Hand Of Abaddon, page 24
Mavin was shouting, ‘Nine Devils!’
The vox-operator was not alone. Those who still lived did so under a constant hail of enemy fire, teeth clamped together or bellowing to chase away their fear, fists clenched around their weapons and praying they would survive the carnage.
Another Chimera took a hit. Rocket-propelled grenade, Kesh thought as it sailed past her and she followed its corkscrewing trajectory. It blew off a dozer blade and punched a hole through the glacis of the transport before exploding. Grey smoke billowed out, and the Chimera slewed to a halt. She heard screaming, troopers injured and in pain. Kesh kept going, all of her will bent on reaching the Maw.
After each hit to the armoured personnel carriers, protection for the troops thinned. Casualties rose with every second. Order wavered in the face of such resistance. Only another fifty feet or so to go and several of the squads had slowed, some even stopping to fire on the enemy, a rabble of ex-Guardsmen and cultists – but they were too far away and too well defended.
‘Push on! Push on!’ Kesh roared, the banner of the 84th flapping behind her as she urged on the desperate charge. Las-beams cut the air in front of her, stabbing from the darkness. A Mordian collapsed next to her, shot through the neck, and Munser rushed in to grab the banner pole before it fell. It took Kesh a few moments to realise the dead man was Atur.
‘Mordian!’ Munser bellowed, and she heard the rallying cry echo throughout the barrelling throng. Seldom had such dour troopers been so animated.
As the Maw reared ever closer, a chasmal opening of seeming infinite black, the Militarum were forced to narrow and congregate. Almost shoulder to shoulder, they had to abandon the Chimeras. The armoured personnel carriers were all but destroyed anyway, most of them burning wrecks on the road behind. They had served their purpose and got the infantry this far.
Darkness beckoned, forbidding as stygian hell, lit by sparks of flame. It was muzzle flash from the heavy stubbers raining down fire, suddenly target rich, as the Guardsmen funnelled in. The ogryn auxilia, those that were left, lumbered to the front. Breacher shields rang with shell impacts or fizzed with ricocheted las-bolts. Several of the abhumans were hit repeatedly and slumped to bloody halts.
Kesh made it through the gap, Munser and the others at her side, and reunited with Hagan, who had blood spattered across his face but shook his head at her concerned expression. None of it was his.
The sides of the mountain pass soared up like the walls of an ocean trench, their presence intimidating and claustrophobic. Guns stippled the crags and caves, the jutting overhangs and plateaus. The Guard pressed to the edges, away from the killing ground in the middle, but men died in their droves anyway.
Discipline, iron-forged from birth, kept the Mordians in order. They fired in precise volleys, taking out gun nests, whittling reckless bands of eager cultists. Bodies began to fall, bones crushed on impact, limbs twisted. Blood smears painted the ground.
The Imperial army pressed on.
There was a near-constant shriek of exchanged fire between the two forces now, the air thick with ozone. Kesh could taste it, actinic, on her tongue. She saw something loom ahead. A mob. The sound of braying and snorting preceded it.
Not a mob at all. A herd.
Abhuman beastmen in their hundreds. Things that might once have been men but had devolved into something even more savage. They had rusty blades, improvised clubs. A few carried pistols but could barely use them.
The neck of the pass was a funnel. Kesh used it.
‘Flamers!’ she bellowed.
Lodrin stepped up, joined by several of his comrades. The Catachans, deft at the use of burning promethium to cleanse particularly belligerent patches of their death world, had a strong contingent of the deadly weapons, and Hagan ordered his specialists forward.
A swell of fire lit the dark, suddenly and obscenely bright. The backwash of heat scalded their skin.
The beasts burned.
Those that did not die quickly flailed through the flames like they were fighting an angry sea. A few made it through, too stubborn, too enduring to die, and met the Guardsmen blade to blade. The ogryns swung their breacher shields like mallets. Kesh saw a Catachan brought down, still stabbing the burning beast as it bore her to the ground. Kesh shot one through the skull, ending its misery. Munser cut down another, shooting it through the chest with his lasgun, firing one-handed as he held on to the 84th’s banner.
