After several hours of winding their way through the confines of the lava channel, Cassius and the veteran squad broke through into a twisted, cramped series of conduits bisected by great pillars of igneous rock. These immense shafts glistened in the bioluminescent light given off by great swathes of fungal growths draping the walls. The soft blue glow they emanated revealed a twisting stair carved into the largest of these pillars, winding its way towards the surface.
Ascending the stairway carefully, for it was hardly designed for the staggering weight of a Space Marine in full warplate, they passed through another slowly rising chamber. At the far end was a boulder set into a series of grooves, cleverly designed so that a team of humans could have hauled it clear. Cassius shifted it aside with ease, and hazy yellow light seeped into the hollow, along with motes of drifting ash.
‘Well done, sergeant,’ he nodded, as the squad filtered out into the dull glare of Kolovan’s sun.
They had emerged roughly a thousand metres from the fortress, in a sheltered nook to the west of the canyon pass that masked their position from the main xenos force. The air was so thick with the miasma of alien spores accompanying the tyranid horde that the filter of Cassius’ rebreather unit was struggling to keep up. The noise of battle behind them was deafening, the high-pitched screech of the alien horde blending with the rhythmic thud of impacting bolter shells and the throaty roar of heavy weapons fire.
‘We should be below the Swarmlord’s last confirmed position,’ said Remas, already holstering his bolt pistol and reaching for a solid handhold. ‘We must make haste as we’ll be exposed as we climb.’
The slope of shattered rock was formidable. Soldiers of the Astra Militarum, even specialised reconnaissance troops, would have been hard-pressed to make the climb. The Ultramarines were tireless. They did not glance back as they climbed with weapons slung. Even Covellos kept pace, his grav-cannon clamped to his back. Cassius led the way and where he could not find a grip, he splintered the stone beneath his fingers to make his own.
The Chaplain paused in his ascent. He swung onto a roughly horizontal ledge and planted his feet, then held his combi-bolter up to his bionic eye, scanning the slope above him.
‘Move on, brothers!’ said Cassius. ‘Do not tarry. We will not remain unseen for long.’
In the valley below, the thump and chatter of bolter fire reached his ears. He risked a backwards glance. Fresh waves of warrior-organisms reached the close bolter range of the defending Ultramarines, and vanished in bursts of gore and shrapnel. A missile streaked from the upper galleries and struck the forward limb of an artillery-beast. It toppled forwards, its huge back-mounted bio-cannon discharging directly into the ground in front of it, sending a plume of dust and foul alien blood into the sky.
Finally, Cassius reached the top of the slope, emerging on a small ledge of broken rock. In front of him the ground rose once more, but it was a gentle bank of no more than a few metres. He drew his weapons, and scanned the immediate environment while he waited for the veteran squad to join him. He saw no movement, but he felt a shiver of anticipation run down his spine. They were close, he could feel it. Centuries of battle had gifted Cassius with an almost preternatural combat sense. Remas and his men clambered over the edge and drew their weapons.
‘We draw near,’ said Sergeant Remas. ‘I can smell the foulness of the enemy from here.’
‘Beyond that rise,’ said Brother Covellos in a hushed voice, gesturing forwards. With guns held at the ready and blades drawn, the Tyrannic War veterans went to hunt their prey.
It did not take them long to find the enemy. The next shallow rise of loose stone opened onto a wide plateau. Curved spars of stone, like broken ribs, reached towards the discoloured sky. Raptors’ nests formed black knots of dried leaves and debris. Between the uprooted slabs of rock lumbered the Swarmlord’s guard, each one a mobile fortress of muscle and bone. Their mouths were locked in a savage grin beneath armour plating akin to the visor of a helmet, and they walked on four legs, carrying a symbiote gun in their forelimbs. The weapon was a fleshy tube that ended in a lipless mouth clamped around a spine of ridged bone. Cassius counted half a dozen ranged across the plateau, sensor-pits beneath their jawlines opening and closing as they searched for the approaching Ultramarines.
One of the creatures bellowed, and the low rolling sound seemed to shake the stone around Cassius. The other xenos replied with braying calls of their own and began to stalk towards the veterans’ position.
Cassius ducked into cover as the other veterans spread out around him. Covellos backed against a slab of rock and hefted his grav-cannon, the servos of his armour whining as they compensated for the weapon’s weight. Eight pairs of eyes fell on the Chaplain, waiting eagerly for the signal to engage the hated foe.
