The first thing the Ultramarines heard was a low rumble, which rolled across the earth towards them until it became a deafening roar. The earth shook beneath their feet, cracks widened and splayed, and the vox screamed with static. From the east they saw the clouds, mighty swathes of displaced ash that had been hurled into the sky by a seismic event of horrific, planet-altering power.
Cassius kneeled and placed his palm against the ground. Through his gauntlet he could feel the shuddering of the earth, and the distant moaning of Kolovan’s pain reached his ears.
‘Galenus has been successful,’ he said.
‘Did you ever doubt it, Chaplain?’ asked Captain Fabian. They stood on the ramparts of the fortress the Ultramarines had designated Sigma Fortulis, staring down at the pass that it guarded. ‘The Fifth have done their job and we’ll do ours.’
Sigma Fortulis was a massive outcrop of wind-sculpted rock, overlooking a pass through two regions of broken and impassable uplands. On either side of the level ground, shattered spurs of rock reached up to the sky, inhabited only by the lizard-like raptors that wheeled around their uppermost peaks. The fortress itself was of stratified rock, the softer layers worn away by the action of the stinging desert winds, and as a result several low, cramped galleries were hollowed out in the rock’s interior.
Some forgotten pre-Imperial tribe had turned the natural structure into a strongpoint against enemy nomads. They had burrowed tunnels into the rock to access the upper levels, fortified some areas and enlarged others, and created a primitive but solid structure that the spears and arrows of their foes could not breach. Whole generations had presumably inhabited the cell-like living quarters cut into the heart of the rock, and defended it with loose rocks hurled from the upper levels or the simple capacity to wait out any siege.
Now, it was a bulwark on hostile ground, a defensible point upon which the Ultramarines would thin the numbers of the tyranid swarm. Fabian had placed his Devastator squads along the wall, heavy bolters to the fore. The remaining hundred men of the company were arranged in their Tactical squads, scattered throughout the structure. The muzzles of their guns were pointed towards the mouth of the canyon, beyond which the enemy gathered. They could see flyer organisms circling in the darkening air, and through the heat haze of the canyon a host was on the move. Xenos spores drifted overhead like seedlings from a great tree. Thicker and thicker they came, in clouds so dense they began to dull even Kolovan’s angry sun. A shrieking, hissing crescendo came from the pass. It would begin soon, Cassius knew.
Sergeant Remas and his men approached. Fellow Ultramarines nodded in respect as they passed; any warrior who had made it through the hell of the Tyrannic Wars was elevated in his brothers’ eyes.
‘Auspex scans indicate that the first few floors of the structure are clear,’ Remas said. ‘There’s no time to make a full search of the lower chambers, but they seem to consist of burial tombs and mausoleums. This fortress runs deep into the earth.’
‘It does not seem to warrant the name of a fortress,’ said Brother Edrius, of Fabian’s command squad. He held the company banner in one sturdy hand, flying it high over the wall so that every warrior nearby could draw inspiration from its storied history.
‘The people of this world once made it so,’ replied Cassius. ‘We shall do so again.’
‘They will soon be upon us,’ said Remas. ‘They will see this place and they will pour into it like water.’
‘We will break them here, brother,’ replied Cassius. ‘This position is a defensive bulwark straight from the pages of the Codex. Strong walls, clear lines of fire. The Emperor has graced us with the means to obliterate these wretched creatures.’
‘I’ve heard the same thing said before,’ said Remas quietly.
Remas wore the mark of the Tyrannic War veterans, but he was no Ultramarine. His own Chapter, the Scythes of the Emperor, had been devoured by the maw of Hive Fleet Kraken. As far as Cassius knew, Remas was the sole survivor. Reports had filtered through of other bands of Space Marines wearing the Chapter’s black and yellow colours launching themselves on suicide missions against high-value tyranid targets, but as yet they went unconfirmed. The Chaplain did not usually have time to waste on pity, but he could hardly imagine how it felt to carry the weight of all those dead brothers. He hoped the carnage that Remas had wrought on the xenos in the years since had provided some comfort.