The scraps of beastman survivors didn’t last long. A few were hit by stray shots from above as the cultists fired down heedlessly. The rest were cut apart by the Catachans, the burly troopers using bayonets and long-toothed knives to savage effect. Hagan drew a chainsword from his back, and the whirring saw edge tore through beast flesh like a razor.
They moved on, stepping over the steadily burning carcasses, inured to the bleating animal misery of the ones slow to die. They continued, gaining a few feet at a time, hunkered against the walls, firing at the enemy above, until they reached the checkpoint. Reinforced flakboard, sandbags, out-facing tank traps wound with spools of razor wire; it had a prefab tower at one end that served as a weapons nest, and a heavier iron gate that looked like it was bolted from the inside. Crude, but still an impediment.
And narrow. This part of the neck was easily the tightest. Even a single transport would have struggled to pass. The cultist army had light vehicles, bikes and ridgerunners better suited to the terrain.
Mordian sappers came up from the rear ranks and were immediately surrounded by the ogryns. The abhumans’ shields formed an uneven dome that kept the field engineers safe as they placed their charges. An order rang out loud and clear from the engineer-sergeant, and the group withdrew. A few seconds later an explosion took out the checkpoint, tower, gate and all, the sound magnified by the tight confines of the neck.
Kesh didn’t hesitate – she shouted to advance and stormed through the newly made breach.
On to the other side, through still-flaming pieces of flakboard, and Kesh stopped as an object rolled into her path. A grenade, its dull red light flashing. Counting down. Having made it this far through hell, Kesh had dared to believed that perhaps there was something, someone, watching over her. That He on Terra had chosen Magda Kesh for some lofty purpose she could not yet discern. Confronted by the blinking grenade light at her feet and the paralysis of her thoughts, she began to doubt. It would end here, all the claims proven false. Just a soldier after all. A lucky one, but dead all the same.
Only in death, as the saying went.
I shall fear no shadow, thought Kesh as she closed her eyes.
Then nothing, seconds stretching into what felt like minutes, and Kesh looked down. A dud grenade, the countdown stopped. She breathed.
I am bless–
The grenade exploded. A delayed fuse. A fraction beforehand, Kesh was hit by something hard, moving fast. She felt heat, her bones rattling at the impact wave, and then she was weightless but hurting as she flew through the air.
Hitting the ground hard, she blacked out.
Chapter Twenty-Four
fallen brothers
i will honour it
a secret unearthed
Vero advanced hard on Helicio, sword raised. He would kill his brother if he had to. Helicio met him, moving at impossible speed, and punched the lieutenant in the chest. Vero flew backwards, plastron shattering as he went airborne. He did not rise.
A crack fractured the statue and ugly red light issued forth. Areios saw it even as he, Drussus and the rest of the fire-team came at Helicio.
Antros and Gethius reached him first: Vero’s men, anguished war cries on their lips as they went to avenge their commander. They fired on their battle-brother, hitting him with a barrage of well-placed bolt-rounds. He should be dead – Areios had already begun to assimilate his grief as the mass-reactives exploded – but Helicio did not die. He shuddered with the impacts, like a prize fighter shrugging off a flurry of blows, and then lunged for Antros.
Antros screamed as Helicio crushed his skull with his bare hand. The other he stabbed into Gethius, fingers straight like a blade, spearing through the Space Marine’s torso and coming out gory and red on the other side. Gethius’ power plant ruptured, exploded, engulfing both himself and Helicio in a bloom of fire and smoke that spilled outwards into the other Ultramarines.
Blackness sweeping over him, Areios surged through flame and in that moment a veiled memory returned to him, the heavy gauze obscuring it suddenly lifted.
In the Forlorn Temple… Helicio standing before the last Oracle, convulsing as he fought to resist the thing seeking ingress into his flesh, his mind. He struggled, fists clenched, turning rigid. And then… stillness.
Lying dormant within until reaching the statue here, slowly hollowing out its host.
Helicio was no more.
A monstrous amalgam of Astartes and warp-born horror remained, foul eruptions of bloated muscle splitting once-noble war plate, tentacular protrusions burrowing through mesh and skin. It hunched, still helmed, but overgrown with mutation, grossly lumpen and repulsive. Lopsided yet somehow stable, it let out a ululating cry of pain and anger.