‘On the slopes beneath the northern fortress of Macragge, you saw it!’ called out Cassius as the hive guard advanced. ‘You, Etriades, and you, Fandralus. You were there. And Brother Covellos, you witnessed the depravity of the tyranid in the hive cities of Genestus! Here is where you claim your revenge. With me, brothers, for Macragge and for Sotha!’
Cassius knew what drove every one of the Ultramarines alongside him. He knew how to hit the nerve that would spur each of them on. Cassius led the charge and the veterans followed him, with Etriades sprinting, twin chainswords out, as if racing Cassius to reach the enemy.
The veterans fired as they ran. A volley slammed into one hive guard, blasting chunks from the chitin protecting its head.
One hive guard stood proud of cover and levelled its weapon. A split second later a zone of warped gravity imploded around it, crushing its exoskeleton and pulping the muscle and organ within. One side of the creature was squashed into gory shreds by the blast of Covellos’ grav-cannon, and it slumped, oozing gore, against the rocks.
‘They crumble before our fury!’ cried Cassius.
The hive guard counter-charged. Etriades jumped and kicked off a spur of rock, crashing into one, blades first. Cassius followed Etriades in as the hive guard pivoted to throw off the Ultramarine. Etriades hacked at the tyranid but the chitin armouring the creature’s leg turned aside the worst of the blow. The guard stamped down on Etriades’ leg and bowed down over him with its jaw yawning wide.
Cassius drew back his crozius arcanum and swung it down at the hive guard as its head was turned from him. The weapon’s head crunched into its shoulder and the power field erupted in a flash of light and thunder. The chitin was blown open, revealing slabs of seething muscle inside. A jet of vaporised gore spurted from the wound and Cassius was momentarily blinded. He fought on instinct, ducking the expected return blow from the barrel of the hive guard’s cannon and driving his fist up into its jaw.
The tyranid fell back, roaring. Etriades rolled from beneath its hoof and stabbed both blades up into its torso. The blades chewed in between the exoskeleton ribs and plunged deep into organ and muscle. The tyranid threw its head back and howled as gore bubbled up between its jaws.
Cassius brought the crozius down into its face. The creature’s lower jaw was ripped open and the split ran down to its breastbone.
Etriades ripped his chainswords free and rammed both into the gory mess that remained of the tyranid’s mouth. The chainteeth sawed deep into its brain.
Cassius glanced behind him to size up the rest of the fight. Another hive guard was down from the veterans’ combined bolter fire. Brother Vetrius and Sergeant Remas were tackling another, and Remas’ power sword had already hacked off one of its forelimbs. The squad was forcing back the monsters, breaking up their line and engaging them face-to-face.
From the corner of his eye, the Chaplain caught a glimpse of pale flesh. One of the xenos aimed its vile weapon through the gap between two stone spires. Instinct sparked Cassius to movement, but he was nowhere near quick enough to cover the ground to the creature before it fired.
The quivering mouth of the cannon spat the spine of twisted bone across the plateau. Cassius followed its path as it arrowed towards where Brother Covellos was lining up another shot from his grav-cannon.
The spike impaled Covellos through the chest and pinned him to the slab of rock behind him. Blood welled up from the split and buckled breastplate. The grav-cannon fell to the ground at Covellos’ side and his hands opened and closed convulsively.
‘Brother!’ yelled Vetrius. He left Remas’ side and ran for his fallen squadmate.
‘Press on!’ yelled Cassius. ‘Break the line! Break their will!’
If the squad stopped here to finish off the hive guard, they would never achieve their objective. They had to hit hard and fast, before the tyranids regrouped and brought more warrior-forms to bear.
Cassius and Etriades ran at the hive guard who had slain Covellos. Cassius doused it in flame as it tried to aim at Etriades, and in its moment of confusion and pain Cassius was upon it. He battered its gun aside with one blow of his crozius and shattered its jaw with the return stroke. Etriades dived into the burning tyranid with all the reckless fury the xenos stoked in him, ramming his chainblades over and over again into the abdomen of the hive guard where the exoskeleton gave way to a stretch of vulnerable skin.
‘You four with me,’ shouted Cassius, gesturing to Remas, Etriades, Vetrius and Fandralus. These were his best fighters, his hardiest souls. ‘The rest of you, finish the guardians.’