Captain Fabian hurried in Cassius’ direction. ‘The Defence of Talassar is relaying a bio-reading spike through the pass,’ he said. ‘I’ve had the Rhinos lined up outside the walls, blocking any entrances and weak points.’
‘We will lose them,’ replied Cassius.
‘We will,’ said Fabian. ‘I will not drive them into the teeth of a tyranid advance when we have a defensive position, but equally I cannot send them away. Their guns will be needed.’
‘So be it,’ said Cassius.
The Chaplain and the veterans descended into the fortress. Its stairways and passages were for normal-sized humans, and the Ultramarines had to stoop and squeeze their way through to the wider galleries. Primitive carvings of Kolovan’s ancient gods covered the walls – a plump fertility goddess, a spindly red-skinned daemon, an axe-wielding kingly god who looked down from the clouds. The Third Company’s heavy weapons units were stashing ammunition at key junctions, acting on the Codex’s precepts for maintaining mobility through a defended structure.
Cassius reached one of the lower hollowed-out strata that stood open to the desert. The walls were scalloped and rippled from the action of the wind carving into smooth hollows.
‘Deploy here,’ he said to Remas. ‘Keep the watch and notify me if you see anything unusual.’
He walked up to the edge, where the rock gave way to a sheer drop. With the overhang and the smoothness of the rock he could appreciate how difficult it must have been for a primitive human enemy to assault this place, though he wondered if the tyranids would find the climb such a hindrance. They would soon find out.
‘They’re on the move,’ said Remas, racking the slide of his bolt pistol.
The enemy seeped out of the valley in a roiling tide of pale flesh that surged towards the Ultramarines’ position. Above them came the flyers, bat-winged and hideous, bearing gun-organs and acid-spewing mouths. On the ground and in the sky there were so many of the creatures, packed so closely together, that Cassius had trouble picking out individual xenoforms, but this first wave seemed to consist of the smaller, faster organisms. That was consistent with typical tyranid assault behaviour. These wretched things would die in their thousands, but every death would cost another bolter round, every hundred deaths another Ultramarine life. It was the simple, ruthless economy of war that won most battles in the tyranids’ favour.
Not here, thought Cassius. They had come prepared. Ammunition pods were scattered throughout the complex, within easy reach of each fire team; there was an unthinkable amount of firepower ready to be hurled into the xenos ranks. Dozens of anti-personnel mines had been placed in the killing field, adjusted for remote detonation so as to ensure the maximum number of casualties.
The bolters opened up, ripping into the front ranks of the alien advance. Bursts of grey and pink smoke marked scores, then hundreds, of deaths. Bodies collapsed, swept up under the momentum of the rush, ground to pieces. Flyers spiralled from the sky, swallowed up in the torrent of biological matter. As the swarm reached the foot of the wall, the mines went off in a series of concussive detonations that shook the fortress. Dust and loose stone fell from the ceiling above the veterans’ position.
‘It was like this on Sotha,’ said Remas, watching from the ledge beside Cassius. ‘When they came to assault the fortress-monastery. I watched them send waves of creatures into our guns. We even dared to hope that this was the way the battle would go and the idiot xenos would walk to their deaths. But they were just measuring the strength of our defences so they could go around them. When the real assault came, we just couldn’t fire fast enough. They hit us at every weak point. It took them weeks, but we fell.’
‘Captain Galenus has completed his mission, sergeant,’ said Cassius. ‘They cannot bring their full weight against us here.’
‘They have no shortage, Chaplain. Look.’
Larger bio-forms were lumbering into view. One was a bloated creature with a huge squirming egg sac hanging beneath its thorax. A pair of towering siege-organisms shambled behind the front line, the smaller organisms scurrying to avoid their massive hooves. One was armed with a pair of enormous claws that looked like they could carve a Rhino in two. The other had one arm deformed into something approximating a wrecking ball, with a mass of spiny bone attached to its arm by lengths of intertwined sinew.