‘Merciful primarch…’ he heard Cicero utter, but Areios was already moving to engage as the monstrous horror lashed at the statue. He met its foul appendage, a thick tendril of gelid pink flesh, and cut deep.
It screamed, hurt, and recoiled.
‘Do not let it breach the statue,’ Areios commanded. Sword at guard, the monster briefly at bay, he glanced to Maendaius, but the Librarian would be of no use here. On his knees, doubled over, hands clasped to his head, he cried out.
‘It is here, it is here… One of the greater kind,’ Maendaius declaimed, ‘shackled to the materium. It is the keeper, that which harbours secrets from beyond the veil. It is here! Bound in stone by the Oracles and left to wither, now craving release…’
Helicio had been a vessel, infected, overwhelmed… Areios dared not think on it further. He cleaved to what he knew: his oaths before the primarch, before the unsheathed sword and the holy bolter. His duty to the Imperium, to his own sacred brotherhood of the Realm of Ultramar. And in the end, it was simple.
‘Kill it.’
‘Our brother…’ said Drussus, dismayed, but he saw Vero, who lay bloodied and unmoving; Antros and Gethius, crushed and torn asunder.
‘That thing is not Helicio,’ declared Areios.
On his feet, coming at the monstrous horror from its flank, Epathus lit his thunder hammer, having recovered it from where it had fallen. Lightning cracked. ‘Berion, Uxio… get Maendaius away from it,’ he ordered, eyeing the creature warily as he closed on it. ‘The rest of you… with me.’
They charged as one, blades drawn.
An untrained mob will often as not get in its own way if it tries to attack in unison. A man might be as likely to be stabbed or struck by a comrade as to land a blow against his enemy. Not so for an Astartes, and never for an Ultramarine. Warriors reborn, they had honed their battle craft and instinct through training and dedication to their killing art. They fought together, truly together, acting and reacting to each other, stabbing and withdrawing, keeping their monstrous foe disorientated and overwhelmed. In seconds, it bled ichor from a dozen deep wounds.
Yet it endured. And it grew, mutating in horrific profusion until it scarcely resembled Helicio any more, reduced to a bulbous mass of limbs and appendages wearing scraps of stretched metal.
It lashed out, a freakish, instinctual blow that caught Ixus on the attack and carved the Astartes in half. His spilled remains flecked Protus’ armour as he lunged from the opposite side, a spiked tail impaling his chest. A welter of blood streamed from the hole in Protus’ breastplate as the horror flung him aside.
It stabbed at Epathus, a host of bony spines suddenly spearing from its bared chest. The captain fended off the blow then leapt, smashing a limb as he brought down the thunder hammer. A screech of agony, tendrils whipping madly at Epathus, who swung again into the horror’s flank. Flesh and hardened bone crumpled. It scurried away on pale arachnid limbs, bulling into Ramirus, who went down beneath the horror’s bulk and was crushed.
Areios gave chase, shepherding it with heavy swings of his blade, hacking off rapidly grown scabs of chitin patching its skin. It stank, like overripe fruit, saccharine and cloying. Drussus landed a blow, a thrust that burst an eye that had bubbled up on the horror’s hunched back, vitreous humour left streaming from the ruined socket.
As massive as a Redemptor, it towered over them both with little left of its former host, barring Helicio’s helmed head clinging to a misshapen torso. The head split apart, revealing what remained of their brother, his face awash with anguish.
Areios paused, his hesitation momentary but enough for the horror to strike him. He felt a sting through his armour, across his chest, and then he was being propelled backwards, head over foot like a leaf in a storm. He stabbed in the mid-tumble, his blade piercing stone and finding an anchor. Skidding to a halt, a glance told Areios that Drussus was down, similarly caught off guard, and the horror was still coming.
Scythes of sharpened bone jutted from two of its forearms. As Areios wrenched free his blade, it raised them in a decapitating strike–
But was smashed aside before the blow could land, a thunder hammer ramming into its flank. Epathus swung again, lightning cracks strangely without echo. And again. Limbs shattered, bone fractured, flesh was pummelled. He beat it until only a ruined carcass remained.