Beyond the hive guard line, watching the battle in the valley below, was the towering four-armed shape of the Swarmlord. This close it was even clearer what an aberration the creature was. Its colours were a dark and mottled version of the hive fleet’s colouration, and it was covered in scar tissue and encrusted growths as if it had been dredged up from the bottom of an ocean. Its four boneswords, each longer than a Space Marine was tall, were covered in deformed eyes and edged with fang-like growths of organic crystal. It had a lean, ancient look, as if time had winnowed out all the unnecessary tissue and left it composed of pure muscle, bone and malice.
A rank, spore-heavy haze hung around the Swarmlord, spurted out by the vents emerging from the chitin plates along its back. It let out a low clicking purr as it turned from the battle below to face Cassius, and its eyes narrowed as it focused on the Chaplain.
The Swarmlord was not just another alien menace. It was not just a lightning rod around which the tyranid swarm gathered. It was the herald of oblivion. It had appeared on a hundred worlds across the galaxy, always at the head of a rampant horde that swept all before it. It was clever, appallingly so, capable of surprising even the most brilliant tactical minds of the Imperium. At Macragge it had outmanoeuvred even Marneus Calgar, the heir of Guilliman’s strategic brilliance.
And it was supposed to be dead.
‘I recognise you,’ said Cassius as he moved carefully across the broken ground, describing a wide circle around the Swarmlord. Its boneswords gave it a huge killing edge and Cassius stayed just out of range. ‘I saw you fall at the Battle for Macragge. We killed you once. And when we have taught you how to fear, we will kill you again.’
The sounds of battle from behind Cassius seemed very far away as he focused on the Swarmlord. Its face split in what looked very much like a grin, the sharp mandibles on either side of its jaws sliding back to reveal dozens of knife-like teeth. It spun two of its blades like a duellist limbering up their sword arm, and joints clicked and popped as it shifted its weight. Its long, scaly tail slithered as it passed over the rocks.
Cassius didn’t take his eyes off the towering xenos as he swapped out the magazine of his bolter. He slid in a new one, this one only half-full because the shells inside were manufactured by a precious few archaeotech crucibles of the Adeptus Mechanicus.
Sergeant Remas reached Cassius’ side along with Brother Etriades. Etriades’ chainblades were already smoking with the effort of the motors sawing through chitin and muscle.
‘We fight this thing as one,’ growled Cassius. ‘Temper your rage with caution, Etriades. I have seen too many brothers fall to those blades.’
The Swarmlord growled, shaking the ground. It advanced a half pace and Cassius dropped back in response, maintaining the gap.
Brother Fandralus reached Cassius’ position. His armour was badly scored, and he reloaded his bolter as he shook the worst of the gore from his faceplate. Fandralus was as tough as they came; the hive guard had failed in their best efforts to bring him down. Vetrius took the creature’s left flank, hefting his chainsword.
‘Our actions here will decide the fate of this entire sector,’ Cassius continued, circling the creature slowly. ‘This is a glorious moment. The Emperor sent us here to serve His justice, and we will not be found wanting.’
The Swarmlord crouched down and bellowed. The sound was like a shrieking gale that blew hot and damp across the plateau. Cassius levelled his combi-bolter at it and it swayed to the side, extremely agile for a creature of such size.
‘In the name of the primarch, and for every loyal Imperial soul this filth has claimed,’ said Cassius, raising his crozius into the air, ‘take its head!’
It was Etriades who moved first. Cassius knew he would – he could not be held back from a fight. In a line battle that was a weakness that needed addressing, but here his fury would be required; they had to keep the creature busy on all sides, off-balance and reeling.
It was easier said than done.
The Swarmlord rushed forward and its four blades swept out. Vetrius’ neck opened, spraying crimson, and a trailing blade tore across his gut. He fell, pawing at his neck, gasping. Etriades leapt and swivelled, throwing himself between the scything blades to land inside the alien’s guard. The Swarmlord spun on its back leg, again far quicker than its bulk seemed capable of, and its muscular tail slammed into Etriades, sending him flying through the air. Stone splintered as he crunched to a halt a few metres from the edge of a sudden drop into the valley.
Fandralus rattled off a volley of bolter shells into the Swarmlord. The xenos barely noticed the explosive impacts along its back carapace but it threw a hate-filled glance in his direction. It was just enough to distract it as Cassius and Remas rushed in.
Remas fired as he went. Again, the bolter shells barely scratched the layers of impacted chitin. Remas leapt over a bonesword that whipped towards him at knee height, but he immediately had to dive face-first to the ground to avoid another that almost sliced off his head. A third cut down and Remas rolled out of the way.
