The Geryon ordinatus platform was a silver diamond against the star field, bright with light reflected from the planet Lakonia. Sarpedon watched it growing closer through the age-grimed glass of the porthole, the Hammerblade fighter-bomber juddering around him as the Chapter serf-pilot flew Sarpedon’s Marines towards their objective.
Sarpedon’s craft held eight other Space Marines under Sergeant Givrillian. There were eleven other craft like it, Hammerblades and Scalptakers, speeding in scattered formation towards the Geryon platform. They would land all over the upper surface, and the Soul Drinkers would enter the upper decks of the platform from a dozen different entry points. Once inside they would link up as they swept through the structure, with the ultimate objective being control of the Geryon itself. Once they had the platform the Soul Drinkers could be sure the Adeptus Mechanicus would have no choice but to return the Soulspear. Then the two Chapter cruisers could swoop in unmolested and pick the Soul Drinkers up from the platform, along with the nearly two hundred Marines remaining on the star fort.
‘Taking fire!’ crackled a serf-pilot’s voice over the vox – Sarpedon glanced at the holomat set up in the centre of the Hammerblade’s cargo bay and saw the rune that flashed was that of Squad Phodel.
‘Squad Phodel, give me details.’
‘Magnalaser turret fire,’ replied the serf-pilot, voice warped by sudden static. Sarpedon peered through the thick porthole glass and saw ruby-red lines of laser flashing out from the platform, lancing past the silver glimmers that were the Soul Drinkers’ makeshift assault craft.
In spite of everything, of all honour and tradition and basic loyalty, the Adeptus Mechanicus would resist. This should have been little more than a show of strength, a lightning raid that would leave the Geryon platform in Soul Drinker hands and convince the Mechanicus to return the Soulspear – but instead, the tech-priests had seen fit to turn this into a battle.
Deep down, Sarpedon had feared this. Those willing to steal the Emperor’s finest could have it in their hearts to fight them for it, too. He had thought it hardly possible that sane men would dare take up arms against the Soul Drinkers, and now it seemed that this enemy was not sane after all.
There was a sudden flash of sparks against the black of space and the vox-link to Squad Phodel filled with static. A glint of silver sheared away from a magnalaser beam and tumbled towards the fast approaching Geryon platform. Six good Marines died as the Scalptaker hit at an angle, its scything wingtip catching on the edge of a hull plate and flipping it over and over until it smashed into a support stanchion. It burst, spilling its guts of fuel and machinery against the structures supporting the gargantuan ordinatus barrel above.
Two of the runes were still lit – an Assault Marine from Squad Phodel and an apothecary. They clung to the hull, hard vacuum against their backs as the fuel evaporated around them, watching the rest of the attackers come down.
Sarpedon watched the half-dozen life-lights winking out on the command holo.
They were the first he had lost as a commander.
The Hammerblade juddered violently – Givrillian and the six Marines of his squad clung to the beams and struts of the cargo-passenger compartment. Through the porthole Sarpedon could now pick out the great metal plain of the artillery platform and the mountainous bulk of the Geryon cannon itself. The wide mouth of its squat main barrel could have swallowed a whole flight of attack craft, and Sarpedon had seen cities smaller than the web of recoil dampeners clustered around its base. He saw three more Soul Drinker craft swoop in low, aiming for the wide expanses of flat hull between sensorium arrays and thruster jet columns.
The Adeptus Mechanicus’s apparent treachery had cost the lives of Space Marines, better men by far than any tech-priest. Every Soul Drinker would know it, in the star fort and the attack force. Their hearts would be steeled by the loss of their battle-brothers even as they whispered prayers to Dorn for the souls of the lost.
Sarpedon could feel their anger, for it was inside him, too, channeled into cold determination. This was war, it had been all along. The Mechanicus would have to kill to keep what they had stolen. Honour demanded that Sarpedon ensure they died for it, too.
Defences opened up all across the platform’s surface, lasers and missiles. Bright bolts of power streaked across the porthole as servitor-emplacements took aim and fired. But there was nothing like the forest of fire they would have encountered had they gone for the platform’s underside, where bombing runs would target the main thruster columns and ammunition holds. The Soul Drinkers weren’t trying to blow the platform up – they were trying to get in.
A near-miss and the craft lurched violently, the Marines struggling to keep stable in the zero gravity. The platform loomed up ahead of them – they were heading for a wide expanse of metal with two craft going in beside them. Below the whine of the engines Sarpedon could hear the zips and crackles as las-bolts passed close and scored the hull.
Another Hammerblade was hit, one wing sheared off, and it angled sharply down towards the platform. Sarpedon didn’t see how it impacted, but another eight lifelights turned cold.
Then the serf-pilot dipped the craft’s nose and they were on their final run, hills and valleys of metal speeding by, explosions stuttering blooms against the blackness of space above them.
They hit shallow and belly-first, the pilot using the impact to slow the craft down given the Hammerblade’s lack of retrothrust power. The noise was awesome – a screech of metal that felt like it would never end, stanchions snapping, hull peeling back like shredded skin. The floor buckled and ruptured, and the platform’s hull plates could be seen scudding past below their feet as the compartment was shaken as if grabbed by a giant fist. Sarpedon glanced through to the pilot’s compartment and spotted the Chapter serf wrestling with the attitude controls, void shield splintering in front of him. The atmosphere had gone by then and his rebreather hood was misted with perspiration.
They stopped. The lights had failed and the command holo was just a glowing green smudge in the air.
‘Report!’
The squad counted off. They had all made it intact. The serf, should he survive, would be suitably decorated upon their return.
‘The cargo door’s jammed,’ said the serf-pilot breathlessly.
‘Get us out,’ said Givrillian, glacing at Trooper Thax at the tail-end of the hold.
