Scorched Earth Page 6

  'Except the Raven Guard have the skill and stealth to turn that into an asset.'

  Haukspeer had kept his lightning claw; of all his trappings it still functioned and it was a formidable weapon. He kept it low and by his side, ready to silence any sentries. During my military career I had not had many occasions to witness the XIX Legion in combat, but if this was the lethal efficacy of their Apothecaries, I shuddered to think what their assault troops were capable of.

  'Walking amongst the shadows as if he's part of them,' Usabius added.

  'Fortunate, then, that we have him as our scout,' I said, casting a sideways glance at the Urgall Hills to our right and the sounds of ritualistic chanting now echoing loudly through them. The warbands were closing. 'What happened?' I asked.

  'A dark seed was sown within them, brother,' Usabius answered. 'It took root in both their minds and bodies, and this is the manifestation of it. This evil.'

  I briefly met my brother's gaze. 'You experienced the sheer pervasive force in the valley. Haukspeer almost killed me because of it.'

  'Yet we did not succumb to its effects, nor were we suborned by our own naturally violent instincts. If this is something that can be fought, then we did that. It is why our brothers hold true to their loyal oaths, I think.'

  My eyes narrowed as I sought a truth that Usabius was skirting. 'So you do not think this to be simple rebellion?'

  'Was what happened in that valley of skulls natural?'

  'No,' I said, remembering the madness of it. Now I thought back, it was as though something had taken me over, or at least was appealing to my baser instincts. Perhaps it was not something foreign after all, but rather a fundamental part of my psyche that I kept hidden or shackled. Alien mind control was something the Legiones Astartes had encountered before, but it could be explained after a fashion. It was exactly that, alien, but the experience in the valley was different. It felt more like expression, like a pre-existing part of me had been unleashed and allowed its rein. Oddly, the realisation of that disturbed me more now that I thought I understood it.

  I wondered whether Usabius had considered the same thing and I asked, 'What did you feel in the valley, when the rage enfolded us?'

  Usabius slipped from my gaze as if shamed that he did not, or could not, come to my aid.

  'I don't know,' he said. 'It was red and wet. And heat… So much heat, like it was cooking my brain inside my skull. A drone in my ears, a thousand times a thousand war shouts all at once devolving into a single unified note of pure violence.'

  'A thousand times a thousand?'

  Usabius paused, as if not understanding my meaning, before he answered, 'No. Eight times eight times eight times eight… Over and over and over. What does it mean?'

  'I don't know, brother.'

  Below my vantage point, Haukspeer signalled the all clear and we moved out.

  The crash site below us was not as deep as the valley of skulls. The bulk of the damaged drop-ship's fuselage was on the top of a flat ridge of dark stone, the lesser wreckage and debris strewn around it. I counted bodies amongst it, some Raven Guard and Iron Hands but mainly Salamanders. They were broken, burned things, scarcely recognisable as the proud Legion warriors they once were. Space Marines were peerless fighters, tough enough to take on and kill any enemy, any foe regardless of race or military strength. But that invulnerability had never been tested against itself, nor had it stood up to the rigours of a devastating crash from the edge of the atmosphere.

  The evidence of just how vulnerable we all really were was stark, littered before me like an abject lesson in humility and the importance of the dangers of hubris.

  All of the injured in the Purgatory's infirmary were hard enough to bear, but this was an entirely tougher prospect to come to terms with.

  Usabius knelt down by one of our fallen brothers, and tried to raise his head to see if he was still alive. When the neck lolled awkwardly and loosely to one side, I knew he was not.

  'I see no survivors,' I whispered.

  'I found none,' Haukspeer replied, seeming to materialise behind me as he made his presence felt.

  I tried not to act startled. 'You must teach me that one day,' I told him, joking.

  Surrounded by the dead, the Raven Guard did not see the humour. 'We don't have one day. Our life is measured in hours, even minutes now. We should look inside,' he said, and started walking towards the open cargo hold.

  Usabius and I followed, my brother giving me a dark look suggesting that our travelling companion was not quite as composed as we both thought he was. Haukspeer had briefly lost his mind in the bone valley and there might be some semblance of that still resonating within him. Without knowing what it was that assailed us, I could not be sure. Even as an Apothecary, he would not be spared the terrible psychological damage we had all suffered as a result of surviving the massacre. To experience death on such a scale would test even a Space Marine's mental fortitude.