‘Make them pay for every one of your fallen battle-brothers, sergeant,’ said Cassius. ‘I must take my place upon the ramparts. Be ready to move if I call for you.’
As Remas and his men sighted their custom bolters and began raking the xenos with accurate bursts of fire, the Chaplain began to make his way back to the wall. He drew Infernus as he ran, the combi-flamer that he himself had crafted many years ago. It had saved his life on countless occasions. He passed the mid-level squads, who were firing from the wall apertures in disciplined volleys and reloading with smooth, practised movements. Their bolter drill was of such quality that there was barely a pause in the sustained barrage.
It was easy, at first. That was the true horror of the tyranid way of war. Hundreds, even thousands of the enemy died before they even reached the gates of the fortress. The ground was thick with corpses, slick with gore. Once a warrior had emptied several clips and still not come face to face with the enemy, he began to think that the battle was won. Then another wave of alien bodies swept across the ground towards him. And another, and another.
On they came, scuttling over the ruined forms of their fellows, heedless of the storm of fire that swept from the towers and walls of the fortress. Explosive rounds hammered into the swarm, thinning it for scant moments until more pawns scurried into place. Bolter fire picked up individual organisms and hurled them back into the writhing mass, acidic blood splattering, flesh rupturing, smoke rising. Rippling, incinerating waves of white flame marked the impact of plasma cannon fire.
Taking the final stone steps to the main wall four at a time, Cassius burst out into sickly daylight. The sky was thick with tyranid flyer organisms, which were harrying the tight formations of the Ultramarines, swooping down to strike with bladed appendages or strafing them with bursts of vile biological ammunition that bored into armour and flesh. Heavy bolter fire from the fortress towers ripped into the flock of organisms circling above Sigma Fortulis, but seemed to make no appreciable difference to their numbers. Cassius battered a low-flying creature to the floor with his crozius, and opened fire with Infernus to blast several more into chunks of rancid, smoking meat.
Fabian led from the wall, firing bursts from his plasma pistol and hacking away with his power sword. He was a golden figure of hope and righteousness.
Cassius was the merciless, furious angel of death at his side.
‘Hurl them back,’ the Chaplain roared, ‘as Lord Calgar purged their filth from the mountains of Macragge.’
Infernus roared, spewing a hail of hellfire rounds that sent tyranids toppling to the floor, burning and melting as voracious acids ate their flesh. Rushing to the wall, Cassius saw a cluster of warrior-forms that had dragged themselves near to the apex of the wall, using their wicked razor forearms to scale the rough stone surface. Leaning out slightly over the edge, he thumbed the activation stud on his weapon and blanketed the creatures in a curtain of flame. Down they fell, screeching and shrieking, living torches that disappeared into the churning mass at the foot of the structure.
He turned back, and his bionic eye swept across the fortress wall. The air was filled with the dry-metal taste of burnt atmosphere as Brother Praxim fired his plasma cannon, sending great pulses of searing energy blazing through the mass. Next to him Brother Capion’s heavy bolter ran dry. He reached for a grenade at his belt and flicked it live, but a flying organism crashed into him with a clatter of bone and metal, pitching him over the crest of the wall. He hung there for just a moment, armour scraping against the stone, precariously balanced. Cassius leapt forwards to grab him, but too late. Capion fell, and the Chaplain saw the grenade go off in his hand. When the smoke cleared, there was no sign of blue armour.
‘Focus your hate,’ Cassius roared, his anger stoked. ‘Feel the righteous fury of the God-Emperor course through your veins. We are his sword. We are his rage.’
He spun, aimed Infernus, and felt the reassuring kick run down his arm as he blasted another swooping organism from the sky. It wheeled and spun like a stricken fighter jet, and smashed into the inner wall in a spray of gore.
