Scythes of the Emperor, page 18
The commander hefted his tyranid skull-shield, keeping his eyes fixed on the slowly widening gap between the two halves of the gate. He could see the tusked snout of the hanging carnifex as it snuffled and bellowed in its exertion, and hear the howls of the gathering beasts beyond.
‘Brother Scythes!’ he called out, bringing himself to a guarded crouch. ‘This is the final hour!’ Behind him, and to his left and right on the improvised barricades in the muster yard, his battle-brothers stood with their own weapons ready.
Further up the bastion – all the way to the topmost ramparts beneath the skyshield, where the great battle standard still flew in symbolic defiance of the Kraken – men and women who had pledged their lives to the Chapter stood ready to die alongside the warrior-giants they served.
It was the most perfect expression of the Sotharan ideal.
And, to the sorrow of all, it existed only in this one, fleeting moment before the end.
Culmonios glanced quickly over the bone crest of his shield, to where Sergeant Angeloi knelt with his bolter trained on the gates. They shared a brief nod of respect.
‘Honoured servants,’ he called out again. ‘As bastion commander of the Giant’s Coffin, I urge you – do not fear the alien, but hate the alien! And kill the alien!’
There were no cheers from the serfs. Only the hungry cries of the xenos echoing out over the mesa, and the clanks of the interceptor cannons tracking back and forth along the wall-tops.
A spore mine struck the battlements to the left of the gate, the acid-cloud explosion hurling three of the last Devastators from their footing. One struck the barbican rampart so hard that the fuel tank of his heavy flamer ruptured in a cascading torrent of fire. Another was flipped bodily over the wall to the waiting jaws of the xenos.
None of the three Space Marines screamed for long.
Culmonios let his voice fall. He was no leader.
‘And, oh my battle-brothers,’ he murmured, ‘we cannot hope to survive this. So fight hard. For Sotha.’
The carnifex tugged hard on the left gate, and the metal sheared from its locks. The beast dropped with it, landing with an earth-shaking crash on the pulped tyranid remains that carpeted all of the bastion approach.
A millisecond of apparent confusion crossed the two besieger-beasts’ alien features, as they tried to understand what was expected of them next. Then the clawed brute drew in a great lungful of air, preparing to roar in triumph.
A full salvo of missiles from the Whirlwind launchers struck it in rapid succession, and the creature was obliterated almost instantly.
The barbican itself disappeared in the flurry of cataclysmic detonations. So too did every other living xenos beast within fifty paces of it. Burning debris rained down the slope of the mesa, revealing all the hordes of the Kraken’s children by the glare of the bastion searchlights.
At this sight, an augmitter-filtered voice screamed out from further away in the muster yard.
‘Brothers! Be the blade!’
Then this time-honoured battle-cry of the Chapter’s Assault contingents was lost beneath the roar of igniting jump packs.
With the Scythes of the Emperor outnumbered by many thousands to one, there was little chance of anything more than a bloody fight to the death, and futile martyrdom. But they had already come to understand a little more of the hive mind’s cold, calculating mien, and they knew that the one thing likely to outwit it, at least temporarily, was a completely irrational and irredeemably human decision.
And so, the Scythes of the Emperor attacked the xenos first.
Three full Assault squads leapt over their brethren towards the ruin of the outer gates, and into the bloody carnage beyond. Their chainswords and power blades whined as they closed with the bewildered xenos creatures, launching a desperate melee – pistols and blades against the razor-sharp claws and weapon analogues.
Here, behind the gaunts and the hunter-slayers, were revealed the true tyranids.
The warriors in crimson and ochre. The crested killers.
Towering over even the armoured giants of the Chapter, they were drawn to the challenge of greater combat like fire wasps to sweet, bruised fruit. They struck with swords of chitin and lashwhips that cleaved through battleplate, flesh and bone alike. They roared their hatred of all life as they brought festering mitts of purulent flesh to bear, jolt-showering their opponents at close range with ravenous, burrowing worms that chewed deep.
