Knight of Talassar - Steve Lyons Read online

  Knight of Talassar

  Steve Lyons

  INTRO

  It seemed, at first, as if one of the stars had exploded.

  A blue light flared above the all-too-close horizon, and a rumble like thunder shuddered through the moon’s thin atmosphere.

  Kenjari was on his way to the mine when it happened. It was early in the morning, although day and night were just divisions on a chrono face here. He stood with a pickaxe slung uselessly over his shoulder, a rebreather clamped to his face, his feet rooted to the barren ground as something – something huge and dark and oddly symmetrical – came hurtling out of the sky towards him.

  It was only when his workmates panicked and ran that he thought to do the same. He wasn’t ready to die; at least, not this way.

  Kenjari was meant to die in the service of the Emperor, his body but not his spirit broken by the effort of hewing materials from the ground: vital metals to be forged into weapons and armour and vehicles for the Emperor’s glorious armies.

  His days of life had been numbered since his transfer to this remote facility.

  The truth was that few men ever saw out their two-year postings here. The moon’s atmosphere was toxic, even inside the billet huts since half the oxygen scrubbers had broken down. Almost as many miners were killed by minor rebreather failures as they were by tunnel collapses or simple exhaustion.

  Every time he woke up on his lumpy mattress, Kenjari checked that his facemask was in place and wondered if this new morning would be his last.

  After twenty months of wondering, he had just begun to feel, to hope, that he might be one of the lucky few. He had begun to think he might even see his home and his children on Agides Primus again.

  Kenjari was a worker, not a soldier. He had always imagined that death would steal up on him slowly, through the shadows of a blocked mine tunnel or across the filthy floor of a medicae hut. Not this way. Not this way!

  He hadn’t run like this in twenty years. His lungs, clogged with rock dust as they were, reacted violently to the sudden demand placed upon them, and Kenjari coughed up a mouthful of phlegm and stumbled badly. Another bright blue flash cast his shadow, long and thin, across the small, raised landing pad ahead of him and, instinctively, foolishly, he turned his head to look.

  The plummeting object blotted out the stars now; it wasn’t a ship as he had briefly imagined – it was bigger, far bigger than any ship – nor was it a meteorite, it was clearly a man-made structure. It was something the likes of which he had never seen before, something that made no sense to his fear-addled brain.

  It was wreathed in half-formed energy tendrils, clawing at its sides as if they were straining to hold it back. They didn’t succeed. It crashed through the towering pit head and splintered its plasteel struts like matchsticks. The winding wheel was completely demolished, stranding hundreds of miners underground.

  The leading edge of the object – or perhaps just one of its tendrils – hit the ground and filled Kenjari’s head with a sound like every piece of metal in the world being tortured; and a cloud of dust and debris, the size of a hab-block and equally as impenetrable, crashed over him like a tidal wave.

  He couldn’t see his workmates, his friends, around him any longer or the ground beneath his feet. He knew that running was futile; still, he ran for as long as he could manage, until he stumbled again and finally fell. Then he lay on his stomach with his hands clasped over his head and a desperate appeal for the Emperor’s mercy straining to escape his choked throat.

  It was some time before he dared open his eyes again, before he realised that the all-pervading noise around him had given way to a silence that rang almost as loudly in his ears. His silent prayers must have been heard and he was alive. He was coated in rock dust; it sloughed from him as, gingerly, he tested each of his limbs in turn, relieved to find no broken bones. He discovered a body, half-buried, alongside him. Its head had been pulverised by a substantial hunk of debris, leaving him no means of identifying it. He had been lucky, that was all. Had his blind flight carried him an inch to the left or the right, he would likely have died too. He should have died.

  Kenjari scrambled to his feet. A black cloud of terror hung over him, but for now shock was keeping it at arm’s length and he only felt numb. The workers’ billet huts had been shredded, their remnants strewn across the jagged landscape. The same fate had befallen the dark, tubular towers of the smelting plant. He couldn’t tell where he was standing, which way he was facing, because every landmark to which he had become accustomed had been razed.