They were taking losses, but the xenos had not breached the walls.
Amidst the continuous thunder of bolter fire, Cassius heard armoured boots clattering up the steps of the inner wall, and turned to see Sergeant Remas and his veteran squad rushing towards him.
‘Chaplain,’ Remas said, and his normally taciturn voice held the faintest hint of excitement. ‘We’ve spotted something. Something you’ll want to see.’
He held out a pair of magnoculars, and gestured towards the broken pinnacles of the highlands to the eastern side of the pass. Cassius took them, and raised them to his organic eye.
Information about wind speed, distance and ballistic drop-off streamed in a column of figures down one side of his view as he scanned the outcroppings. He could make out a dozen or so warrior-forms clambering over the rocks, a difficult climb for a human, and surely a taxing one for the bulky organisms. They were heavy guardian units which combined a solid quadrupedal frame with overlapping plates of dense armour. He knew from experience the punishing firepower that these creatures’ armour could absorb, and knew also that they often placed themselves around potentially vulnerable bio-organisms.
They were there to protect something.
The silhouette of the creature that emerged into view had too upright a posture to be a hive tyrant of the kind that were advancing along the pass below. Each of its four arms carried a blade of bone with an edge of serrated crystal and several clawed sub-limbs ran in two rows along its exoskeletal ribcage. The plates of chitin armour over its back and neck gave way to a sharp face full of a malevolent intelligence no bestial alien of the hive fleets should ever have possessed. Even from this distance the narrowed specks of its eyes spoke of a cruelty almost human in its intensity.
Cassius had seen that silhouette before, at Cold Steel Ridge when it had massacred the honour guard that saved Marneus Calgar from its blades. He had seen that face, that needle-filled grin, at the Battle of the Polar Fortresses, when it had led the charge across those same peaks Cassius had looked out upon from Tigurius’ sanctum.
‘The Swarmlord,’ breathed Cassius. ‘It lives.’
A shiver ran down his spine – anticipation and something colder, more instinctual, that he did not fully understand. Then there was the rage, the searing, hate-filled rage. How many brothers had he seen die at this creature’s hands? Dozens? Hundreds? He pictured Brother Pericos, bisected by a pair of serrated blades. He saw Verrun, roaring his defiance as the creature lifted him up and snapped his neck with what the Chaplain could have sworn was sadistic pleasure.
How many worlds had been devoured because of this abomination? So many dead. So much lost. He could not stay here and waste his bolter rounds on chattel while that monster roamed free.
‘We must kill it,’ said Remas, and it was the first time in many years that Cassius had heard a flicker of excitement in the man’s voice.
‘No. It is too far away, and we have enough to deal with as it is,’ said Captain Fabian. ‘I will not send men away on some doomed assassination mission while the fortress still stands.’
Cassius held out the macrobinoculars and Remas took them. He turned to Fabian.
‘I must kill this thing, brother,’ Cassius said.
‘Chaplain, we need you here,’ protested Fabian. ‘The men need your presence on these walls, your defiance and your strength.’
‘The men are Ultramarines,’ Cassius said. ‘They know their duty, and they will hold. And when I kill this creature, sweeping the rest of the xenos filth from Kolovan will be a far simpler task. It is the key, brother.’
‘It is a distraction. Chaplain Cassius, do not do this.’
‘Hold the walls, captain,’ Cassius said. ‘Hold the beast at bay, and I will cut off its head.’
Without another word, the Chaplain marched down the steps to the inner courtyard, the Tyrannic War veterans at his side. Ultramarine squads who had overheard the exchange glanced at the Lord Chaplain as he passed, but Cassius said nothing, offered no reassurances or even acknowledgment. He could not think of anything else but the desire to meet that foul creature in battle once more, to end its wretched existence. How had it survived? Chapter Master Calgar had torn the creature to pieces in the death-hives of Ichar IV. Cassius remembered every single moment of that cursed charnel pit – fighting through the sludge of digested Imperial citizens, xenos bio-acids eating away at his flesh, dead battle-brothers dissolving in the torrent of filth as he stumbled over their steaming corpses.
