KNIGHTS OF MACRAGGE Page 4

  Reda knew they were all dead, but resolved to go down fighting.

  ‘We have to kill it,’ she cried, hoping to inspire some resistance.

  Her shotgun blast exploded high on the Traitor Marine’s chest but it barely registered. Just a momentary pause, and it was moving again. Implacable and wrought for slaughter. More shots rained in as a fighting desperation took hold, las and bullets from autocarbines, and when they were spent the armsmen drew close combat weapons. Reda almost laughed out loud at their chances of survival as she pulled out her power maul and energised the flanged head. Gerrant’s autocarbine clacked empty, so he and Keltzer grabbed up a fallen breacher shield and charged, Reda tucked right in behind them. The other armsmen trailed after them, a few drawn off into other skirmishes. Some fled, back into the darkness of the ship.

  Almost close enough to touch, Reda smelled the ozone bleeding off the Traitor Marine’s armour, and heard the barely perceptible sibilance of strange voices in the air around it. She lashed out with the power maul, a tongue of crackling energy smearing off the mace head… A swipe of the Traitor Marine’s axe and the armsmen were scattered, the breacher shield shorn, useless and discarded. It had saved their lives at least, though Reda considered as she lay on her back, unarmed and bleeding, skull throbbing like a madman’s drum, that the Traitor Marine might have wanted to spare them a quick death.

  Gerrant stirred nearby, but then collapsed. Keltzer was screaming, an ugly scorch mark running from crown to groin where the axe’s power field had touched him. Staring up at the ancient warrior bearing down on her, the noise of the warzone appeared to ebb for Reda, its bright fury dimming and the life-or-death desperation of other small battles slowing to an incomprehensible crawl.

  Surrounded by this tapestry of violence and madness, she felt utterly alone, just her and it, face-to-face, hopelessly, laughably outmatched. Reda pulled her knife, wincing as her fractured ribs ground against each other. The blood running down her arm reached the haft and made it slick.

  ‘I’m just wearing you down…’ she snarled through clenched teeth.

  The Traitor Marine reached up to its helm, not deigning to acknowledge her. The left eyepiece was cracked, nearly entirely shattered. With a slight jerk, the helm came loose, turning fractionally as it pulled away from the neck brace. The Traitor Marine lifted it off, the helm ringing loudly against the deck as he let it fall from his grasp. Because it was a he, not a creature nor a monster. A man, only one elevated or degenerated to the point of something other.

  Reda had been expecting a horror, a denizen of the warp. Instead she saw scars, not ritualistic marks but battle scars, no different to any son of Guilliman on board the Emperor’s Will. The Traitor Marine touched a gash above his left eye. Gauntleted fingers came away shiny in the light. Reda had no memory of hitting him. He almost looked impressed as he regarded her and raised his axe, framing an executioner’s blow. Up-close, the haft was as long as Reda’s body, the actual blade twice as broad. Gods and monsters died to weapons like that, mortal man would only sully it. And then he did something Reda did not expect.

  ‘I’ll make it quick,’ he murmured in Gothic, his accent thick and the words unfamiliar.

  Reda gave him nothing except defiance.

  His neck quivered and for a moment Reda thought he had succumbed to a seizure or some dark blessing of his gods. His mouth fell open, just a little, and as he reached up to his neck, he collapsed to one knee.

  A spear jutted through the Traitor Marine’s neck, spitting it like a piece of rotten meat. The bladed tip crackled with noisome ozone, the blood cauterising and burning off in seconds. He fell to his other knee, trying to turn his head. His fingers stretched for the studded, leather-wound haft of his axe, but the blade was firmly embedded in the ground. Blood bubbling up from his throat gently spilled over his lip. It hissed where it touched his armour, slowly corroding the metal. Giving up on the axe, he unclipped a baroque-looking bolt pistol holstered at his hip. The muzzle had been fashioned into a serpent’s fanged mouth. He was glaring at Reda but his anger was directed elsewhere. As he began to turn his body, something fast struck the Traitor Marine in the left temple. Reda caught a half-second of heat trajectory before the Traitor Marine’s head violently exploded, showering her with red, gory matter.

  TWO STORMS

  Pillium retrieved the spear, yanking it loose from what remained of the Hellreaper’s head and neck. The charge in the bladed spear flickered and gave out. Grunting, he tossed it aside and took his bolt rifle in a two-handed grip.