The gravity was normal now they were in the platform’s gravitic field, and Trooper Thax stepped forward holding the las-cutter with which each craft had been issued. The only sounds as he carved a wide arc in the side of the craft were the tingling vibrations through the Hammerblade’s hull, and the faint background hiss of the vox-link.
They needed to get into atmosphere soon. The Mechanicus were undoubtedly capable of jamming their vox-net and the Soul Drinkers needed the option of verbal communication.
The hull section fell away and Sarpedon looked out on this new battlefield. A rolling expanse of riveted hull plates, punctured by mechanical outcrops and bulky mech-shed hills. The mighty peak of the gun soared above them, brooding and dark, picked out in reflected light from the glowing disk of Lakonia and hung against the backdrop of stars.
Givrillian was at his side, bolter levelled as the squad deployed from the wrecked Hammerblade. ‘Looks like a munitions supply tunnel half a kilometre west, commander. Good for an entry point?’
‘Take us in, sergeant.’
The Marines moved swiftly across the platform deck, forming a cordon around Sarpedon. Thax and his plasma gun were on point and two Marines jogged backwards to cover the field of fire behind them. The munitions tunnel was a large square opening in the platform deck covered with metal slats of a shutter – there was a good chance the tunnel shaft led somewhere useful. There was an equally good chance the place had been marked as a likely entry point by the enemy and would be well-defended.
Good. Let them try. Let them find out what happens when they cross swords with the Soul Drinkers.
Sarpedon opened the command channel of the vox-net. The too-familiar broken chatter of battle flooded into his head.
‘Squad Phodel down, I’ve got visual…’
‘… hit hard, we have wounded and are heading into the secondary intake…’
‘… pressure suits and energy weapons, taking fire…’
They were losing men already. But that was to be expected in such a high-risk deployment. When they were in the thick of the enemy and could fight back, it would be a different story. If there was another way, he would have taken it. But there was not. They had forced him into this, these thieves not fit to wear the Imperial eagle. And now they had shown the depths to which they would sink.
He held that thought and cherished it. Purity through hate. Dignity through rage. The words of the philosopher-soldier Daenyathos, written eight thousand years before in the pages of the Catechisms Martial, were a rock in the sea of war.
Purity through hate. Dignity through rage. Let the fire within you light the fires without.
The vox-net picture built up. The first craft had landed unmolested, with only a few injuries reported. The next flew into the defensive fire and two of these had been lost, with at least fourteen Marines dead and probably more. Amongst them the six members of Sergeant Phodel’s assault squad and one of the Tech-Marines. There were no reports from the other two.
Tellos’s squad, inevitably, was already inside, emerging in a main thoroughfare and blasting a great wound in the defenders they found with melta-bombs and bolt shells. In the background of his vox-frequency was the unmistakable thrum of chainblade through bone.
Las-fire stuttered soundlessly overhead as Sarpedon and Givrillian’s squad reached the lip of the cargo-feed. Krak grenades blew off enough slats to provide an entrance, their small armour-piercing bursts imploding strangely in the vacuum.
‘Go! Go!’
The Marines vaulted into the shaft in quick succession, Thax first, with Givrillian and Sarpedon in the middle. The shaft twisted alarmingly into the body of the platform and the Marines struggled to keep their footing. Sarpedon visualised their position – the shaft curled down alongside the massive machinery of the Geryon’s loading and recoil mechanisms, right down to the muster deck where the Soul Drinkers would be able to move around the platform and secure it. They were heading in the right direction.
‘Auspex is not transmitting,’ said Givrillian from somewhere in the darkness. ‘Interference.’
Deeper, through the guts of massive machinery. Through grilles in the shaft’s side Sarpedon’s enhanced eyes glimpsed immense cogs turning slowly, pistons thudding out a rhythm. The vox-net was fragmented – he could tell there were combats breaking out all over, but no more. Tellos’s voice cut through for a second, bellowing triumphant.
‘Contact!’ came a yell from beneath, a split-second before a wall of air whumped up the shaft. An atmosphere. Somewhere for the tech-guard to fight.
The bright wash of Thax’s plasma gun rippled up from the bottom of the shaft. Fire from both sides crackled. Sarpedon tore off his helmet, felt the oily air in his throat, and leapt downwards.
‘For Dorn!’ he yelled, force staff raised to stab and thrust.
Contact.
The air howled into the shaft when tech-guard Grik slammed the intake lever down. The 674-XU28’s machine-spirit spoke to the platform, which breathed atmosphere in the cargo feed so the Sixers could fight there without fear of vacuum-death. As long as they fought on this platform, the Sixers knew the very battlefield was on their side.
The loader shaft the enemy was entering through emptied into the throat of an ammo shifter, all huge blocks of brushed-steel machinery chased with bronze icons and inscribed machine-prayers. The great cogs beyond would move and the machinery would form a great swallowing gullet, dragging shells down to be slammed into the Geryon’s breech. The shifter had reversed flow and brought the Sixers up here, to meet the attackers forcing their way in from above.
The twenty-strong tech-guard fire-team drew up around the feed exit, torchlights darting up into the twisted shaft. Klayden held up a metal hand flat and they waited for a second or two, listening.
A voice, shouting from inside the shaft. Panic, without a doubt. The attackers knew they had been found and they would probably be scrambling back up, trying to find a way out of their trap.
The fist closed. Advance.
Both flamer-bearing Sixers hurried forward and aimed the spouts of their weapons into the feed. After they had washed the feed with flame the hellgun and melta-gun guard would follow, picking off those fleeing from the firestorm.
Suddenly a plasma blast, a great bolt of white-hot liquid fire, vomited from the feed with a brash roar, drenching the flamer troops and dissolving one in an instant. The reek of burning metal swept over Kiv, and his launcher racked a grenade to echo his revulsion.