All that death. All that sacrifice. And still the beast walked free.
No longer. He would not allow it. He would find it, and he would kill it, for good this time. He would obliterate the creature so thoroughly that whatever foul xenos blasphemy had brought it back to life would never be able to do so again.
‘Our scans of the complex revealed a number of tunnels under the fortress,’ said Remas as they walked. ‘Lava channels, carved out of the earth aeons ago.’
Reaching the floor, they crossed over the inner courtyard, which was ringed by more pagan statues of forgotten gods. At the far end was an archway, and on the right a set of wide, curved stairs led down into the dusty coolness of the catacomb levels. These chambers were narrow and low-ceilinged, and the winding paths and rough stonework suggested that whichever tribe had occupied this fortress had not been overly concerned about burial rites for their dead.
Remas led them past alcoves lined with great stone coffins, placed upright and crudely carved with runes and hieroglyphs from another age. The sergeant made a right turn at an intersection, and they passed through the remains of two shattered stone doors and entered a wide, semi-circular room. The smashed remnants of clay pottery covered the floor, and the walls were scarred in places as if huge slabs of stone had been torn free. In the corner of the room there was a great gouge torn out of the stone floor. Debris surrounding the hole suggested that someone or something had broken into the chamber from below.
Sergeant Remas stepped to the edge, lit a flare and dropped it down. Red light revealed a rough tunnel that sloped gently down out of sight.
‘I’ve no idea who tunnelled their way in here,’ he said. ‘Thieves, perhaps? A creature of some kind? Whatever it was, it carved its way in via a lava channel that runs northwest, towards the mountains where we saw the Swarmlord.’
‘We cannot know that this leads to where we want to go,’ said Cassius.
‘No,’ Remas replied, ‘but geo-scans from the Talassar indicate that there is a series of caverns just to the west of the pass, at the foot of the cliffs. This particular channel leads in that direction.’
‘Perhaps it was an escape route for the fortress defenders?’ suggested Brother Fandralus, staring down into the tunnel, which was barely wide enough for the Space Marines to squeeze through.
‘We cannot cross the open ground to get to our target,’ said Remas, turning to Cassius. ‘We will be swarmed before we get twenty paces. This is our only chance.’
The Chaplain nodded. ‘Lead on, sergeant.’
Sigma Fortulis was a tough old beast. Her walls were thick and strong, and she offered fine firing angles for the warriors defending her. Whoever had carved her out of the earth had known their business, and even thousands of years after her original construction she would have posed a significant tactical challenge for any regular army.
The tyranids were no regular army.
Lumbering artillery-beasts had taken up position in the distance, out of effective range of the Ultramarines’ guns. They vomited forth clouds of explosive living missiles, which arced over the heads of the horde to tear great chunks of stone from the fortress walls. As the battle dragged on, the creatures targeted each of these weak points with barrage after barrage of their spore bombs. Slowly but surely, the xenos carved Sigma Fortulis open. Below, the simple warrior-forms performed their own tasks; eating up the ammunition of the Space Marines. In death they added to the mountain of corpses that reached ever closer to the lower galleries, and to the breaches in the wall.
There was nothing to be done but fight, and the Tactical squads that guarded the lower levels battled heroically to keep the enemy at bay for several hours. Siege organisms barrelled towards them, smashing into the rock with the force of a runaway maglev train. They reached in with their great, hooked forelimbs and strained, tearing stones free, smashing and battering with their heavy, armoured tails. Plasma guns and heavy bolters tore into them in return, but as soon as one fell another charged forth to take its place.