Standing before the carnage, Areios pulled his broken sword from the ground. The blade snapped in two. The head of his thunder hammer swathed in gore, his armour likewise, Epathus turned to him. Drussus was rising, mercifully still alive, though many of their brethren were fit only for the Apothecary’s reductor.
‘Courage and honour…’ Epathus began, the Ultramarian war cry an affirmation. He had rents in his battle plate, a crack down his left shoulder guard.
It did not save him as the thick tine of bone pierced his back and chest.
Epathus convulsed, back arched, as blood punched from the wound. He fell forward, and was caught by a bloodied Areios, who cradled his captain to the ground before turning his broken sword on the horror.
But it was already dead, or so close to death as to pose no threat. Its last violent act had claimed its slayer. So it would be an act of mercy, not vengeance, that Areios performed next.
He held the side of Helicio’s face, now nought but a growth on the monstrously mutated thing, taking off his own helm and letting it fall to the ground so their eyes could meet. There was nothing but torture in those eyes, and a pleading desperation. Areios slid in the snapped blade through the ear, pushing it right to the hilt. Relief flickered, briefly replaced by horror, and then the eyes became as glass and whatever had been left of Helicio faded away.
At its final destruction, the monstrous horror deflated, ichorous essence leaking out of its once bloated form and leaving behind only distended and brutalised flesh. Helicio’s flesh, pieces of broken armour intertwined. A bleak sight.
Drussus approached, his helm removed and held at his side, his face ashen. ‘Blood of the primarch…’ he breathed.
Areios went to Epathus. Even a cursory glance, and he knew the captain would not survive. A red and ugly flower had opened in his chest, exposing ruptured organs. That he still clung on at all was a testament to the man’s immense willpower. He was reaching for his helm clasp, scrabbling at it with dying fingers. Depressing the seals, Areios removed it for him.
One eye was bloodshot, the other just filled with red. There was blood leaking out of his mouth too and smearing his face from where he had coughed it up against the inside of his helm. Lungs spasming, every breath was raw agony.
Epathus glanced to where his thunder hammer lay by his side unattended. Areios retrieved it, placing it reverently in his captain’s grasp, but he was mistaken. Epathus frowned. Eyes urging, he used what remained of his strength to push the weapon towards the lieutenant.
Understanding now, Areios wrapped his fingers around the thunder hammer’s haft, bringing it close to his body. He nodded once, murmured, ‘I will honour it.’
And then Epathus was gone.
Maendaius yet lived, on his feet now but only with Cicero’s aid. His ragged face suggested he had endured some unspeakable horror. Areios doubted he would ever find out what had happened.
The statue had become dormant, the bloody glow dying completely and the grey soul materia evaporating with it. The atmosphere reverted to a normal state, faint sunlight illuminating a grisly scene.
Their brothers dismembered and slain.
‘We must not linger here,’ muttered Maendaius.
Areios felt his ire rise. ‘Our dead require extraction, Librarian. Honoured Vero and our vaunted brother-captain amongst them.’ Turning to Cicero, he said, ‘Call for Valentius.’
‘Greater matters are afoot,’ Maendaius replied, his voice oddly distant. ‘In the torment… I saw it. I saw the secret the Oracles gleaned from the entity inside the statue.’
‘Our brother-captain is amongst the dead!’ Areios repeated firmly, his anger overspilling.
‘Heed me,’ said Maendaius, his eyes softly aglow. ‘We must act. We must…’
‘Act? What do you mean?’ The hurt was a blade in Areios’ side. The grief was a hammer’s weight in his hands. Epathus had been a mentor, a brother of rare renown. He deserved more than the Librarian’s casual disregard.
‘A threat arises, and we must meet it with a ready sword.’
‘Cease this gnomic babble, Maendaius. Speak plainly,’ said Drussus.
‘He speaks as plainly as he’s able,’ observed Areios.
The Librarian had not fully recovered at all; the light of madness shone in his eyes. Cicero, who was the closest, held his face and tried to reach him.