The Swarmlord was focused on Remas. That was their advantage – for all its strength and fury, the Ultramarines outnumbered it. It was truly rare to corner such a creature alone, and that gave the squad an equally rare opportunity to kill it. Cassius ran at it, holding his fire, and brought his crozius down in a crushing overhead blow.
It would do no good to strike at its torso or head. What the lightning-quick boneswords did not parry, the layers of chitin would turn aside. Instead Cassius aimed low, at the muscle and exoskeleton of the Swarmlord’s upper back leg.
With a burst of light, the armour of its thigh was torn open. Hard shrapnel pinged against Cassius’ armour. The muscle packing the Swarmlord’s leg was laid gorily open and the monster howled.
‘Fine strike, Chaplain!’ yelled Etriades. He assaulted the Swarmlord again, and it swivelled to face him. Its mouth split wide open and it bellowed at Etriades as it parried another of his sword-blows with supernatural speed. The vents along its back spat a grey-green spore fog that cast a foul shadow over the plateau, as if night had suddenly fallen on Kolovan.
A counter-stroke from the Swarmlord caught Etriades on his shin and the resonating crystal sliced right through ceramite and bone. The warrior was pitched onto his back with his foot and lower leg sailing over the edge of the plateau. The severed portion tumbled down towards the seething mass of tyranids.
Etriades gasped in pain and reached for the bolt pistol mag-clamped to his thigh.
Cassius rolled out of the way of the Swarmlord’s blades, behind the creature. Its tail sailed over his head. He aimed at its wounded leg and fired his combi-weapon’s nozzle, dousing the limb in clinging fuel. Exposed muscle burned and the xenos buckled onto one reverse-jointed knee as the flames clambered up its back and ribcage.
Bolter shells pinged off the Swarmlord’s carapace. Etriades’ and Fandralus’ fire was accurate, but achieved little more than to annoy the creature. The Swarmlord learned quickly, and it had identified the Chaplain as the greatest threat. It cast Fandralus aside with a disinterested backhand swipe that tore through his armour, and focused now on Cassius.
It did not lunge at the Chaplain with its blades or try to crunch down on his body with its fangs. A flicker of power burst into life in front of its face, between its unblinking eyes. Cassius had just enough warning from the familiar sensation of greasiness and static to dive for cover and shield his mind as much as his body.
Warpcraft. He had faced the assaults of enemy psykers so many times he had written whole volumes of addenda to the Codex Astartes on the perils of the witch. Eldar farseers had tried to flay his soul from his body and sorcerers pledged to the gods of the warp had sought to boil his blood or immolate him with the power of their minds. He had trained with the Librarians of the Ultramarines, including the peerless Tigurius himself, to resist the effects of the psyker’s arts on his mind and body.
Cassius’ gambit had worked. He had wounded the xenos and caught its attention, and now it would attempt to scour his mind. But Cassius’ spirit was as strong as that of any Space Marine who had walked the Imperium since the Horus Heresy, and the Swarmlord would find its psychic power was not as irresistible as it thought.
Cassius had heard the creature’s horrific scream from a distance before, echoing between the polar mountains of Macragge. It was a brute-force assault that drove a psychic spike into the mind of the target, shattering its brain functions and leaving it a soul-dead husk. Cassius had never experienced it first-hand until now, and he ran rapidly through a mental shielding prayer as the rising shriek of the Swarmlord’s will rose in his mind.
From the Kraken and the daemon, from the traitor and the heretic, from those without, those within and those beyond – my Emperor, my primarch, my brethren living and dead, deliver us.
A white-hot spear of sound impaled Cassius. The pain burst in his mind and black spots flared before his eyes. He felt himself falling.
Pain was nothing. A Space Marine did not fear it – he did not fear anything. But the loss of control was abhorrent. The thought of being rendered helpless was so offensive that Cassius took hold of that rage and clung to it, splitting the conscious part of himself away from the substance of his brain overwhelmed by the assault.
He rode it out. A lesser mind would have been consumed, but Cassius, the Master of Sanctity, had been conditioned and counselled by Lord Tigurius in the mental discipline required by a Chaplain of the Space Marines.
The spike was withdrawn. Cassius poured his fury, his faith, everything that was key to his soul, into the breach it left behind. His body lay on the rocks of the plateau, taut with convulsions. His fist had clenched reflexively around his crozius, and he snatched the combi-bolter from where it had fallen on the rocks beside him.