In the end, the deadlock was broken by a phalanx of monstrous tyranid warrior-forms, advanced organisms that fought like seasoned veterans rather than mindless beasts. They carved through the remnants of the Ultramarines’ lower-level defence with wicked, curved blade-limbs, and advanced into the fortress behind a hail of vile bio-organic projectiles that ate through ceramite and flesh with frenzied hunger.
Captain Fabian led the counter-charge from the upper levels. They met the tyranid advance in the cramped corridors of the third level. Bolter rounds and bio-rounds shredded armour and meat as the Third Company Ultramarines hurled themselves into the xenos, roaring their captain’s name. Fabian fought at the tip of the spear, his trusted command squad at his side. He hacked and stabbed with his power sword, firing point-blank into the enemy with his plasma pistol. Around him the Assault squads were relishing the chance to lock blades with their hated foe. Chainswords chewed and crunched through armoured exoskeletons, while power fists grabbed and crushed skulls and limbs. Brother Ollus pushed ahead of his captain to decapitate a snarling monster with a swing of his power axe, then collapsed as another alien fired a sizzling burst of acid into his gut at close range. These creatures were the tyranids’ elite assault troops, far deadlier than the swarming vermin that had launched the assault, but they were outnumbered by Fabian’s force. The last fell to a thrust of the captain’s blade, and Brother Galiun stepped forward to hurl a grenade down the stairway from which the beasts had emerged. It went off with a deep thud, and the screeching coming from the level below went briefly silent.
Captain Fabian wiped rancid alien blood from the visor of his helm. The Third Company had fought brilliantly. He could not have asked anything more from his men, who had made the xenos pay dearly for every foot of ground. They had offered death to the enemy with bolter and blade, felling scores, perhaps hundreds of creatures for every Adeptus Astartes warrior that fell. They had not faltered. He was proud of every one of them.
There was no way they could hold the fortress.
The captain’s eyes scanned the battlefield, the rents that siege-beasts had torn into the walls, the ruptures where tyranid artillery spores had landed, the dead brothers that lined the halls of the fortress. The endless mass of tyranids on the desert ground below, still straining to force their way into Sigma Fortulis, promised no end to the assault. They had thrown back half a dozen waves, but now the rising carpet of dead aliens and the shattered fortifications offered easy access to the fortress proper, and without the fury of Cassius to rally and focus the men, the battle was dissolving into a series of localised skirmishes that were bleeding Fabian’s ranks dry.
Two xenos hauled their way over the wall, and clattered through the mass of corpses towards him. He met the first with a horizontal slash of his power sword, cutting a blade appendage off and slicing deep into the creature’s neck. Edrius charged in and rammed the company banner into the back of the second, pinning it. He aimed his bolt pistol and put a round through the xenos’ skull, ending its mindless screeching. Fabian nodded in appreciation.
‘We cannot hold here, sir,’ Edrius growled. He had taken an acid burn to the throat, and it clearly pained him to speak. ‘They are inside the walls.’
Fabian fired his plasma pistol over the parapet, blasting more climbing xenoforms into ash.
‘I know, brother,’ he said. ‘We have contacted Sergeant Verigar’s force at the landing zone. They are sending airborne extraction. We must hold out until they get here.’
Edrius coughed up blood, cursed and wiped his mouth clean with the back of his gauntlet. ‘Aye, captain,’ he said.
‘Brother Gallus,’ Fabian shouted to his vox operator. ‘Send the word to all squads, fall back to the top level.’
The rampart wall of Sigma Fortulis was wide enough for two Space Marines to comfortably pass each other by, but not for any kind of airborne extraction. The only area where the Third could theoretically do so was the north-western tower, at the only corner of the fort left intact. At both compass points where the wall met the tower, rough stone steps spiralled up to the apex, a wide, roughly circular platform cut with spherical, concentric grooves. They could land a single gunship here at a time, which meant they would have to extract squad-by-squad – hardly ideal, but better than any alternative Fabian could think of.