The Scythes were hungry too – they hungered for their long-denied vengeance.
Whether the tyranids even understood the concept, or the reason for it, was immaterial. They fell to point-blank bolt pistol fire, or with their heads struck from their shoulders by curved falx blades, or hauled to the ground and cleaved open by the teeth of shrieking chainswords. Curses and invective filled the air between the alien howls and cries of human agony.
But this valiant counter-assault could not last. The simple arithmetic of battle was against the Scythes, and they had all known it from the moment that they had sworn their final oaths and added their voices to the most sombre battle-hymns.
In a little under ninety seconds, the three squads were reduced to a handful of warriors left standing. Those who could fired their jump packs and leapt clear, making for the relative safety of the bastion walls, casting remorseful glances back at the dead and wounded battle-brothers they had left behind.
Culmonios steeled himself. He had given this order once before, and grappled with the sickening, tragic weight of it ever since.
‘They’ve taken the bait,’ he cried into the vox. ‘Open fire! Hit them again!’
The Whirlwinds loosed another flurry, rocking back on their track wheels as they emptied their missile racks completely. Two of the warheads struck the rubble of the barbican, but the rest found their mark, obliterating the scene of the melee in an instant and curtailing the tyranids’ short-lived victory out on the mesa.
Those wounded Scythes would not suffer the ignominy of desecration or devourment by the Kraken, blasted into the hereafter along with their foes instead. Culmonios was thankful for that, at least.
Brother Nimeon, forming up as part of a field-combined Tactical combat squad, chambered a round in his boltgun. ‘Oh, commander,’ he said over the vox-link, ‘you really kicked the hornet’s nest that time.’
The Kraken’s children were enraged. Those shrieking creatures that could spring back to their feet left the more grievously wounded behind for the ripper swarms, and surged forwards again in even greater numbers. There had ceased to be any semblance of broods – the enemy was now, simply, an amorphous horde.
There was too little time to reload the Whirlwinds for another barrage. The Militarum artillery carriages had run dry. This final, bitter engagement would be fought with bolter and chainsword, to the ruin of all.
Culmonios roared. The order scarcely needed to be spoken out loud.
‘Brothers – fire at will!’
The Scythes opened up as the xenos came on. It was impossible to miss – they were as a wall of sinuous bodies and glinting claws, crushed together by their weight of numbers. The blaze of ordered bolter drill was a wonder of Chapter discipline, putting a hail of mass-reactives into the foremost targets to slow those behind.
But there were too many. A hundred times too many. A thousand, even.
The first line of the horde crashed over the remains of the walls. Some beasts came in too furiously, too quickly, tumbling and cartwheeling as they lost their agile footing. It was like watching ocean breakers on the rocky shores of Sotha.
The interceptor cannons opened up. The Techmarines had disabled the safety mechanisms that prevented the quad-turrets from traversing too far towards the ground, allowing the gunners to re-aim them at and over the bastion walls. Flak shells made short work of spore pods and isolated beasts in the sky, but on the massed horde their effect was positively catastrophic. Each dark, staccato burst turned flesh and chitin into bloody mist, felling scores more with jagged micro-shrapnel.
And each gun fired over two hundred shells a minute.
And still, the xenos were too many. It barely even thinned their numbers.
Culmonios realised that he was running forwards, a wordless battle-cry roaring from deep within his chest. He and a dozen others had vaulted the barricade, racing to meet the horde and firing his pistol without aiming. He had fought to keep his murderous rage down for so long that he almost did not recognise himself, now that it was unleashed once more – the warrior he became in the grip of that rage was someone else altogether, and neither of them would leave Miral Prime alive.
He threw his pistol and thumbed the activation stud on his chainsword. The blade howled into life, though the sound was lost completely beneath the din.