  Only one thing, one structure, reached above the surface now. It nestled, lopsidedly, in a crater of its own making, impossibly intact although sections of its walls had fallen and black wisps of smoke curled lazily upwards from its bowels. Kenjari thought about the miners in the tunnels beneath it. He knew they must have been crushed; the black cloud descended closer towards him.

  In that moment, he felt death stealing up on him through the shadows and he thought, for the first time, that he would rather not have seen it coming. I should have died like the others, he thought. That would have been the true mercy.

  Kenjari was a worker, not a soldier. He had always expected it would be his work that killed him. He had never imagined anything like this.

  He hadn’t expected – of all things – a castle to fall out of the sky on top of him.

  CHAPTER I

  As usual, Captain Sicarius was the first to emerge from the Thunderhawk.

  He stepped off the forward ramp onto earth that was cold and unyielding, even to his considerable armoured weight. He glanced up at strange patterns of stars, freckling the black sky. The captain wondered – as he had during every mission in the scant years since his rise to that rank – how many battle-brothers he would lose here.

  They poured out of the transport ship behind him: thirty of the Emperor’s finest, resplendent in blue power armour with gold and white trappings, the U-symbol of their Chapter emblazoned upon their left shoulders. They had donned their helmets, forewarned that the air was poisonous, so the only way to tell them apart was by their battle honours.

  More gunships – Thunderhawks and Stormravens –were in the process of landing beside them, easing themselves down onto cushions of noxious exhaust gases. They disgorged the remainder of the Ultramarines strikeforce onto this, their latest battlefield. At the same time, more Thunderhawks – modified to carry vehicles in place of passengers – swooped in to deposit their cargos of Predator Destructor and Vindicator tanks.

  The operation was executed with the utmost efficiency. Where, a few minutes earlier, this low plateau had been devoid of any life – or of anything that life may have created – now it teemed with proud blue juggernauts, and not a moment too soon, as the captain quickly apprehended.

  His auto-senses picked up the dull cracks of shell fire, even over the aircraft engines, before he could get his bearings. He stepped to the plateau’s edge and looked over a virtual labyrinth of trenches and foxholes. He could make out figures scurrying through those trenches: the soldiers of the Astra Militarum – a Death Korps of Krieg regiment, he recalled – whose reports had brought him to this tiny, unnamed moon.

  His gaze, however, strayed beyond them – to the object of the Ultramarines’ mission here. The horizon was closer than Sicarius was accustomed to, no more than three kilometres ahead of him to the east. Squatting there upon it, like some ancient, mythical monster, was the Indestructible.

  It was the size of a small city, but had the look of a cathedral with its gothic spires and towers and covered walkways. It was a multi-layered, stepped structure, symmetrical, with four arms extending from the diamond-shaped basilica at
its centre. It had once, evidently, been a burnished gold in colour, but its walls were soot-blackened, flaking and beginning to crumble.

  It was a Ramilies-class star fort: a giant mobile base of operations assembled in the Imperium’s own forges. It shouldn’t have been here. It should have been out in space somewhere, proudly standing sentry over one of the Emperor’s worlds; not crippled and stranded like this, held captive by the inexorable force of gravity.

  The Ramilies was its own arsenal. Its towers bristled with gun emplacements, while torpedo tubes glowered warningly through its outer walls. Its cavernous launch bays could each easily contain a cruiser or multiple flights of smaller ships.

  Four aircraft were rising from one of those launch bays now, from the Ramilies’s far quadrant. Like the fort itself, they had seen better days – though possibly not much better. They were crudely constructed, with heavy guns grafted haphazardly onto their patched-together hulls. They looked too ungainly to fly, yet fly they did, as if keeping themselves in the air by sheer obduracy alone.

  Ork technology; there was no mistaking it.

