In the Depths of Hades - Nick Kyme

  IN THE DEPTHS OF HADES

  Nick Kyme

  Vinyar scowled at the filth on his boots. He scowled at the idling battle tanks with their tracks caked in mud and at the troops squatting around fires, playing cards, working combat drills and muttering about the heat. It was sweltering in the vicinity of what used to be Hades Hive, now little more than a crater – a rotting carcass laid open to the rain. Several months had passed since the desolation of the city, but the reek of death and the mewling presence of bereavement persisted.

  Vinyar scowled about that too. He deplored weakness.

  So far, he had seen precious little to be sanguine about on Armageddon. The rain was just the latest annoyance.

  Three days they had been stuck out in these rancid wastes, enduring the industrial stench that infested every molecule of air like a contagion, waiting for the regiment to muster.

  Now, inexplicably to his mind, they were at an impasse.

  He found Sergeant Tuurok standing by a strategium table, looking at reconnaissance maps as the downpour soaked him and his war council.

  Camp had been struck, the tents and prefabs collapsed in preparation for imminent assault. The need to linger baffled the Marines Malevolent captain.

  ‘Why aren’t we advancing?’ Vinyar demanded, barging into the strategy briefing with neither care nor recognition for the six human officers of the Astra Militarum.

  One, a lieutenant judging by his dirty rank pins, attempted an introduction.

  ‘85th Ocanon Phalanx, my lord. It’s a pleasure to–’

  Vinyar briefly turned his ire on the lieutenant. ‘Not for me it isn’t. I don’t care who you are or that you’re pleased to be fighting alongside the Malevolents.’ His attention swung like an angry search light back to Tuurok.

  ‘There is a problem, brother-captain,’ said Tuurok, wise enough to get straight to the point.

  Vinyar glared. Warm rain pounded his shoulder guards, drenching his dyed black ermine cloak and streaking down the lines of old scars that ravaged his face. Grizzled was not the word for Vinyar; in all his years of warmongering, he had long-since gone beyond that.

  ‘Elaborate,’ he ordered, the broken servos in his power glove whirring impotently.

  ‘The orks have taken prisoners. They sent this as evidence and a warning.’ Tuurok gestured to one of his men, who pulled back a small piece of tarpaulin to reveal the severed head that had been sitting on the table.

  ‘It’s Commissar Rauspeer,’ uttered one of the humans.

  Vinyar glanced in his direction and guessed the black-coated youth had been this Rauspeer’s second-in-command.

  ‘They sent it?’ Vinyar asked Tuurok, incredulous.

  ‘Catapulted from the ruins, sir.’

  Tuurok opened his gauntleted fist. He held three human fingers. Two wore rings, the third had a tattoo.

  ‘These were stuffed in the mouth.’

  Vinyar examined them.

  He looked up to survey the assembly – the human officers, the two Malvolents. His honour guard waited quietly behind him, bolters locked across their chests.

  ‘And?’ he asked. ‘It’s a crater, sergeant. A shanty town. Storm the hive, or what’s left of it. Bring this fight to an end so we can move on.’

  ‘With respect, my lord,’ said the lieutenant, ‘if we do that, they will kill every one of their captives, including three of our commanding officers.’ He pointed at some markings on the map. ‘Our scouts have them being held at this–’

  The officer stopped when Vinyar raised his gauntleted hand.

  ‘Enough,’ hissed the Malevolent. His jaw clenched. He looked ready to snap. Maybe he would start with this impudent mortal’s neck.

  ‘You’re all dismissed,’ he said, ‘immediately. I need to speak to my warriors alone.’

  After exchanging a few wary glances, the Astra Militarum officers left the strategium table and returned to their own ranks. Most did so gratefully.

  Sergeant Tuurok kept his head raised and his hands braced against the table throughout the sudden exodus.