Below, in the lower halls of Sigma Fortulis, Fabian knew his men were falling back, hacking their way towards the ramparts. It would be hell down there. No longer faced with an effective gun-line, the tyranids would pour into the fortress in horrific numbers, harrying the retreating Space Marines every step of the way.
‘Damn your reckless anger, Chaplain,’ the captain hissed.
With Cassius gone, the Ultramarines had lost a vital tactical edge. Fabian was a fine warrior and an experienced leader, but he could not set a fire in his warriors’ hearts like the Chaplain could. Cassius was an icon, a symbol of the undefeatable, eternal glory of the Adeptus Astartes. He had been purging the enemies of mankind for centuries before Fabian was even born, had held back the tyranid tide on a hundred worlds. His mere presence was enough to convince the men that they would destroy any force sent against them – how could they possibly fall, with the legendary Master of Sanctity at their side?
Now he was gone, the thick walls of Sigma Fortulis felt like scant protection indeed.
‘Second and fifth squads, hold the stairs,’ he roared, rushing alongside his men to the northwest tower. ‘Keep them clear. The rest of you, sweep the walls and the skies. Devastator squads to the top of the tower.’
The heavy weapons teams lugged their bulky weapons up the winding steps of the tower, and set up behind its shallow crenellations. The spine-shaking thud of heavy bolter fire began afresh, joined by the roar of plasma and flame. By now the tyranids had scaled the eastern wall in force, and they swept across the ramparts towards the repositioned Space Marines. Once again the Ultramarines had a solid defensive position, with Tactical squads kneeling to the fore and the blistering fire of the heavy weapons teams screaming overhead. Warrior-forms leapt and ran at the ceramite wall, but were torn to shreds by the enfilade. The xenos flyers had more success, and their bio-organic weapons dropped several Space Marines to the ground, smoking craters burned through their armour, but the creatures’ numbers had been severely culled by concentrated fire.
The sun dimmed, as if it too was being choked to death by the climactic torture that the tyranids had unleashed upon Kolovan. Suddenly it was the dusty beige of late evening, then the near pitch-black of night. Dull, grey snow fell across the carnage, blanketing the proud blue of the Ultramarines and the foul milky yellow of the xenos swarm in a layer of filth. Not snow, Fabian realised. The first ash clouds from Galenus’ detonation had arrived, thick enough to blot out the sun. He blinked on his helmet’s night-vision filter, and winced as he fired a burst of white-hot plasma into the midst of the enemy that briefly lit up his view like the aftermath of a nuclear explosion.
Tactical squads poured out of the lower level access stairs, taking their place in the Ultramarines line with barely a pause, and then turning to add their own volleys to the barrage. Fabian felt a surge of pride as he watched them, the finest warriors in the galaxy, still calm and disciplined in the face of this chaos.
Their proud defiance would not be enough. More and more warrior-forms poured over the wall, and finally the advance reached blade range. No longer able to pour fire into the enemy, the Ultramarines were forced to switch to combat knives and other close-range weapons instead. Fabian pushed to the front, leading with his power sword. In the frenzy of the press, all thought of finesse or weapon-art was abandoned in favour of blunt, mechanical killing. He skewered one creature through the mouth, wrenched his blade free and carved a bloody line across the torso of another. He punched, smashed with the pommel of his blade, stomped a fallen xenos under his boots, spun and intercepted a thrusting bonesword, and hacked his blade into the owner’s cranium in a spray of ichor.
Bio-rounds slammed into his pauldron, staggering him, and a shrieking warrior-form leapt upon his back, blade-limbs digging at his warplate, trying to find a weak point in the fine ceramite. Brother Edrius leapt in, thrusting his combat knife into the thing’s side and dragging it to the floor, despatching it with practised thrusts.
‘My thanks, brother,’ said Fabian.