  The shells that Sicarius had heard had been fired by the Guardsmen in the trenches, shot from Earthshaker cannons. The Earthshakers were siege guns, slow to reload and cumbersome to aim; they were built for breaking through walls, not for bringing down aerial combatants. So far, they had failed to score a direct hit on any of their four targets, only buffeting them with explosive blast waves.

  One of the ork craft was thrown into a clumsy barrel roll, careening away from the rest of its flight. As Sicarius watched, however – against all odds, against all sense – its pilot managed to wrestle it back under control. All four ships were sweeping over the trenches, he realised, without deigning to return their occupants’ fire. They were bearing down on the plateau on which he stood.

  He bellowed an order to the Space Marines behind him: ‘Scatter!’

  The first ork craft roared over Sicarius’s head, its bomb bay doors yawning open. Three rocket-shaped casings dropped out of its belly, one by one. Forewarned, the majority of Sicarius’s brothers leapt out of harm’s way; their vehicles, however, were virtual sitting ducks.

  The first bomb smacked into the prow of a Predator Destructor, its gunner barely managing to duck back into his turret before it struck. The ensuing explosion lifted the vehicle off its tracks and set its engine ablaze, forcing its crew to evacuate.

  The remaining two bombs took longer to choose their targets, and Sicarius realised that they had some form of guiding intelligence. One of them swooped low over the roof of the disabled Predator, and then began to climb again. It streaked towards a bright blue Thunderhawk which had been coming in to land; two Vindicator tanks were attached to the ship’s underside, dangling helplessly.

  Fortunately for their crews – not to mention the Thunderhawk’s pilot – the bomb’s controller had overreached itself. Its limited propulsion unit sputtered out and it faltered a good way short of its objective. It spiralled back to earth, some half a kilometre away, where it burst harmlessly.

  ‘Let them come,’ a familiar voice bellowed, defiantly. ‘I will not cower from any stinking greenskins. Let them try to shift me from this spot.’

  Brother Ultracius had not sought cover like the others. He had been an Ultramarines sergeant once – but now, he was a walking tank himself, what little remained of his physical form interred inside a Dreadnought casing.

  Standing at almost twice the height of his brothers, he had made himself an irresistible target. As the third and final bomb came around and dived towards him, Ultracius let rip at it with his massive twin-linked heavy bolter: a prodigious weapon that jutted from his right elbow in place of a forearm.

  The bomb flew unerringly through a hail of bolt-rounds towards him, close enough to Sicarius now for him to see that machine-spirits didn’t drive it as he had expected. It had a pilot: a gretchin, a member of a stunted orkoid subspecies. It was shorter – much shorter – and punier than a typical ork; still, it couldn’t have fit easily into the bomb’s casing, not unless its legs had been amputated.

  Its squat body was hunched over a tiny control stick, its pointed ears trembling with malevolent laughter.

  One of Ultracius’s bolts had found its mark, and the guided bomb exploded barely a metre in front of the aquila symbol on the Dreadnought’s chassis. A fraction of a second later and it would have hit him squarely, cracking even his armour plating. As it was, he weathered the blast, though it forced him onto his back foot and almost made his knee joints buckle.

  The gretchin pilot perished in flames.

  Less than three seconds had passed since the bombs had dropped.

  In that time, however, the vox-net had exploded with urgent chatter. The pilots of the grounded Thunderhawks were hauling them back into the air; while those still carrying tanks and other vital equipment were flying evasive manoeuvres, looking for a chance to set down their heavy burdens.

  The second and third ork bombers, delayed by the Earthshakers’ covering fire, were intercepted before they could reach the plateau. One of them was crippled almost instantly, holed by an explosive punch from a Thunderhawk’s battle cannon; the other craft put up a better fight. Its hull may have seemed less than aerodynamic, but it was tough enough to shrug off a fusillade from four twin-linked heavy bolters.

  The bomber fought back. Its pilot was a fully-grown ork, looking somewhat out of place behind a glacis, a pair of goggles perched ridiculously on its green snout. Its primary weapons were a pair of automatic ballistic guns slung underneath its wings. Like most ork ‘shootas’, they were noisier than they were accurate.