  Early on, in those first days when we were still scrambling for order and searching futilely for meaning, I had heard stories of legionaries even taking their own lives because the weight of anguish was too much to bear. Never with a pistol to the mouth or temple, or a blade to the torso as it was in the days of the ancient Romanii Empire, but rather by simply venturing out at night on their own and seeking out the enemy. I could think of no other word to describe it than suicidal. Those not broken in the body like Sulnar harboured other wounds, ones of the mind instead.

  I watched the Raven Guard keenly as he entered through the open ramp into a realm of shadows beyond. As I followed, I exchanged a quick glance with Usabius telling him to watch the right flank as I concentrated on the left. There could be anything inside the drop-ship, anything. My eagerness to find my father, Vulkan, was almost overwhelming but I did not allow it to cloud my sense of caution. Slow, precise, methodical: that was how the primarch had taught us; that was how it would be.

  From the outside the drop-ship looked perpetually, blindingly dark but once we were inside it was a different story. Lumen-strips set into the ceiling still functioned. At least some did. They flickered intermittently, reminding me of the Purgatory's cargo bay, describing a scene of utter devastation. Broken pipes, exposed wires, crushed bulkheads, split doors and shattered mag-harnesses - it was like the intestines of some metal behemoth, wrecked and ruined by a massive and sudden trauma.

  The impact of the crash had pushed the ventral corridor backwards, presumably when the Stormbird's nose struck the earth. The cockpit had crumpled, split apart entirely, and the pressure of that destruction had pressed the neck back, forcing most of the troop cages into the cargo bay.

  Stepping over a strut of metal spearing out from the deck where half the plating had been burned away, revealing a bent and ravaged grille beneath, I saw my first corpse.

  It was another Salamander, and for a moment I fought down a fist of panic as it lodged in my throat at the thought that this might be Vulkan. It was not, and I cursed myself for the relief I felt at that.

  The deeper we progressed, through snaking, spitting wires and spastic lighting, the more bodies we saw. A Raven Guard, back broken and twisted over a fallen beam; an Iron Hand crushed beneath a section of collapsed ceiling where the upper deck had come down; a Salamander, barely visible through the cloud of vapour spewing from a broken coolant pipe, half-frozen by liquid nitrogen but his true death revealed upon closer inspection as impalement by a trio of iron rebars.

  For a moment I considered the reason why we did not find as many bodies at the entrance was because some predator, indigenous or otherwise, had crept in and dragged away the easy meat, unwilling to venture further for fear of what the darkness harboured. I banished the thought quickly, treating it as dangerous.

  Death was multitudinous and varied. Some legionaries bore no evidence of how they had died at all, still strapped in their cages, upright but certainly dead. Carnage was everywhere. And that revelation terrified me beyond the limits of what I had been con
ditioned to feel.

  If there were this many slain and no survivors then that could surely mean only one thing…

  'Keep going.' Usabius was right behind me, stopped dead, and I realised belatedly that I too was not moving.

  'So much death…' I whispered, garnering an approbative glance from Haukspeer who went ahead of us.

  Scarcely a hundred metres long and it had taken us almost a half-hour just to reach this point in the cargo bay.

  Usabius merely patted my shoulder. 'It does not mean he is slain too. It's possible that—'

  Haukspeer held up his lightning claw, indicating he had found something.

  I drew in close to him.

  'Movement,' he hissed, staying as low as his damaged armour would allow before breaking off into the shadows and disappearing a moment later.

  In the quietude, I heard venting pipes, the crackle of electricity and the groan of slowly shifting, cooling metal. All sounds I would expect in an empty drop-ship denuded of life. But then another sound encroached, a distant moaning. It echoed, resonating off the tight, contracted confines of the vessel, wending through corridors and spilling out into the cargo bay, barely audible until we had got close enough to hear it.

  Someone injured. Alive.

  I started to rush, but Usabius drew me back.

  'Be calm, brother. We do not know what we face yet.'