Edrius nodded, lifting the company banner high into the air, where it was met with a furious cheer. They were retreating here, thought Fabian, but no shame would fall upon his beloved Third Company.
Something tall and unthinkably fast hurled itself over the wall and flashed towards Edrius, sending torn Ultramarines reeling behind it as it came.
There was the hissing rush of something incredibly sharp being propelled through the air with tremendous force, and a strangled gasp from Brother Edrius. The standard bearer turned to Fabian, eyes wide in surprise, and the right half of his upper torso slid free, cut at a perfect diagonal. The rest of his body swayed a moment, and then toppled back into the arms of the Space Marine behind him with a splatter of gore.
In the fallen Ultramarine’s place stood a creature of nightmare. Its eyes, twin orbs of pitiless black, were buried under a sweeping head-crest that daggered backwards, tipped with bony spikes and ridges. Its gaping maw was filled with row upon row of needle-sharp teeth, through which a vile, purple tongue protruded, tasting the air. The body was a towering mass of corded muscle and chitin. Each limb grasped a bio-weapon, a writhing, tendon-like lash tipped with cruel barbs in the right claw, a serrated bonesword in the left. Two lower arms clutched a vicious-looking gun-organ, which pulsed with energy.
The very presence of the creature seemed to inspire the xenos around it into a frenzied rage. They shrieked as one, and hurled themselves at the Space Marines with renewed vigour. As they surged forward, so did the beast, rushing at Fabian with its whip leading the way. The captain batted the weapon aside, but it curled around his blade and scored his plate at the side, not enough to breach the armour, but with force enough to send him staggering sideways into the thrust of the creature’s bonesword. At the last moment he pirouetted to the right, letting the weapon scrape past him, and returned with a thrust aimed at the beast’s lower torso. It turned as well, with grace that seemed absurd given its horrific, muscle-bound form, avoiding the strike by the barest of margins.
Fabian set his feet and charged in again, accepting another lash from the creature’s whip and pushing the beast’s blade out wide with his own weapon, then coming back across with a backhand cut that sliced the gun-organ in half in a spray of ichor and bone fragments. The creature shrieked, reeled backwards, and Fabian saw the opening. He lunged forward, tip of his blade seeking the beast’s armoured chest. It was a kill-thrust, aggressive and viper-quick.
The tyranid anticipated it. As Fabian lunged, it stepped back with unnatural speed, and the captain realised in shock that the creature had desired his strike, had baited him into it. The tendril lash wrapped around his sword arm, overextending his motion and dragging him forward to stumble on the blood-slick ground. He landed on one knee, disorientated. The bonesword came down. Fabian twisted to the side, but still it cracked into his helm, slicing through the ceramite with ease, carving into his face.
Agony lanced through his skull. His vision exploded, helmet sensors destroyed by the strike. Light blinded him, then darkness fell over him. He had no idea where he was, where his enemy was. He rolled to the side, desperately, and heard the shriek of something hard scraping stone. With one hand he pulled his ruined helm free. Something came with it, something wet and organic. Fabian gasped in agony. Something wrapped around his throat, digging into his flesh, and he felt himself being dragged to his feet.
Suddenly there was light. Not the fluorescent green of his helmet’s night-vision, but a harsh and searching glare that ached at his left eye. For some reason it did not reach his right. The sun had come back, he thought, blurrily. There was a sound too, a deep, throaty scream backed by a mechanical thud-thud-thud. Dimly, as if through a cloud of muddied water, he saw the xenos clutching him turn its hateful stare to the skies, and he heard it offer its own roar of outrage.
He grabbed at his belt, felt his fingers close around a small, metal disk.
The creature looked back at him, dragged him closer until he could smell its reeking, spoiled-meat breath, and brought its blade back to strike.
Fabian punched his clenched fist through its hideous teeth, burying his gauntlet in its throat. The metal disk he clutched in that gauntlet gave a slight, electronic trill muffled by the enveloping flesh.
Then his world erupted in fire.