  ‘The Ocanon won’t fight,’ he said as soon as they were gone. ‘They refuse to–’

  Vinyar struck him across the chin with his club-like power fist. Mercifully disengaged, it still bludgeoned Tuurok and put him on one knee.

  ‘No excuses,’ snarled Vinyar. ‘Cleanse the hive. Whatever it takes.’

  ‘Brother-captain, the tactical situation–’

  As fast as mercury, Vinyar seized Tuurok by the throat and lifted him back onto his feet.

  The warrior by Tuurok’s side, his adjutant, shifted uncomfortably but said nothing and did nothing to intervene. He knew better than to cross Vinyar.

  ‘We’ve wasted enough time already. Orks are moving across the Diablo Mountains and I need reinforcements in that region. We cannot afford to ignore Hive Hades until the greenskins within are dead. We risk being outflanked if they choose to mobilise, but we are hunting savages in caves. It should not be beyond us.’ Vinyar clenched Tuurok’s neck a little tighter, squeezing a half-choked rasp from the sergeant. ‘Are you now clear on the tactical situation, brother-sergeant?’

  Vinyar held on a little longer to make his point then released Tuurok, who had to cough some air back into his lungs before he could reply.

  ‘We need them. They refuse to fight with their leaders still inside Hades, and we can’t force them.’

  Another bout of violent apoplexy was stalled as Vinyar caught sight of the map. The holding pens or whatever they were where the orks had their prisoners were deep in the heart of the crater, in the depths of the old sundered hive. He lifted his gaze to stare across the annihilation left by the ork bombardment. The ruins of the hive city guttered with fires. Smoke billowing from immense pyres of wreckage and human corpses obscured much of the skeletal remains.

  Six weeks into the war, an orbital bombardment had turned the hive into a husk. In truth, bombardment was an overly prosaic term for what the orks had done. More accurate would be to say the orks unleashed an asteroid against the city, atomising it and all those within. The earth around the blast site had crystallised under the immense pressure and heat expelled in the attack. An exothermic reaction several magnitudes greater than any conventional ordnance had vaporised watercourses, flattened structures and reduced forests to ash within a two-kilometre radius.

  So rapid and whole was the city’s execution that it had become a dire reminder of Ghazghkull Thraka’s power and the ork warlord’s desire for wanton destruction. The ruins of Hades had become the domain of the ork, haunted by ghosts – men and women who had died so quickly and violently that they didn’t realise they were revenants. Like a plague that infests a carcass and begins to colonise the necrotic flesh, the orks had turned what little there was left of Hades into a fortress of sorts. And though it had zero strategic value, it did harbour a significant gathering of ork military strength. Therefore, it could not be ignored and it was almost as if Thraka knew this would be the case. Encourage men to defend ruins and fight over the dead. Let them cling to the wreckage of their cities and their lives, whilst the orks rampaged and revelled in the act of warmongering.

  Vinyar considered himself a warmonger. For him, and the rest of the Marines Malevolent, their crusade was unending. In his warrior’s heart, he could not conceive of a time when creatures such as he and those he commanded would no longer be necessary. War did not end. Peace was illusory. There was only the next battle.

  Savagery and bestial nature aside, Vinyar wondered privately if the Malevolents and this Thraka were so d
ifferent. Then he hawked up a gobbet of phlegm and spat it out, as if to expel the thought as well as his grainy sputum.

  A sudden burst of prickling wind skirled loudly across the barren wastes beyond the crater of Hades Hive. It stole away the smoke and carried the animalistic bellows and porcine grunting of the beasts within. So too did the wind bring forth the stench of the greenskins’ dung and the boiling pig-fat reek of slow-cooked human flesh. Vinyar glared and felt his ire deepen for the ork and their pugnacity.

  I’ll smack that belligerence out of you…

  ‘Captain,’ a voice uttered from behind him.