  In a one-on-one dogfight, the clumsy ork craft was probably outmatched. That didn’t mean it wasn’t a threat, however.

  The fourth bomber – the one the Earthshaker cannons had sent into a spin – was finally coming up on the plateau; while the first – the one that had made one bombing run already – was coming around to make another. They found that the Ultramarines had three more gunships in the air, waiting for them.

  We should have set down further behind the lines, Sicarius thought. His eagerness for battle and inexperience of command had made him incautious. He blamed himself, but, stuck on the ground as he was now, there wasn’t much he could do to put things right. He could only watch as the opposing flights circled each other, spitting at each other venomously.

  ‘The Emperor is with you,’ he encouraged his pilots by vox, but resisted the urge to bellow instructions at them. They knew what they had to do and how to do it. They wouldn’t have been sitting in those cockpits if their instincts weren’t as finely honed as they could be.

  He ordered his tanks to advance, separating as they did. They were moving targets now, grinding their way down the broad, winding trails that led to the plateau’s base; still, moving all the same. In addition, the Stormravens had closed ranks to keep their enemies at bay, and were beginning to drive them back.

  Nevertheless, one of the bombers opened its bay to eject two guided casings, but their intended targets were beyond their limited range. They detonated on the ground, and claimed no casualties other than their own hapless occupants.

  Another ork bomber was fatally holed and sent screaming, nose over tail, out of Sicarius’s sight. A moment later, a fiery cloud blossomed over the horizon to the north, reassuring him that the threat had been dealt with. In its turn a Stormraven gunship had also been damaged, smoke belching out of one of its engines; the pilot, however, sounded confident that he could make an emergency landing.

  Sicarius stepped off the edge of the plateau. The drop was short enough for his armour to completely absorb the impact of his landing. He voxed his battle-brothers: ‘Form up on me.’ The first of the tanks was already pulling up behind him, while the situation in the sky seemed to be under control.

  Then, a pilot’s voice rasped urgently through his earpiece: ‘The last ork, captain – it’s coming right at you… gambling everything on a suicide dive…�
�� He could hear the rattling of patched-together engines growing in volume above him.

  Sicarius wasn’t worried. Three Stormravens had already dropped onto the bomber’s tail, with their lascannons flaring. It wouldn’t get close to him.

  The inevitable explosion, when it came, made it seem as if a new sun was blazing in the sky, turning night into day for just a moment. The light glinted off blue ceramite and plasteel, and cast the shadows of a hundred armoured warriors and their powerful engines ahead of them. It was in that light that the Ultramarines strikeforce began their march across the small moon’s barren surface; a spectacle that would surely have caused their enemies to quail, had any of them only seen it.

  The Ultramarines were marching to war.

  CHAPTER II

  A knot of figures emerged from the trenches to meet them.

  They were wrapped from neck to boots in thick black greatcoats; their shoulder flashes revealed them to be members of the 319th Krieg Regiment of the Imperial Guard. Sergeant Lucien had never met a Krieg Korpsman before, but others had spoken highly of their courage and commitment.

  Like the Ultramarines, they didn’t show their faces. Thick rubber tubes snaked from the gasmasks they wore to rebreather units in battered leather casings slung from their webbing. The only features of the masks were pairs of opaque, round lenses, which gave the wearers a blank-eyed, expressionless look.

  The masks were crowned by steel helmets, stamped with the image of the Imperial aquila; all but for one of them, who wore a commissar’s peaked cap. It was he who headed the welcoming committee: a barrel-chested man with a long, assured stride. Marching a step behind him was a shorter, wirier figure, who wore a captain’s rank insignia but, unusually, displayed no medals or other decorations.

  The Krieg captain halted and saluted smartly, and Sicarius returned the gesture. The commissar began to extend a hand towards him, noticed the size of the Space Marine’s gauntlets and thought again. He introduced himself as Dast, but named none of the rest of his party. Even the captain he identified only by his rank.