  ‘You’re bleeding…’ said a voice beneath him.

  He looked down to see a grizzled woman in worn fatigues and battered armour, brandishing a serrated-edged combat knife in one bloody hand. She’d lost her helmet, and her short, dark hair stuck out in tufty clumps from being sandwiched beneath it.

  ‘Flesh wounds,’ he replied, about to move on.

  ‘Don’t leave us,’ said the woman.

  Pillium turned to shout an order for his battle-brothers to come together, then made a swift count of the other armsmen with the woman. Deeming their combat efficacy negligible, he carried on.

  ‘Please!’

  ‘Can you fight?’ he asked, calling out as he moved away. The bolt rifle bucked in his hands as he took shots of opportunity. Somewhere ahead of him, Secutius and his squad were taking the fight to the enemy. He wanted to join them.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then fight,’ he said, making for the warp engine, where Ithro Arkaedron fought alone.

  The honour guard lay dead at the Librarian’s feet, having given their last to defend him and keep safe the warp engine.

  ‘What are those things?’ asked Secutius, letting rip with another short sharp burst of fire, trying to conserve ammunition.

  The Space Marines in the arena had consolidated together, and forged a half-armoured wedge of monstrously armed gladiators. They fought around a core of warriors, weapons facing out, constantly moving and engaging.

  ‘Daemonhosts,’ said Daceus. The old veteran had kept pace well, and fought with a tenacity Pillium had not seen in the arena. ‘Our most effective tactic is to fight them up-close.’ He brandished a revving chainsword. ‘Blades only. In my experience they work the best. Bolt shells tend not to take.’

  ‘I have no issue with that,’ declared Pillium. ‘I prefer to look my enemy in the eye as I vanquish it.’

  ‘Then you had best get to vanquishing,’ Daceus replied, and Pillium followed his gaze.

  A host descended on Arkaedron and he looked hard-pressed to resist it. Arcs of lightning spat from his staff, raking the ragged cultists who were being joined by increasing numbers of Traitor Marines. A few carried the markings of the Hellreapers, others claimed allegiance to the War Dogs, the Exultant, Horde of Misery and half a dozen other warbands. But it was the daemonhosts, the possessed, the ones in chains that posed the most severe threat.

  A fresh whip-crack of lightning lashed through the traitors, scything limbs and rending bone, but their fervour was unbreakable. Fire uncoiled from Arkaedron’s fingertips, a flame vortex hot enough to crack ceramite and turn power armour to ash. A rain of silver blades cascaded from on high, shredding flesh and piercing metal. The dead piled atop the dead. Sweat drenched Arkaedron’s forehead, the hollows around his eyes deepening with every fresh conjuration. And yet the possessed endured.

  Pillium waded into the fight, bent on reaching Arkaedron, and saw three such creatures slowly converging on the stricken Librarian and, ultimately, the warp engine. The first had the dishevelled disposition of an emaciated tramp; the second a woman with black, diaphanous hair, metal stakes rammed through her wrists and ankles; the last was an urchin boy, bald as pale marble, a crown of bony horns jutting from a malformed scalp.

  Pillium had no way of knowing the true face of the horrors lurking beneath their distended and abused flesh, and he did not care to. All that mattered was ending them. Strafing his bolt rifle in a wide arc, he cleared a path the
n swapped his firearm for a gleaming combat blade. He saw Secutius had done the same.

  ‘He is fast for his age, this one,’ Secutius said. Daceus had already moved into the breach, urging others nearby to follow.

  ‘Invictus!’

  The other veterans were on his lead, fighting like they were born to it, like they had never known anything other. Pillium was determined not to be outdone by their example.

  ‘Don’t tell me this isn’t about honour,’ he said, though Secutius didn’t argue. ‘It’s always about honour.’

  He and Secutius drove their warriors on.

  ‘For Guilliman and the crusade!’ he roared, and a second spear wedge of unarmoured Ultramarines joined the first, eager to overtake it.

  Reda rolled onto her knees and gagged, the stench of the Traitor Marine’s blood forcing hot bile up her throat. The fight had moved on, following strength, cleaving to the worst of the violence. A few Ultramarines and the scattered remnants of armsmen who had managed to push up encroached at the edges of a thick horde of traitors. The disparate warbands had all but ceased fighting each other for the spoils, and their concerted effort was beginning to turn into a winning strategy.