The Chaplain hauled himself upright, forcing back the complaints of his strained body. The Swarmlord had turned away, assuming Cassius was dead, to finish off Etriades who was picking himself up with one shoulder guard badly buckled and one leg a mangled stump.
The Swarmlord paused. Its sensor-pits flared. But Cassius was even faster than the tyranid’s alien reflexes. He blasted a trio of shots into the side of its face. The bolts were not the standard ammunition of the Adeptus Astartes, but hellfire rounds, created by the alien hunters of the Ordo Xenos. Their explosive cores had been replaced with reservoirs of molecular acid created to react with the tyranid physiology and burn through their chitin and flesh like the flame of a cutting torch. The side of the Swarmlord’s face disintegrated, revealing the sensor-pit channels riddling its skull, and for a moment one eye socket was eaten bare to echo Cassius’ own scarred face.
Cassius dived in closer and smacked his crozius against the side of the Swarmlord’s grinning skull. The power field tore through muscle and bone in a flash. The alien’s head cracked to the side in a burst of shattered teeth. Its lower jaw was half torn from its face and hung by a flap of skin, spraying gore.
The Swarmlord dropped to one knee, stunned. Cassius swung his reverse blow up into its throat and felt the crunch of its exoskeleton fracturing. Remas leapt at the creature, leading with his power sword. With the tyranid’s guard down, it was vulnerable. The blade ripped into its chest. Fandralus was next in, pouring bolter fire into the Swarmlord’s shattered face despite the appalling wound that had opened his breastplate horizontally. Brother Tiresis was next in, fresh from breaking the line of hive guard, swinging his power axe into the Swarmlord’s wounded leg and burying the blade deep in the muscle.
The rest of the squad caught up with Cassius’ group, bolters freshly reloaded with hellfire rounds. As the Swarmlord weaved its blades around to fend off the melee assault, the Space Marines opened fire from all sides, enveloping the hated creature in a blistering storm. It screeched, staggered and slumped to the floor in a defensive crouch.
Sensing that the battle was nearing its end, Fandralus drew his blade and rushed in at the monster’s unguarded flank.
‘Die, damn you!’ he shouted as he ran, gripping the sword two-handed, tip pointing at the ground. He raised the blade, aiming to drive it deep into the stricken beast’s flank.
The Swarmlord reared up, blood spraying from the countless wounds the Ultramarines had opened on its body. It swept its upper pair of boneswords across in a lateral slice, blindingly fast. Fandralus came apart, bisected at the waist with surgical precision.
But the Swarmlord had lowered its defences to kill. More bolter shells poured in, opening fresh wounds in the creature’s charred and mangled exoskeleton. Someone hurled a grenade, which exploded an inch from its face, cooking flesh and blasting a chunk of its shattered jaw free. Cassius kept Infernus level, washing the creature with cleansing flame. The stench of burning matter was almost unbearable. The Swarmlord threw its ruined head back and bellowed so loudly the sound echoed back and forth around the valley below like the sounding of a terrible war-horn.
The sound returned from below, this time the howling of thousands of tyranids. As if in mourning, the entire horde cried out, from the high screeches of the termagants to the deep lowing of the siege-organisms. It was the sound of anguish and pain distilled, the desolate wail of the hive mind recognising the suffering of its deadliest avatar.
‘No pause!’ yelled Cassius. His head still rang from the psychic assault and the edges of his vision were greyed out, but he forced on through the pain. ‘No quarter!’
Cassius felt the humming in his hand as the crozius’ power field flared back into life. He ran at the Swarmlord and leapt, trusting in the pain and confusion of the creature to keep it from hitting him with another swipe of its boneswords. His crozius fell in a high arc and slammed into its face above its ruined left eye. It split the skull clean open and in a flash obliterated everything from the creature’s forehead to brain stem. The xenos reeled and crashed to the floor.
The veterans moved in, firing the last of their hellfire ammunition into the creature’s vital organs, making sure that it was well and truly dead.
Cassius let the pain in his head ebb away as he looked upon the corpse of the terror of Macragge, the avatar of the hive mind. His armour dispensed painkillers into his bloodstream and his head cleared slightly, though he still felt the oily, nauseous aftermath of the psychic intrusion.