Kiv caught a glimpse of the attackers – a sheen of purple ceramite picked out in haloes of gunfire, the glint of jade green eyepieces, the shine of bone.
The second tech-guard had lost half his body, dripping skeleton’s arm fragmenting, ribs burned clean. He had caught sight of the attackers just as the plasma gun opened up.
‘Space Marines,’ he gasped, and died.
‘Give me haywires!’ yelled Klayden as bolter fire spat from the feed, punching holes through tech-guard and ringing around the shifter equipment.
Kiv knew he was their one hope – his haywire grenades could remove the Marines’ advantage of armour and auto-senses. He would shout and his launcher would shout with him, sending electromagnetic waves billowing up into the Marines, shorting their senses, locking the joints of their armour. Tech-guards were dying, one decapitated as a round punched into his throat and blew his head clean off. Rounds snicked through the edges of Kiv’s flak-tabard and cracked around his ears as shrapnel spun and gunsmoke coiled in the air.
He took aim, ready to fire a haywire grenade through the shaft entrance and into the massive purple-armoured figures crammed into the metal throat. The launcher willed his finger to the trigger.
For order. For logic. For the Omnissiah.
A crackling shaft of arunwood speared out from the shaft and stabbed Kiv through the eye.
It was Sarpedon’s first glimpse of the enemy here – a pale-skinned and shaven-headed tech-guard, clad in red-brown quilted flak-gear, his skin punctured with wires and interfaces. The determination on the face contrasted with the youthful features as the tech-guard slid off the force staff with a flick of Sarpedon’s wrist.
There were about a dozen tech-guard still fighting, and Sarpedon wished for the hundredth time he had a better idea of the total tech-guard numbers on the platform. A hundred? A thousand? Five thousand? How many enemies would the Soul Drinkers have to fight before they could secure their honour and their lives?
He told himself it didn’t matter. The tech-guard were just men. No more.
Sarpedon was now in the thick of the fighting, Marines spilling out around him with bolters blazing. His own weapon fired off three rounds into the chest of the nearest guard, whose left arm fell sheared at the elbow along with the hellgun he was carrying.
Givrillian barrelled forward into their half-bionic leader and crushed him to the floor, bolter stock slamming into the man’s head. The bionic hand grabbed the sergeant’s shoulder pad and began tearing handfuls out of the ceramite, deep enough to draw blood, before Givrillian drove a fist through his sternum.
Another brother Marine dragged Givrillian off the enemy’s body so Thax could get a clean shot into the backs of the tech-guard now retreating between the massive steel buttresses. He caught one of them full on, the bolt boring right through him before spattering others with gobbets of superheated plasma. They fell, screamed, and caught fire. The Marines now advancing through the machinery picked them off before they could even start to scream.
Sarpedon despatched a wounded tech-guard with the butt of his staff. He was the last.
‘Secure the entry point, commander?’ said Givrillian.
Sarpedon pointed down the wide, dark metal tunnel that stretched downwards. ‘No time, sergeant. Press on, remember the objective.’
A noise vibrated through the floor like thunder from a steel sky. Flakes of rust flittered down from the juddering walls and the huge chunks of machinery began to shift. Gaps between them opened up and Sarpedon could see those cogs slowly turning.
The machinery had activated. They were being swallowed by the offspring of 674-XU28.
Nikros, the single Marine who remained of Squad Phodel, along with Apothecary Daiogan who had also survived the crash, somehow managed to find a way into the platform’s secondary magazine chambers and set krak grenades to destroy the caches of macrocannon ammunition. Then their luck ran out, however. Pinned down by a siege engineer unit, Daiogan died under a hail of heavy bolter shells and Nikros was severely wounded.
Then the magazines went up, incinerating Nikros along with everyone and everything within a two hundred-metre radius, taking a huge chunk like a bite mark out of the platform’s surface. Several dozen tech-guard were killed as the local atmosphere depressurised, failing to get their pressure-masks on. When the bulkheads closed and the leak shut down, Nikros and Daiogan had personally accounted for almost three hundred tech-guard.
Assault-sergeant Graevus linked up with two other units, one assault and one tactical, and threw a cordon around a huge docking emplacement that sprung from the platform’s sunward corner. In a textbook move of which Daenyathos would have been proud, he stormed the emplacement as if it was a fortified town. Sweeping in and downwards half his troops cut their way through the tech-guard to reach the massively complex building-sized knot of wires and readouts, which contained the portion of 674-XU28’s machine-spirit. Several squads of tech-guard, their weapons silenced to avoid accidental damage to the sacred cogitators and knowledge-conduits, attacked with bare hands.
Graevus was a stone-cold killer with little time for such amateurish antics. He dealt with most of them personally with his power axe while Tech-Marine Lygris went to work on the link between the machine-spirit and the control systems for the Geryon.
Tellos’s squad had broken through the upper surface of the platform with melta-bombs, and leapt from the rafters straight into the heart of the tech-guard prepping for combat on the vast, high-ceilinged muster deck. His squad carved out a beachhead in the shadow of the Geryon’s recoil-rams, and was acting as a focal point for the assault units making it through the hull and onto the platform’s muster deck.
Tellos stood on a mound of tech-guard corpses, energy and las-fire like a halo playing around him, with Marines scrambling up to fight beside him, firing, slicing, dying. The tech-guard fed more and more men into the maw of the killing zone he was creating – he had taken upon himself the vital task of draining the tech-guard manpower and morale while the other scattered Soul Drinker units closed in on the real prizes.
The machinery disgorged Sarpedon and Squad Givrillian into the intake for the lubricant ducts. They came out halfway up the gargantuan recoil dampeners that dominated the muster deck. The metallic mandibles opened up before them and they tumbled into the slick trench of the intake, green-black lubricant sluicing over them. Brother Doshan was sucked into the yawning black oval of the intake before Givrillian dug the boots of his armour into the stained metal and halted the slide.