  Reda pushed up onto her feet, dragging those armsmen near her who were not dead up by their scruffs. Gerrant too.

  ‘On your feet,’ she said, vaguely aware she was slurring her words. She heard Kraef shouting nearby. He sounded angry. So was she. ‘We’re not done yet.’

  The warrior who had killed the Traitor Marine and saved her life had cut a path into the horde, he and several others, all without their armour but no less imposing or brutal for that. To see them fight like that, sinews visibly straining, over-muscled bodies bulging with effort, it appalled her. By stripping away their armour, their mantle, they appeared even less human than when glaring from behind ceramite-sheathed retinal lenses.

  The one standing on the warp engine’s dais, he radiated power and as Reda felt the awe Ithro Arkaedron inspired, she made ready to sound the charge. It would likely be the armsmaster’s last. Only now, at the end, did her fatigue threaten to finish her. She vowed to hold on for as long as she could.

  ‘Who are we?’ she bellowed, finding her voice and the last vestiges of her courage.

  The reply never came. She had found her maul and raised it like a bannered lance, about to declare victory or death, when Arkaedron fell.

  His fate was not obvious at first. The Librarian appeared to stumble as if reeling from a powerful blow, though no hand – at least not one that could be seen by mortal perception – struck him. Then he shook, and the lightning arcs spilling from his eyes and cascading from his staff grew wild and unfocused. Fire took hold of his robes and he began to burn. His conjured storm flared magnesium bright then dimmed and turned inwards. Arkaedron’s skin glowed, a lantern’s hot light beneath it, and tendrils of smoke uncoiled from his mouth and eyes.

  Regaining a fighting stance, he cut apart the chained vagabond, bisecting him from shoulder to hip and violently shearing the two halves by the splaying of his left hand. His defiance was brief as two other chained creatures advanced upon him, a siren-like woman in dirty grey fatigues and an urchin boy with a swollen, malformed head.

  As Arkaedron shrank back, the creatures seemed to grow, and they curved over the Librarian like shadows encroaching on the light, their claws extended, their grubby teeth bared. He grew rigid, jerking violently as if he were being impaled by a dozen invisible blades. The lightning died and in that moment so too did Ithro Arkaedron, the silver eagle staff falling from his nerveless fingers as he coughed up a spurt of rich transhuman blood. His limbs folded, snapping across the bone, armour tearing like parchment, legs and arms bent inwards by an unseen hand. His neck snapped back, his skull disappearing in a welter of bloody mist and bone fragments.

  Reda screamed, a wail from the pit of her soul, from the deepest well of her despair. She lurched and fell as a discernible shudder of disbelief swept through the defenders.

  A piece of crushed and bloody metal clanged to the deck. The remains of Ithro Arkaedron. The Librarian had been utterly destroyed, his armour, flesh and bone pulverised together as if by an industrial compressor.

  Pillium fought on, harder than before, desperation lending him urgency and wrath. It was an unfamiliar sensation. The Indomitus Crusade had been baptismal, and the engagements he had fought in hard, but nothing like this. Not the bleeding edge, near-annihilation stakes they battled here in this hell-wracked chamber far from Terra’s light.

  ‘This is not glory…’ Secutius said, echoing Pillium’s troubled thoughts.

  ‘It is death,’ Daceus replied, the three fighting shoulder to shoulder as all the Ultramarines now were. ‘It is Ultramar.’

  Daceus cut down a War Dog, splitting the warrior’s snarling face and letting the chainsword chew through the meat. Wrenching the blade free, the blood flecked across his face and for a brief moment Pillium saw the wildness of the ancient Macraggian Battle Kings in the veteran’s eyes. ‘We are Macragge,’ snarled Daceus, clashing with another War Dog. ‘We die on our feet or not at all.’

  Pillium sheathed his combat blade in an Exalted’s neck, a puff of cloying perfume spilling from the warrior’s mouth making him gag. Scowling, he ripped off the dying warrior’s helm and shattered his skull with a savage headbutt.

  ‘I’m not dying here,’ he declared, tearing his blade free and letting the Exalted fall. It felt good to rage, but like a fire eating up the last of its oxygen, it could not last.

  The circle of defiance was shrinking, as one by one the Ultramarines and their allies fell to a traitor’s blade.