It was dead. He stared at its ruined features, and tiredness battled with relief for mastery of his battered soul. He thought of all the brave sons of Ultramar that had fallen at this monster’s claws, remembered the horror he had felt when it had downed Marneus Calgar. The Chapter Master had never been quite the same since that day. Still glorious, of course, still the greatest hero of the Imperium and the unmatched warrior he always was, but colder and slower to smile. He had left something behind on the blood-slicked ice of Macragge. Another reason to hate the tyranids. Another reason to celebrate the death of this monster. And yet Cassius could not.
There was no flare of triumph in the Chaplain’s mind. Perhaps, had he been younger, he would have felt it and grasped it, and sermonised on the glory the veterans had just earned for their Chapter. He would have reflected on how the history of the Imperium had been changed by the actions of the squad that day. But now, the needs of the battle still being fought weighed too heavily for him to give those thoughts the time to form. The day was not over yet.
Cassius turned back to his squad, who had gathered around the Swarmlord’s corpse. Etriades was leaning against a rock, pale and exhausted but with a triumphant smile on his face. The Chaplain rushed to his side. The veteran’s transhuman biology had already clotted the blood in his severed leg, but a score of other wounds were starting to take their toll. Etriades would require urgent medical attention if he were to survive.
‘It is done,’ said the Chaplain. Behind them the Swarmlord was a mass of torn organs, severed limbs and scorched matter. The stones glistened with ichor. ‘You have earned great glory today, brother. Now hold on, and we’ll get you to an Apothecary.’
‘I’m done, Chaplain,’ Etriades said, through a mouthful of blood. ‘I’ll just slow you down. Leave me here with a bolter, and I’ll cover your retreat.’
‘Enough,’ snapped Cassius. ‘Talk such foolishness again and I will have you doing penance for the next hundred years. You’re coming with us.’
As Brother Tiresis helped Etriades up, the Chaplain walked to the edge of the pass and looked down. The tyranid mass had not halted with the death of the Swarmlord. Sigma Fortulis would not hold much longer. In the bloody quagmire that had built up beneath the fortress, hundreds of warrior-forms were swarming over the heaps of their dead. A hive tyrant had survived the volleys of the Devastator units above and was marshalling the lesser organisms forward, and already a living ladder of writhing bodies had formed as they clambered up the sheer rock to reach the lowest galleries. Bolter fire stuttered down ceaselessly in a waterfall of shrapnel that sliced and tore the tyranids apart, but it was not enough to stop them from forcing a breach.
‘Take the corpse of Brother Covellos,’ continued Cassius. ‘There is no time to mourn our lost, nor to savour our victory. Our battle-brothers need us. The swarm does not relent.’
‘Chaplain!’ came the voice of Brother Kilrian. ‘They cut off our retreat!’
Cassius ran to the scree slope and stared down. Hundreds of warrior-forms were clawing their way towards the veterans, far too many to fight with their depleted numbers. The creatures hissed and shrieked as they came, black eyes locked single-mindedly on their quarry.
‘This way,’ said Sergeant Remas, pointing away from the pass, into the jagged rocks of the lowlands. ‘Move!’
They ran, trying to put as much distance between themselves and the xenos dragging themselves up the slope as possible. Cassius looked for any sign of cover, of a path that could lead them around and away from the tyranids, but could see nothing. The ash continued to fall, obscuring their vision. It was thick on the ground now, and caked the Ultramarines’ armour. He could see flashes of gunfire back towards the fortress, but all else was swirling dust and smoke. Only his bionic eye could cut through the gloom, and it saw nothing but pitiless rock in all directions.
Ahead there was a flat, wide ridge of broken earth, lined with boulders. Remas scrambled up in the lead, and cursed as he glanced over the edge. Cassius saw him raise his bolt pistol and fire, and knew they were outflanked. With Etriades injured and Covellos’ body in tow, they could not outrun the enemy. All that was left was to send as many of the enemy with them as they could.
‘More xenos filth to purge!’ he said. ‘Time to earn your place at the God-Emperor’s side, Ultramarines. Let them taste the fury of Macragge!’
The veterans roared their defiance as they took position on the ridge, slamming into cover behind boulders and raking the onrushing tyranids with bolter fire. The ash was thick now, and masked the exact numbers of the enemy, but they rushed in from all sides, hurling themselves at the remaining Space Marines. Etriades leaned against a rocky spur, blasting into the mass with his bolt pistol. His arm swayed as he fired. He had lost a horrific amount of blood, and Cassius doubted he would last much longer.