Sarpedon hauled himself up so his eyes were level with the edge of the intake trench, and looked down.
They were easily a hundred and fifty metres above the cavernous muster deck. From one corner billowed a great hemisphere of flame where the magazines had gone up minutes before. Smoke was thick in the air and straggling groups of tech-guard on the Geryon structure were trying to co-ordinate supporting fire. Below them the deck, partitioned into roofless rooms and corridors, was swarming with tech-guard streaming towards the centre.
Towards a charnel house. Bodies lay so thick the attacking tech-guard had to clamber up a slope of their own fallen just to get into sight of the Marine position. The tactical squads who had made it this far were sending sheets of disciplined bolter drill-fire down towards the tech-guard, scattering charges so they would break uselessly against the counter-charging Assault Marines.
Tellos was at their head, of course, his armour black with blood and his hair thick with it. It streamed down his bare face and rained from the whirring teeth of his chainsword. In the sharp relief of his augmented senses Sarpedon watched him take down two men with one swipe, ignoring the hellgun blast that raked channels into his armour like claw marks.
‘Voxes coming in, sir!’ called Givrillian. ‘Lygris reports contact with the spirit-link!’
‘Tell him to keep me updated. We’re buying him time here.’
‘Aye, commander!’
Lygris was good. He would know what to do.
Every battle was tough. The star fort was tough. This was tougher by far. The Van Skorvold mutants had been determined but ill-trained and of varied competence. The tech-guard, meanwhile, were quality troops equipped with some of the best weaponry the Mechanicus could forge. The star fort had been a rehearsal – this was the real fight.
‘With me!’ Sarpedon called, and Squad Givrillian clambered out beside him as the closest tech-guard stragglers spotted them and moved to fire.
This was why he had been born. This was why the Emperor had looked upon him and marked him out as a warrior, so the year-long Great Harvest of the Soul Drinkers had found him a strong and valiant youth, driven to excel, fearing not even the armoured giants who strode from their spacecraft to judge him.
To fight. To bathe in the blood of his enemies, to know that every cut and stab and bullet fired was for the good of mankind and the glory of the Imperium.
This was why Tellos had been born.
They were learning fast, these tech-guard, as does anyone who must learn to survive. Their advantage was the quick-firing high-impact energy weapons and they were sending fire-teams around all sides of his makeshift position to assault from many directions at once. Tellos, like any Soul Drinker, knew the power of psychology in the thick of combat – he picked out one enemy front, annihilated it totally, and left the others gazing into the gaping hole in their attack. They faltered, they turned. Then they died, for turning to flee is the most dangerous thing a warrior can do.
He dived in – literally, blade-first over the heads of a tight knot of tech-guard, two of their number manhandling a bronze-chased autocannon. He hit shoulder-first, buckling one man’s ribcage underneath him, chainblade lashing out at the legs of another. His other hand held his combat knife and it jabbed up beneath the jaw of one of the autocannon crew. Tellos twisted it, felt the gristly wrench as the jaw came loose, and withdrew it in a fountain of blood.
Hot pain punched through his knife arm – a hellgun shot, thin and powerful. It went through the muscle and painkillers shot into his veins. The offending gunman was bisected with a wild upwards stroke, a novice’s cut that would have left Tellos wide open to counter-thrust from any foe not shell-shocked and panicking.
He knew they would be defeated even now, nerves in tatters, unable to counter the most base of attacks. Elegance and duelling had its place in war – but the need here was for butchery.
He loved them both alike. The fine art of noble combat, and the glorious rush of righteous carnage. He had loved them both even before the ships of the Great Harvest had come to his world. It was why he had been chosen.
Behind him his squads followed up, firing bolter shells into fleeing backs and quickly slaying anyone still close. The Tactical Marines further back sent volleys of shells over their heads to explode against the partitions and machine-stacks, keeping tech-guard heads down.
A few energy bolts lasered down from a hidden position and a Marine was cut nearly in half by a thick crimson melta-beam. Another took a bad-looking abdomen shot from a lasweapon and had to be dragged as the assault squad regrouped before they were surrounded.
They were dying here. Tellos’s squad was already down to half-strength. Only a couple of their fallen would ever fight again, for the formidable tech of their enemies inflicted grievous and unhealable wounds. Pallas, the apothecary who had made it to the position with some of the Tactical Marines, was busy collecting gene-seed from the fallen as well as patching up the brothers’ wounds.
But they had taken down hundreds, maybe thousands between them, and there were only so many tech-guard on this platform. Marines were hard to kill and harder to beat, and though Tellos himself bled from a dozen wounds he was more eager for the fight than he had ever been. If they had to die, they would. But they would win.
Someone screamed, and Tellos was shocked to realise it was a Space Marine, for Squad Vorts was suddenly under attack. His auto-senses blocked out the flare but the shower of sparks was still spectacular, cascading from the sundered body of one of Vorts’s Assault Marines. Attackers were storming the rear of the position, leaping from wall to console to corpse like inhuman things.
There were half-a-dozen of them and their skin was covered in swirling designs glowing blue-white so brightly the glare would hurt a normal man’s eye. Flashes of lightning burst from their fingers and eyes, and rippled across their bare torsos. They were moving so quickly that Vorts’s men hadn’t had the chance to counter-attack.
Electro-priests. Tellos had never seen a real one – few in number but famously deadly, fanatical dervishes of the machine-cult. He faced them and readied that charge. This was why he had been born.
One was cut down by bolt pistol fire before he got there. Another was speared neatly by a chainblade as he landed. The others were suddenly in the middle of Vorts’s squad – a helmet exploded under an electrified hand, a Marine was hurled twenty metres in the flash of energy discharge, trailing smoke from a ruptured chestplate.