  ‘I’m not dying here!’ he roared, but as the hordes briefly parted and he saw the way to the warp engines, he realised it would not be up to him.

  The two daemonhosts had entered the unnatural aura of the machine and in the flickers of eldritch light, glimpses of their true forms were revealed. Leathery wings, scabrous, bone claws and scaled red hides. A serpentine body, writhing with peristalsis, hoofed feet and gnarled…

  They would breach the warp engine’s cowl and unmake the machine within.

  ‘That engine fails and the Geller field fails too,’ said Daceus, fighting against hopelessness. His gaze found Pillium and Secutius, the eyes of the three meeting in a brief moment of recognition. ‘It has been an honour, brothers.’

  Secutius gave a brief salute but Pillium could find no such charity within him. ‘Defeat and annihilation are not honourable,’ he said, and chafed bitterly against his fate. The cowl of the machine had been stripped away, a discarded metallic rind littering the deck.

  ‘Who are we?’ Daceus roared, the old fool defiant until the last.

  A thunderous explosion answered, forcing Pillium to look up at the vaulted ceiling as it caught fire.

  Reda had lost sight of the warp engine. The dais had become so crowded in the struggle for the machine that all she saw was an ever-tightening knot of Ultramarines, and the traitor hordes squabbling for the bloody honour of killing them.

  ‘We are dead…’ breathed Gerrant, slipping on one knee.

  The pale and haggard faces of the other armsmen suggested they thought so too.

  Reda did not deny it. She reached out and gripped Gerrant’s hand. He turned and his eyes were pits of sorrow, of a life not lived. She wanted to say something, anything, but the words caught in her throat and the pain in her side she had denied for the last few minutes came into acute focus. The power maul fell from her fingers, shorting out with a few last sparks as it hit the ground. Reda followed it, her hand slipping from Gerrant’s. His expression changed as he realised how badly she was injured.

  The chamber dimmed, darkening at the edges, but the onset of shadow was swift. Pain kept Reda awake for a few more seconds. She barely felt the hard deck rush up to meet her, the jolt of metal against bone. She heard thunder and thought that must be impossible. With the dying of her sight, she saw fire as the dark metal sky crashed down, and a host of
armour-clad angels soared from on high to deliver the defenders from death. She wept, holding on for a few more seconds just to catch a glimpse. The crested helm, the glittering sword, a regal cloak fluttering in the air. The courage and authority of his voice, the inspiration. Leading a golden charge…

  We are Macragge!

  Reda smiled as she faded into unconsciousness, tears welling in her eyes.

  ‘Sicarius…’

  BECALMED

  Retius Daceus folded his arms across his chest, the scores and burns marring his armour still visible despite his best efforts to scrub them out. He was not a prideful man but a fastidious one, and when he stood in the presence of his captain, he at least wanted to look like he could do the job he had been given. He also didn’t waste words.

  ‘We have a serious problem.’

  ‘From all accounts,’ answered Sicarius, ‘we have more than just one.’ His cold, blue gaze took in the rest of the room and the audience he had summoned to his quarters. He had long abandoned the notion of having a private space, though there were times that he missed the luxury of isolation and the clarity of thought that came with it. Ever since the ship had been adrift, power had been failing and several decks had to be shut down and sealed as vital life support systems could no longer be sustained to an acceptable level of efficacy. It meant some of the briefing chambers had been repurposed as barracks, or living spaces for the non-combatant members of the crew. In turn, this had meant sacrificing privacy for pragmatism. A tacticarium hololith table had been moved in and most of the furnishings, including the slab cot where Sicarius had occasionally slept, moved out to make space for briefings and reports.

  Even so, it was still crowded in the captain’s quarters.

  ‘Our failing power reserves are of significant concern,’ said Haephestus, taking the opportunity to voice his findings first. The Techmarine was a towering presence, only surpassed by the indomitable figure of Argo Helicos who stood next to him. ‘I have conducted numerous theoreticals based on the current depletion rates and have worked up a predictive algorithm to posit an energy half-life.’ Haephestus tapped a panel on his left vambrace. Unlike the other Ultramarines in the room, it was red, like the rest of his armour, to denote his Martian training and allegiance. A series of complex computations and isometrical power forecasts flickered into being, rendered up as grainy graphical images that the Techmarine transferred to the hololithic table around which they were all gathered.