‘One last triumph, brothers!’ the Chaplain bellowed. ‘One last glory in the primarch’s name!’
More and more tyranids raced across the ground towards their position. Cassius turned to the nearest cluster of aliens, which leapt and scrambled towards him across the broken earth. Infernus spat a tongue of fire, and two of the creatures went down, wreathed in flames.
He wondered whether Fabian still held the fortress. He had thought the death of the Swarmlord would disrupt the invasion. He had counted on it, and it had not happened. Cassius was not a man given to second-guessing, but a voice in the back of his head wondered if he had made the right choice.
He swept his crozius around, shattering the armour-plated hide of a warrior-form, then unleashed a torrent of bolter shells from Infernus that ripped through a throng of blade-armed monstrosities. He turned and saw Sergeant Remas fall, sent spinning to the floor by a hail of biological projectiles. Cassius rushed towards him, battering alien forms aside with his crozius.
‘Sergeant!’ he cried.
‘I’m fine,’ Remas said, through gritted teeth. He raised his pistol and fired past Cassius, and the Chaplain heard the wet thud of an impacting bolt round.
More projectiles struck Cassius, driving him to his knees. He felt an angry burn in his side, and knew that at least one had penetrated his plate. On all sides the tyranids pressed in, clambering over their dead, desperate to spill transhuman blood. Cassius continued to shatter limbs and skulls with his crozius, but it was becoming harder to find space to swing. Jaws snapped at his face, and he grasped the lower mandible, squeezed and wrenched, and felt a satisfying crunch. He pushed the screeching creature away and turned to meet a new threat on his right.
Something clubbed him in the chest and pitched him on his back. Infernus slipped from his hand, skittering away on the loose rock. Dazed, he looked up into the coal-black eyes of a towering beast with curving, serrated blade-limbs. It leered at him, tongue lashing out to taste the air.
Light washed over its maggot-pale flesh, and it hissed and looked up to the left. Cassius stretched, his fingers clasped the grip of Infernus and he raised the combi-weapon.
There was a rattling roar, and the creature’s torso exploded in a shower of sickly yellow ichor. It toppled to the side, and as it fell a score of creatures behind it also exploded into gobbets of flesh and shards of bone-plate.
Roaring overhead came three blessed gunships of the Fifth Company, assault cannons blazing. Huge swathes of tyranid warrior-forms were simply evaporated in the barrage, sending clouds of bloody mist swirling into the sky to mix with the choking ash. The Stormravens turned a tight circle and swung back around, slowing to hover several metres behind the squad, in the open ground behind their position.
Searchlights lit up the ground, and Cassius could see Ultramarines pouring from the access doors to set up defensive perimeters around the vessels.
‘Up, brothers!’ he roared, scrambling to his feet and dragging Remas along with him. ‘The Emperor has use for us yet!’
While the Ultramarines poured accurate, punishing suppressive fire into the stunned and reeling tyranids, the veteran squad rushed towards the safety of the gunships. Corvellos’ body was lost, but Etriades was being carried by two of his brothers. He was barely conscious, and his head lolled worryingly, but his eyes were still open. The defensive circle opened to let them pass, and Cassius hauled Remas into the lead gunship’s transport hold, where he staggered against the far wall, wincing in pain. The rest of the veterans followed him in, and the floor swayed beneath them as the ship lifted into the sky, engines screaming.
‘Tell me you at least killed the damned thing?’ came a rasping voice from the back of the transport bay.
Captain Fabian stood there, an Apothecary tending to the jagged latticework of scars that encircled his neck. That was far from his most prominent injury; one side of his face was a ruin of seared flesh and weeping fluid, and his left hand was gone. Two members of his command squad stood at his side. One clutched the tattered, bloodstained but unbroken banner of the Fifth Company.
Cassius looked at him for a long moment.
‘We did, captain,’ he replied.
‘The fortress fell regardless,’ Fabian said. ‘I lost many good men today. I hope it was worth it, Chaplain.’
Cassius said nothing. The captain waved his Apothecary away and gestured for him to see to the stricken Etriades.
‘There is news from Sergeant Verigar at the landing zone,’ said Fabian, still staring at the Chaplain through his one good eye. ‘The Adeptus Mechanicus have made contact. They claim to know a way to weaken the hive fleet’s grip on Kolovan. We may have a genuine way to defeat them after all.’