Tellos picked out one and drew his assault, parrying blows from bare hands stronger than plasteel. The electro-priest’s eyes were silvery and blank. He jerked and spasmed quicker even than a Marine’s reflexes would allow. The priest whirled, one hand chopping low and clipping Tellos’s knee, and the sergeant barely kept upright as the shock ripped through his leg. He felt the charred muscle and skin soldered to the inside of his armour. This thing would die.
He dodged, sliced, drawing a shower of sparks off the priest’s torso. But the priest was still alive and grabbed the chainblade with arcing fingers. The mechanism shattered and teeth flew everywhere like shrapnel. Tellos countered with the knife, aiming for the space between the ribs where a heretic heart dared to beat, but the priest’s other hand grabbed his wrist with inhuman reactions.
The power sliced through him. He couldn’t get his hand away, the grip was too strong, like a magnet. He tried to slam the wrecked chainsword into the priest’s face but it caught his other hand and the circuit was completed, power coursing free through him for a split-second before with one final effort he wrenched himself free.
Tellos landed heavily on his back and spotted the priest falling, recovering, standing again. Smoke coiled from the chainblade wounds. Tellos noticed that from somewhere it had picked up two purple gauntlets.
Then he looked to see if he still held his knife, and saw the charred stumps of his wrists. His hands. It had his hands.
The world was turning white around the edges and there was a thin keening in his ears. Something grabbed him and he caught the white shoulder pad out of the corner of his eye, knowing it was Pallas who was dragging him away by the collar of his armour and pumping bolt pistol shells into the electro-priest’s face.
His hands.
This was it. He would die here. Just like he had been born to fight, he had been born to die here, maimed and broken, surrounded by his brothers and the corpses of his foes.
It wasn’t bad. He would be remembered. But there was so much more he could have done, so much…
Something huge and dark dropped down in front of him. Power arced from its staff and around the aegis hood raised from his collar. And Tellos was glad, for as long as their commander was watching, he knew his death would be glorious.
Sarpedon decided to give the tech-guard what they deserved. He decided to give them the Hell.
What did they fear? Too simple. Go back a stage – what did they want? They wanted order and logic and a plan to the universe, a galaxy where the machine god’s rules governed reality. And fear? They feared disorder and anarchy, confusion and madness, bedlam, impulse and rage.
That was their hell.
Somehow, the fact that these men had once called themselves his allies made it easier. Treachery felt worse that the mark of the xenos or the pollution of the mutant – it was more immediate, a thing of pure malice. Those who allied themselves with the foulness of Chaos were traitors too, against the Emperor and the rightness of the universe, and so it was treachery that Marines were raised to loathe more than anything else.
Put like that, it was simple.
He let the Hell boil up from the mound of corpses beneath his feet, and flood down from the shadows of the platform’s superstructure high above. It was the screams of the dying changing to howls of bloodlust, the reek of brimstone and blood. Insane loops of colour coursed through the air and deathly stains of rust spread from the hands of great shadowy spectres of corrosion.
The tech-guard ran but the electro-priests just convulsed in confusion and anger, too far gone to flee but unable to fight on with sounds and smells and images of disorder surrounding them. The battered remainder of Vorts’s squad took one down at chainsword length, sparks flying as the chainteeth bored through its skin and into its hyperactive organs.
Sarpedon went deeper. Groans of breaking machinery, like ice caps in thaw, rocked the muster deck, and the half-glimpsed shadows of falling cogs and masonry plummeted through the darkness.
‘Advance!’ The voice was that of Pallas, taking charge of the surviving forces in the strongpoint. Squads Volis and Givrillian levelled bolters and swept out, storming the surrounding positions of tech-guard now thrown into sudden disarray by the Hell. Walls of bolter fire tore through flak-tabards and augmetic torsos. Some way distant Squad Graevus arrived, dropping in from the overhanging ventilation channels onto the heads of reinforcing siege engineers. Graevus’s axe blade could just be glimpsed, a bright blue diamond flashing up and down surrounded by crimson mist.
Sarpedon joined the three survivors of Squad Vorts as they sprinted after Volis and into the heavy weapons emplacement the tech-guard had been trying to set up. Two lascannon and an autocannon with six crew and about thirty tech-guard were crammed into a flak-board emplacement built around columns of cogitator-memory blocks.
‘Lygris!’ voxed Sarpedon as he ran. ‘Does this platform run from the ship’s machine-spirit?’
‘Yes, lord.’
‘Find out how it communicates with the crew. If it’s verbal, I want a sample. You have twenty seconds.’
‘Yes, lord.’
It took him fifteen.
By the time Sarpedon had vaulted over the flak-board behind Squad Vorts, he knew how the machine-spirit sounded over the vox-casters scattered throughout the platform and the Mechanicus ship itself. It was a cultured male voice with a hint of the aristocratic – reassuringly confident, calm and intelligent. Perfect.
He went deeper still. He hardly registered his force-staff swiping off the arm of a heavy weapons crewman about to fire. He was occupied with the Hell, going deeper still.
What did they fear?
‘Die,’ boomed the voice of the machine-spirit. ‘Die. Die. Die.’
Most of them probably knew it was a trick. It didn’t matter. They froze anyway, shocked to the core by the possibility that the beloved machine, the one thing in the universe that they could trust without question, was turning on them.
‘Die.’
And they did. Volis’s bolters chewed through dozens, the chainswords of Squad Vorts cut down more. Sarpedon must have bludgeoned and carved up a score of tech-guard as they fired blindly into the air or ran screaming. In the thick of the fighting they linked up with Graevus to form a body-strewn corridor into which Soul Drinkers poured and spread outwards, surrounding knots of panicking tech-guard and butchering them.
But even if they killed every single one of them, the battlefleet surrounding the platform could destroy them as soon as it was apparent the platform had been taken. It was time they were buying, nothing more.