Culmonios crashed headlong into the foe. At the last second he had had the presence of mind to bring his skull-crested shield up, and that was likely the only reason that he was not instantly dashed to the floor like so many of his brethren. He swung his blade in a lethal arc, felling two of the xenos abominations and opening the belly of a third.
But there was no room to turn the weapon back. The press of oncoming bodies was too thick. He felt them slamming blindly into his side, edging him around as they passed.
Teeth. Blade-limbs. The stench of spoiled meat.
He cried out in frustration as his left knee buckled beneath the torrent.
Around him was nothing but white noise.
A sharp pain lanced into his hip as a slashing claw happened to pierce his war-plate seals, but the lucky creature was already gone before he could react.
Then something heavier crashed into his chest, and he fell.
Beneath the feet of the enemy, he expected to be torn apart almost instantly.
But he was not. He was overrun, dragged along the ground unknowingly by the horde. He could feel the dusty ferrocrete of the muster yard scraping against his armour.
The dead weight of a tyranid body tumbled onto his chest, rolling with the tide and knocking the wind from his lungs. He couldn’t even tell if the creature was alive or not. He kicked hard and the body shifted, smothering his face and pushing the back of his head into the ground.
Culmonios thrashed reflexively, trying to dislodge it, but lost his grip on the chainsword’s hilt. It was gone in an instant.
Teeth sank into his splayed shield arm, above the elbow. He tried to cry out for aid from his battle-brothers, but couldn’t find his breath. Blood was running inside his armour.
He felt helpless. Swallowed up by things moving faster than he could follow.
Unpleasant memories of the fall of Sotha came to him then, with a sickening clarity.
He remembered the faces of the civilians who reached up to him from the crush at the fortress-monastery’s gates, and the panic in their eyes when they realised that their faith in their guardians had been thoroughly misplaced. The Great Devourer was a living tide that had washed over the plains of the home world, and broke against the foothills of the mountains with irresistible force…
Trampled and forgotten beneath the tread of his foes, not unlike the millions of Sothans they had abandoned to similar fates, a thought occurred to Culmonios in that moment.
If this was how he was going to die, after everything that he had survived, then it seemed a hollow and pointless ending indeed – though perhaps entirely fitting.
Out in the void, far from the orbit of Miral Prime, the fabric of reality shivered.
Such a phenomenon would have set the long-range sensors of any Imperial ship to a clamour, tuned as they were to keep watch for disturbances or anomalous movement between the material universe and the empyrean. For a species whose domination of the galaxy had relied upon the manipulation of that other-realm for millennia, it was vital that human voidfarers at least be able to perceive it in some rudimentary manner, be that through warp-sensitive gene mutation or by virtue of the auspex.
The tyranids did not perceive the immaterium as mankind had taught itself to. The shadow cast by Hive Fleet Kraken in the warp was disruptive and unpredictable where psychically sensitive minds were concerned, but the xenos had little interest when their chosen prey were notably absent.
Thus did the hive ships spread throughout the Miral System remain completely ignorant of this apparently unremarkable ripple in the cosmos, and what was to follow. In these earliest days of what would eventually become known as the Second Tyrannic War, when the splinter fleets had already outwitted countless Imperial forces including the noble Scythes of the Emperor, this was the first time that they, in turn, were themselves outwitted.
For where the xenos adapted and learned from their prey, so too had their prey been forced to adapt in response.
The shadow in the warp had robbed the Scythes of their Navigators and astropaths, forcing them to undertake an endless series of meticulously calculated blind warp jumps in order to move their warships from system to system. Slowly, patiently, the Chapter’s shipmasters had worked their way back to Miral.
Across the system’s interior, well inside the noted Mandeville point, nine separate and strategically placed warp rifts opened simultaneously.
Only then did the hive ships become aware of their killers.
By that time, they were already undone.
Only with the most tremendous effort of body and mind was Culmonios able to rise. The tangle of limbs – some living and deadly, others dead and limp – dragged at his battleplate, slowing his combat reflexes.