  'It could be Vulkan.' I practically gasped the words, almost breathless with hope.

  'Be calm.'

  Part of the ceiling had crashed in on the cargo bay, bringing slabs of metal, columns and chunks of the drop-ship's superstructure with it. It created a sort of ragged bulkhead, a considerable blind spot that we were perched at the corner of.

  A corridor of bodies, entangled in wreckage, made progress through this part of the ship difficult. We had to carefully pick our way through it, pausing every few seconds to make sure the sound was still there and our father yet lived.

  I told myself it was Vulkan. I willed it to be so. To countenance anything else would be to give in to despair, to give up completely, and I had come too far and endured too much for that.

  The route through the drop-ship became narrower still, harder to traverse. A sideways impact had crushed a section of the collapsed troop hold in the Stormbird's flank. Through a charnel house of broken bodies and wreckage I saw the booted feet of a warrior half-obscured by a fallen beam. Haukspeer was a spectre hovering ahead of me, appearing and disappearing like a broken pict capture as the single lumen flickering overhead swung its light back and forth across the corridor. His claw was up, the signal to wait.

  It took every mote of my resolve to do so, especially when I saw those booted feet move. It was a small motion, easy to miss, but we were standing so still, listening and looking so intently. In my mind's eye, I saw the scalloped greaves of my father, the deep sea green of his armour, his cloak of cascading emerald, the fanged maw of his fearsome battle-helm, those red lenses radiating power and compassion…

  Vulkan…

  Enveloped in darkness, these details were impossible to discern but I heard the figure moan, and then another sound that came from above us.

  The Raven Guard looked up.

  I noticed that the lumen-strip was shaking more vigorously as the vibrations from something moving above fed down to it through the drop-ship's hull.

  'Haukspeer, we must go to him now!'

  I exchanged a glance with Usabius. We would move on Vulkan in the next few seconds.

  'Wait…' hissed the Raven Guard. 'Something is not—'

  The screech of rending metal cut apart the silence, as harsh artificial light strafed in from the ceiling where the drop-ship's hull had just been ripped away. Magnesium-white turned ruby-red as the blind-hunter leaned into view, squatting over the tear it had created in the roof. A discordant hoot of alarm and excitement burst from its harrowing-horn with the sudden discovery of prey.

  Us.

  'Kill it!' I roared, and unleashed my bolter.

  Explosive shell impacts rippled across the blind-hunter's nose cone, staggering it and forcing its flaring nasal pits to contract. It reeled as I fed it another burst, rocking back on its haunches like a punch-drunk pugilist until it moved out of sight.

  During the short respite, I seized Usabius by the arm.

  'Go to Vulkan!' I told him urgently, 'Protect him, get him out if you can. Haukspeer and I will draw this thing off.'

  There was no argument. Usabius did as I asked and ran down the shattered corridor, passing under the gaping hole in the roof, and kept on going.

  'Haukspeer!' I yelled, but the Raven Guard was already coming towards me.

  'We run,' he said.

  'Agreed. We must draw it off, so that—'

  'Just tell me this, Salamander,' he snapped, interrupting me. 'Are you my ally still? Can you do this?'

  I was not sure what Haukspeer meant. Perhaps he had experienced too much in his makeshift apothecarion, seen iron-hard warriors break like brittle, rusted metal and it had shaken his faith in any soldier under pressure.

  'You can count on me, brother,' I assured him, just as the red lamps of the blind-hunter returned. 'To the end.'

  Haukspeer cast a quick glance over his shoulder and gestured to a tightly packed corridor that broke off from the cargo bay. 'This way.'

  I went after him, the angry bleat of the harrowing-horn resounding in my ears.

  Heat pressed against my back in a sudden, prickling pressure wave. As well as their claws, the Dark Mechanicum had fashioned the blind-hunters many weapons. An underslung flame unit was tailored for cleansing, and I thought I had seen the glint of two shoulder mounts in the glimpse I caught of the monster in the muzzle flare of my bolter.