Above the muster deck, in the dark and cold mem-bank complex Graevus had captured in the assault’s opening minutes, Tech-Marine Lygris and a dozen-strong Marine guard were pulling a cogitator stack apart. The complex was a tangle of cogitators and mem-banks, linked by metal-clad conduits and endless snaking lengths of cable. The moans of the dying and sharp cracks of gunfire filtered up from the muster deck below, echoing and eerie in the dim shadows of the complex.
The Marines’ hands tore a tarnished metal plate away from the four metre-high obelisk of the cogitator stack, revealing a multicoloured tangle of cables. Lygris reached in and hauled a bundle of them out of the housing.
‘We’ll do this the old-fashioned way,’ he said grimly, and the shears of his servo-arm cut through the waist-thick primary cable.
Electricity flashed violently and a hundred lights on the tangle of wires and cogitators above him went dark. The machine-spirit was cut off from the Geryon, for now at least.
Lygris drew the interface from his backpack – a snaking bundle of cables tipped with a sharp silver spike. He used it rarely, but knew it intimately. It was difficult to explain for someone who had not seen the machine-cult’s teachings – this was something only the higher echelons had the right to do, and though he was a Soul Drinker and the best of men, he still recoiled at the horror the tech-priests would feel at his transgression. But it was the surest way. The only way.
He pulled down a likely-looking knot of mem-cables, pulsing with the information than ran through their filaments. He found a socket and snapped another cable into it, feeling it come to life in his hand.
‘Cover me,’ he said, glancing at the Tactical Marines. ‘I’ll be unconscious for a couple of minutes.’
‘Yes, lord.’
Lygris took the interface cable and jammed the spike into the back of his head. His eyes must have rolled back and his arms flopped by his sides, but he didn’t notice. His mind was full of the white light of knowledge – a standard mind-impulse unit link would disorientate an untrained man but this was anything but standard. The information from the Mechanicus craft and the platform was coursing through him, too much to filter, too fast to read.
He knew he couldn’t interface directly. No one could – if such technology had ever existed then it had been lost tens of thousands of years ago. He had to focus, find the systems he was looking for, do his work and get out.
Remember what you are fighting for. For the Emperor. For Dorn.
He thought he would drown in the torrent of information. Finally he found a shape – a great shape of power and brutality, massive and terrible. Lygris could feel its intelligence burning as it loomed out of the hot white overload of information, could hear the deep throb of its virtual heart, taste its reek of old iron like blood in his mouth.
He looked for a name, and found it: Geryon.
He knew the machine-spirit would be furiously seeking a way through its secondary and redundant systems, trying to find a way in to challenge the interloper. Already a black beam like a searchlight was scouring the depths of the platform’s mem-systems, hunting. Lygris had a few seconds here before the massive amorphous darkness of the machine-spirit found him, and knew also that it would all be over if it did. No one outside the Mechanicus had any idea of what a truly ancient and powerful machine-spirit could do to an intruder in its systems. Lygris could only be sure that he would be lucky if he got away with his mind wiped.
The Geryon yawned before him, huge and dark. Lygris scrabbled faster through the pale crystalline thought structures he had made to depict the mem-bank files, tore through the endless loops of cables that were control interfaces, battered down the plasteel doors his mind made from the hard-wired barriers. He sank imaginary fingers into the hard metal of the command program, forcing it to yield beneath his hands, feeling the vast machinery as great thrumming shapes against his skin. He felt immense ammo-haulers and forced them to move, slamming disruptor shells the size of tanks into the breech. The coolants, the recoil compensators, the propellant tanks – he rammed them all into position.
It was too late. The Geryon was upon him, powering up an information burst of such magnitude it would fill Lygris’s mind to bursting and then drain away, leaving a brain scoured of all memory and intelligence. It was over. He was effectively dead.
He did the last thing the machine-spirit would expect. He dived right into it, down the black-smoke throat of the Geryon, feeling its reeking hot breath blistering his skin. He had to be quick, quicker than anyone could reasonably hope to be, before the Geryon caught him and crushed him with coils of information.
Lygris swept through the darkness of the Geryon and hurtled upwards, skimming the roiling black madness of the neural circuits that formed its brain. He sought out the tiny pinprick of light that was the link between the machine-spirit and the platform’s sensoria, the conduit through which information about the outside void poured into the Geryon’s brain.
Faster, so fast Lygris thought he would die of the effort. But the Geryon was behind him, breath hot on his back, teeth gouging at him even as he dived into the glowing portal and into the sensoria systems.
Lygris looked out onto space through Geryon’s great eye. He spotted something, focused. The definition grew: conning towers and gun emplacements, the aquiline prow, the bright wash of its engines. An Imperial battleship, proud and strong, a large and tempting target.
He was locked. He was loaded.
He fired.
The Geryon-class had several classes of ammunition. One was a single titanic shell that had an immense starburst area, which would create an instant zone of interdiction through which attack craft and even lighter cruisers would be unable to travel.
Another contained a half-dozen void charges, which would spread electromagnetic chaff and pulse waves in all directions and create the equivalent of stellar minefields across a wide area.
Still another contained over a hundred disruption canisters, which would rain interference over an entire battlefleet, causing a temporary sensor-blackout. It was one of these that belched from the huge metal throat of the Geryon and burst just orbitwards of Chloure’s sub-battlefleet.
One canister struck the underside of the Hydranye Ko and its momentum barged it through a full seven decks before it exploded, sending rivers of chaff-filaments rushing through corridors and pooling in cargo holds. More than thirty crew died in the explosion, and a further seventy or so from inhaling the filaments and fragments that flooded the lower decks. Half the light cruiser’s air filtration system was clogged and the ship issued an all-points life support alert.
