I swear.’
Vaanes took a breath, wondering if he would have to fight Grendel now. The warrior had been spoiling for it ever since he had joined Honsou’s band, but as he tensed his muscles in readiness for action, his eyes caught a glint of silver on the dangling trooper’s uniform.
An honour badge pinned to his collar.
Droplets of blood had stained the uniform around it, but not a single drop sullied the badge itself and the image of a stylised silver ‘U’ upon a rich blue background was unmistakable…
Ultramarines.
Picked out in gold behind the symbol of the Ultramarines was the numeral IV, and Vaanes felt a surge of anger as he realised the meaning of the symbol. It was a campaign badge awarded to those who had fought alongside the Fourth Company of the Ultramarines.