Wiping cold alien blood from his eyes, he spun around with his shield held out, catching the sweeping talons of a tyranid warrior and turning them aside. The creature’s momentary confusion at facing the polished bone visage of a brood-cousin bought Culmonios the instant he needed, to slam the shield’s crest into its fanged snout. In one fluid motion he whipped out his combat blade and hamstrung the tottering xenos, before plunging the knife between its ribs, over and over again.
A snapping gaunt beast barrelled into him from the side, and they rolled together in the pile. Culmonios threw the thing back, then kicked its head around as it came at him again, and stamped down on its bared throat for good measure.
Two more tyranid warriors howled at him from what was left of the nearest barricade. Bodies were slumped there – the armoured bodies of brother Scythes, their flesh burned away by acidic projectile shots. He raised the shield again to deflect the shots directed at him, before charging the barricade.
He fought without a plan, without any kind of strategy. He simply responded from moment to moment. He had been spared from death’s embrace once more, though he knew that he surely danced with the reaper at every turn.
Death was close, now. He was merely challenging it to claim him, each time he confronted a new enemy.
‘Commander!’
The voice reached him through the fog of his own detached fury. He glanced up to see an Assault squad brother arcing down from the bastion’s rampart towards him, the turbines of the warrior’s jump pack blazing against the Mirali night sky.
The tyranids sensed him too. They tried to shoot him out of the air, but their powerfully venomous gun-analogues could not follow his trajectory quickly enough. The Space Marine landed squarely on the carpet of corpses and opened up with his plasma pistol, blowing one of the beasts almost in half with a shot to the abdomen. Culmonios knifed the second in the face, slashing again at its eyes before breaking its neck with his gauntleted hands and letting the body fall.
The fighting had spread out across the whole of the open bastion; everywhere inside the perimeter walls was a tyranid-choked battleground. From the upper ramparts, armed serfs fired down into the skirmish under the guidance of the remaining Astra Militarum gun crews, though wary of accidentally striking their transhuman masters instead of the foe. Two of the interceptor cannons still fired into the hordes pushing for the ruined outer gates, though it could only be a matter of time before their magazines were finally emptied.
Presumably, the First Company Terminators under Master Thorcyra’s command were still engaged against the infiltrating xenos in the tunnels, but communications had been sketchy and incomplete from beneath the rocky foundation of the mesa even before Culmonios had lost his vox-bead in the crush.
The bastion commander hoped that Brother Keltru was still at his post, coordinating this ‘defence’, such as it was – the Chapter’s defiant, tactical suicide.
Not that the crippled warrior could have got far, even if he wasn’t.
Culmonios snatched up a dropped falx from the ground, and turned to salute his jump-packed ally, just in time to see him speared through on the metres-long mantis talons of a hulking carnifex. The dying warrior cried out, choking blood through his helmet grille as he tried to raise his pistol, but the great beast shucked him aside in a splatter of gore before rounding on Culmonios.
Three more of them lumbered through the ruined gates. One still smouldered across its thick carapace where it had evidently been set alight with burning promethium. Another dragged the remains of a ruined gun-analogue behind it, lacking anthropomorphic hands to drop a damaged weapon as any other warrior might in the heat of battle. Like pack hunters, they bellowed and snapped at one another even as they circled Culmonios and his remaining brethren fighting on against the xenos horde at ground level.
The commander raised his shield and falx.
‘So, I finally got your attention, then,’ he spat, fancying that he addressed the abstract sentience of the hive mind itself. ‘Which one of you wants to try first?’
The nearest carnifex roared over the fray, so loud that Culmonios felt it in his own chest. Then the roar became a grating scream, and he realised that he had heard this terrible sound before – the telltale glow of bio-plasma began to rise in the thing’s chest, flaring with growing intensity between its exoskeletal ribs.