Several erupted between the star fort and the ships of the battlefleet. The Diligent and the Deacon Byzantine were in themselves relatively unaffected, but their view of the star fort was covered in a thick gauze of interference. Two scout craft on routine patrol from the Deacon became hopelessly lost as their unprotected servitor-guidance and comms failed completely. Several hours later they finally ran out of fuel and their crews froze to death.
The Deacon was quicker to respond to the sudden attack, firing several fragmentation torpedoes into the mass of interference discharge. The warheads malfunctioned as soon as they entered the electromagnetic fields and detonated piecemeal, adding more wreckage to the mess.
On the bridge of the Diligent, massive electrical feedback tore through the command systems and sent sheets of flame rippling up from the navigational consoles. For a few minutes all was black and hot and deadly – the screams of the dead and the roaring of flames mixed with the hiss of emergency saviour systems flooding the burning areas with fog and foam.
The damage control crew were there within three minutes, musclebound ratings with crowbars and rope hauling petty officers and nav-servitors from the burning wreckage. When the bridge was ordered enough for effective command, it had been established that the small craft tracked near the ordinatus platform were not obsolete fighters being used as maintenance craft after all, and that the platform was now under the control of the Soul Drinkers Space Marines.
It was also apparent that the Soul Drinkers had acted in a far more violent manner than Chloure had predicted. Chloure chose not to mention this.
Only the 674-XU28 was relatively unaffected, positioning itself to have a clear shot at the star fort and using its own jamming systems to counter the disruptive electromagnetic waves. Unfortunately its primary armament was currently under Soul Drinker control several thousand kilometres distant, and it had little more than defensive turret fire to boast in the way of firepower.
The tech-priests on board the 674-XU28 noted the puzzling fact that the defences on the star fort were powering down.
‘Get me damage reports! Now! And sensors!’ Givo Kourdya hated letting things out of his control, and jumped from the deep leather upholstery of his captain’s chair to bawl at the hapless petty officers and logisticians stumbling in the half-light of the bridge. Most of the lights had blown and the cogitator screens were flickering. Plumes of white smoke spurted from ruptured conduits and the viewscreen was full of ghostly static. The only sounds were sparks and steam, and the shouting of orders and curses. Otherwise there was silence, and this was significant because it meant the engines had stopped.
Lines of glowing green text chattered along the pict-slate set into the arm of the command chair. Damage reports – structural damage from the disruptor warhead was confined to a relatively small area, but the control systems for half the ship were haywire.
The engines had gone into emergency shutdown. Kourdya knew they wouldn’t be back on-line for several hours, because priority for the damage control crews was the switching back on of the coolant systems before the plasma reactors overheated.
There were still no sensors. Sensors were the most delicate things on any ship and, annoyingly, the most useful. The Hydranye Ko was almost entirely blind. The most effective means of navigation, targeting and close manoeuvring was currently to look out of a porthole.
‘Front sensorium’s down, sir,’ said the tech-adept whose unfortunate task was to liaise between the Mechanicus personnel and the command crew. ‘But the rearward facing arrays are in some kind of shape.’
‘And?’
‘We’ve got energy signatures, sir, from the planet’s far side. Two of them, cruiser strength, heading–’
‘How fast?’
‘Very fast, sir. Faster than our top speed.’
‘Space Marine cruisers,’ said Kourdya, mostly to himself. Wonderful. His ship was temporarily blind and crippled, but it didn’t matter.
The real effect of the Geryon shell had been to prevent co-operation between the three cruisers of the sub-battlefleet. Between them they could have taken on the strike cruisers, which were probably light on weaponry to make room for attack craft bays. But one-on-one, the Hydranye Ko wouldn’t have stood much of a chance even in full working order.
Kourdya sank back down into the command chair and pressed a control stud on the arm. If it still worked it would ring a bell somewhere below decks to indicate that a valet servitor should trundle up to the bridge bearing a decanter of eighty year-old devilberry liqueur and a shot glass. The Hydranye Ko wasn’t going anywhere for a while, and in such situations Kourdya always tried to allow himself some little luxury to make sure it wasn’t all bad.
‘I wish I’d never won this ship,’ he mused as he waited on the darkened bridge for his drink.
Sarpedon glanced around him – he was in the flak-board corridor they had carved through the middle of the muster deck, daring the tech-guard around to attack, sending out counter-assault parties when they did. The Hell still burned all around – chains of glowing numbers formed equations in the air that fragmented and dissolved, and snakes of rust slithered along the bloodsoaked floor. The shock was dimmed by now but tech-guard still lost it here and there, screaming for machine-spirit’s mocking voice to shut up. And the ordeal was taking the edge off even the stoutest of them, their aim thrown by shaking hands.
A voice came over the vox, strangled with static. ‘Commander Sarpedon, this is the Unendingly Just. We are clear for pick-up.’
It had worked. Lygris had done it. If the Tech-Marine survived – and the Marines set to guard him said the interface had a taken its toll on him – he would be rewarded.
‘Acknowledged, Unendingly Just,’ replied Sarpedon, raising his voice to be heard above the static on the vox-net. ‘Preparing to move out.’
Sarpedon had the majority of the Soul Drinkers with him, with the rest around Lygris’s position. He loosed off a snap shot at a head that poked above a heap of wreckage, missed, guessed the position of the rest of the body and fired through the cover. Something screamed.
Treachery can never hide.
‘Soul Drinkers!’ he yelled. ‘Prepare for withdrawal! Graevus, Vorts, meet up with Lygris’s position and secure a route. The rest, fall back with me!’
The Gundog and the Unendingly Just swept in from the other side of Lakonia’s orbit, where they had hung in the planet’s sensor-shadow while the star fort and, later, the platform had been won. Their engines, overcharged for speed, were tagged as a larger-than-cruiser signal by the sensors of the closest ship, the Hydranye Ko.