  Could be autocannons; possibly something else, something worse. I knew some of the walkers carried webbers, filled with scything monofilament; others, more debilitating radiation weaponry. Hard-armoured, ceramite over-carapace concealing some unknown biological horror beneath, the blind-hunters were part organic, part machine and almost invulnerable to conventional weapons. As Haukspeer and I rushed through the cluttered cargo bay, tripping over bodies, snagging and scraping our armour on the half-destroyed ship, I wished dearly that I had something more potent than a boltgun.

  After the gout of flame failed to kill us, the blind-hunter did not pursue. It could not, the confines of the crashed Stormbird were too tight. Instead, it scurried across the roof. I heard its talons raking gouges in the hull as it tracked us with its sensors. Named blind-hunters, the walkers were actually far from sightless. Through painful and often fatal experience, we had learned the search lamps they used contained some kind of bio-sweep and heat-tracking wave. I did not know why the beams switched from white to red, but I suspected it was some genetic quirk from the walkers' organic component. None of it mattered now. The only significant fact was that no legionary on foot had ever outrun one and encounters with the hunters could only end in death for the walker or its prey. To my knowledge, the former had yet to come to pass. Our odds of survival then, were extremely narrow.

  I felt the last dark grains in my hourglass slipping towards the neck. Soon they would be spent, so I vowed that I would give Usabius enough time to get Vulkan out and to safety. If my life meant nothing else, it would at least mean that.

  Haukspeer halted at the edge of the corridor, and was looking up.

  'What are you doing?' I asked. 'We need to get it to follow us. If we allow it to catch—'

  'Too late. Listen,' he said, pointing to the ceiling with one of his talons.

  I frowned. 'I can't hear anything.'

  'That's the point,' replied the Raven Guard. 'It's stopped.'

  Following his gaze, I whispered, 'Above us?'

  Haukspeer nodded slowly, stepping back as I raised my bolter.

  The likelihood of my shots penetrating through the ragged shreds of the ceiling was extremely small but I was not trying to hit it, I was trying to goad it.

  In my
peripheral vision, I saw Haukspeer unclip a frag grenade from his belt.

  'Ready.' I did not wait for an answer and squeezed the trigger.

  Mass-reactives pummelled the ceiling, taking out sections of shattered metal and exposing the numerous fractures in the hull. A huge chunk of pipes, the remains of the upper deck and scorched armour-plating crashed down in a deluge. The blind-hunter fell with it, surprised when its footing suddenly gave way beneath it. Half-collapsed on one reverse-jointed knee, it leered over at me with its crimson search lamps. I allowed a bellow from its harrowing-horn before I fired another burst. This time I raked its underslung arsenal, puncturing the flamer's tank and sending roaring promethium over its lozenge-shaped body in an incendiary wave.

  Some of the conflagration struck me too, my armour's internal temperature gauge spiking then red-lining on my retinal lens display. I ignored it. To let up now, to hesitate or falter for an instant, was to die.

  'Pour it on!' I cried, hoping Haukspeer had heard me.

  A deafening boom followed by a dense pressure burst confirmed he had. The ground fell away beneath me, or rather I was lifted above it as the grenade blast took me off my feet and smashed me into a broken troop cage. Fighting my way free from a pile of bodies, I fired off a snap shot. One-handed, my aim was poor but in the resulting flash I saw Haukspeer facing off against the monster, his lightning claw flaring like a defiant torch against the darkness.

  The blind-hunter was wreathed in fire that was slowly dying out. It had a dent in its carapace and several pieces of shrapnel embedded in it went deep. Wounded but far from immobilised, the flame unit wrecked but its remaining arsenal intact, the walker had lost little battle efficacy. As Haukspeer threw himself at it, one of the blind-hunter's shoulder mounts hummed into life.

  I was wrong. They were not autocannons. Solid-shot would have been merciful compared to what happened next. A heat-hazing melta beam stabbed from the blind-hunter's left shoulder, the wide dispersal making it tough to dodge. Haukspeer tried but the edge of the pulsing microwaves hit him on his right side, cruel given that his left was already a ruin. His lightning claw withered and sloughed away, taking most of his remaining arm with it. The attack faltered in a scream of the Raven Guard's agony. He fell, rolled, tumbled until he slumped in a throbbing heap. As he raised his head, still trying to fight, the blind-hunter's second weapon cycled into action.