The Ko made no move to intercept as they swept over the battlefleet, through fire arcs that would have destroyed even the tough Marine strike cruisers had the battlefleet been able to see them. Only the Adeptus Mechanicus craft tried to stop them, offering token turret blasts from its macrocannon batteries. The dark purple paint on the Gundog’s hull was slightly scorched, nothing more.
The strike cruisers were run by serf-crews under the command of small Soul Drinker retinues who knew when to let their charges make the decisions and when to rein them in. Both ships had been refitted extensively for close-order manoeuvre and they tumbled elegantly towards the top of the platform, which was still wreathed in propellant wash from the Geryon’s firing. Few of the defensive turrets were still functioning – the close-range lance batteries and light torpedo waves ensured that none continued to do so.
The Unendingly Just launched a wave of twenty Thunderhawks towards the docking emplacement that Graevus had assaulted less than an hour before. Marines were already gathering amongst the docking clamps and refuelling junctions, holding the landing sites against attack.
The Gundog’s belly was empty, having held the corvus pods now dotting the hull of the star fort. Lacking a means of moving large numbers of troops it docked directly with the star fort, latching on to a wide ship-to-station thoroughfare through which millions of shackled feet had marched in the decades before. Chapter serfs made the docking secure and the Soul Drinkers withdrew from the star fort’s weapons emplacements and muster points onto the strike cruiser.
Chaplain Iktinos, nominally in command of the two hundred Soul Drinkers left on the star fort, ensured that as per Sarpedon’s standing orders, the personnel embarked upon the strike cruiser Gundog included the prisoner-priest Yser and the three dozen members of his flock.
When the Soul Drinkers withdrew into the waiting Thunderhawk gunships from the ordinatus platform, it turned out there was more than enough room in the transports. Only sixty-three Marines of the original hundred were still alive.
The Unendingly Just, receiving its brood of Thunderhawks back into its flight decks, turned gracefully and gunned its primary engines, sprinting towards the system edge where it would meet up with the Gundog and escape into the warp. It left behind nearly forty dead Soul Drinkers, and uncounted thousands of Mechanicus tech-guard.
By the time the Diligent had recovered its wits and managed to focus its sensors beyond the interference field, the two strike cruisers had long since disappeared with the three company-strong Soul Drinkers’ force. Chloure could do was sit back in his command pulpit, and watch the star fort die. The viewscreen was full of the ugly swollen bulk of the Van Skorvold star fort. It flashed like lightning as the first charges went off across its metal skin.
‘Tertiary fuel stacks,’ said Manis, the Diligent’s master of Ordnance, as a blossom of fire burst against the scorched metal shell. ‘They knew what they were doing.’
Chloure guessed the Soul Drinkers had planted bundles of grenades, or maybe explosives salvaged from the Van Skorvold arsenals, equipped with timers. Every Space Marine, he guessed, would have had extensive demolitions training and would know exactly where to plant a charge to hurt that star fort the most.
‘Can we save it?’ he asked.
‘Not a chance,’ said Manis.
Even Chloure could tell that the star fort was already tilting alarmingly towards the pale orb of Lakonia. The gravitic stabilisers, Manis informed him, had been the first to go. Probably melta-charges, but again bundles of standard grenades would do the trick if you knew what to look for.
Another explosion, the largest, tore a massive section out of the side of the star fort. The flaming wreckage scattered from the hull as if in slow-motion before winking out in the vacuum. It was moving quicker now, turning over ponderously as it fell into a terminal orbital decay.
His mission had been to apprehend the Van Skorvolds, dismantle their empire, and take it over in the name of the Administratum. He had thought he had done an extraordinary job, using just the right rumours to bring the Soul Drinkers into the operation, saving valuable resources and casualties by having the Space Marines clear the fort of resistance. But instead he had failed in his mission as completely as could be imagined – the fort was destroyed, his fleet damaged, the possibility of an Administratum-controlled human cargo business in flames. He might as well have left the Van Skorvolds in charge – the Administratum would have been far better off.
He tried to tell himself the worst thing was the billions of credits burning up before his eyes. But in truth, Chloure knew there were whole Imperial organisations devoted to publicly punishing men who had failed as totally as he had.
‘Your orders, sir?’ Vekk stood proud with his arms behind his back, as if nothing had happened.
‘I suppose we’d better follow them,’ said Chloure wearily. ‘We’ll lose them but there will be questions if we don’t try.’
‘Aye, sir.’ Vekk turned and started barking out orders as if they were important.
All that revenue, he told himself. Bloody Khobotov. Bloody Marines. All that revenue.
Callisthenes Van Skorvold never found a way out of the old defence station’s command centre, let alone the star fort itself. When the friction with Lakonia’s atmosphere melted the outer hull and sent flames gouting through the star fort, he died screaming as the skin and muscle was scorched from his bones. Finally he was reduced to a fine ash and scattered over Lakonia’s rolling green countryside along with several million tons of flaming wreckage.
Veritas Van Skorvold found and launched one of the few saviour pods she had bothered to keep maintained on the star fort, and got far enough clear of the station to avoid being dragged down into its orbital decay. She drifted for three days and was picked up by the Hydranye Ko, which was stationary in high orbit while repairs were carried out. She was promptly arrested and thrown in the brig. The security systems had failed along with rest of the ship and keeping her incarcerated proved very tiresome, especially when she began biting whoever was assigned to guard her. Captain Kourdya was heard to voice on several occasions the suspicion that the Soul Drinkers had let her live deliberately for the sole purpose of annoying him.
Every warrior needs a funeral pyre. Commander Caeon got his when the flames roared through the hull of the star fort as it broke up in the atmosphere. Caeon was, perhaps inevitably, very difficult to burn. But by the time the star fort had disintegrated, this proudest of Soul Drinkers was nothing but dust.