  Vinyar turned and saw a third warrior standing by Sergeant Tuurok. Like the other Malevolents he was clad in bile-yellow and coal-black armour and moved with a predatory grace. His helmet was loosely attached to his belt, not mag-locked but held by a strap of leather. Though still battered, some of his battleplate looked more robust than the rest, as if it were an amalgam and not a concomitant suit. Scraped paint revealed some of the nature of who it had been taken from – black with a white templar cross.

  He wore his hammer strapped diagonally across his back – its haft jutted out above his left shoulder guard, the head visible just past his right hip. He looked battle-worn but vital, and was less scarred than Vinyar. Shoulder-length, pearl-white hair framed his face, giving the warrior a pseudo-angelic cast, but there was hate enough in his dark eyes to drown nations.

  The sight of him brought up something unpleasant in Vinyar’s throat and hardened the captain’s barricade of clenched teeth.

  ‘Kastor,’ he said, almost snarling.

  Amongst the Malevolents, the Vilifiers were the elite. Few in number, they were drawn from all ten companies, even the Scouts, and represented the most brutal fighters in the Chapter.

  Kastor was their commanding officer.

  ‘We can breach the crater that has confounded your men,’ said Kastor, evenly.

  ‘And do what exactly once you’re in there?’ asked Vinyar.

  Scarcely five strides separated them and, although they were brothers-in-arms, they came across more like two fighters preparing to duel.

  Kastor snorted, as if the answer was obvious. ‘To rescue the hostages, of course.’

  Vinyar’s gravelly, roaring laughter sounded incongruous coming from the stern captain and drew several glances from nearby Guard officers who dared to look at him.

  ‘That is amusing,’ he conceded. ‘I would dearly like to see you try, Kastor. Perhaps the death that’s owed you will finally seek you out.’

  ‘Perhaps, captain.’

  Vinyar’s sardonic humour vanished, replaced by rancour. ‘I am not your captain,’ he uttered darkly.

  ‘No, you aren’t,’ Kastor replied, making it clear in his tone exactly what he thought of Vinyar’s supposed authority over Hades, and his orders. ‘So this conversation is really just a formality, isn’t it?’

  Looking Vinyar in the eye, he whistled loudly.

  Four warriors in the yellow and black of the Malevolents stepped out into the rain from where they had been hiding amidst the throng. They had been almost invisible until summoned. The Guardsmen standing around them, suddenly finding a quartet of hulking Space Marines in their midst, immediately jerked in surprise.

  One of the four eyed up the soldiers through his vision slit, glowering silently.

  Two others stood stock still, their stalker-pattern bolters hanging casually over their shoulders.

  The foremost Vilifier, the only one who went without his helmet and who had a youthful look about him, nodded to Kastor.

  ‘Penetrating this camp was easy,’ said Vinyar, able to mask his surprise at the sudden appearance of the veterans. ‘You’ll find the ork den harder to crack.’

  ‘Do I have your concession then, brother-captain?’ asked Kastor. He glanced at Tuurok, who seethed impotently at the other sergeant about to usurp his mission out from under him.

  Kastor afforded him a thin smile, which only enraged Tuurok further.

  Vinyar ignored the histrionics. ‘I thought you didn’t need my sanction, brother?’

  ‘Nevertheless…’

  Every fibre of Vinyar bristled with the desire to teach Kastor a salutary and punishing lesson for his arrogance. Ideally, it would be a permanent one, but he let it go. This time he had overreached himself. The orks would have him, and the dirty little thorn who had been poaching warriors from Vinyar’s ranks for over two decades would, at last, get what was coming to him.

  The captain stepped aside, ushering Kastor towards what he hoped would be his doom.

  It was only when Kastor had walked past him that Vinyar uttered a churlish rejoinder.

  ‘Watch your back, Kastor.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t think I’m the one who needs to look over his shoulder,’ replied Kastor without even glancing back.

  ‘Arrogant cur,’ spat Vinyar, muttering. He was about to vent his ire on Kastor’s men but when he looked over to where they had been standing they were already gone, vanished into the rain and the dark.

  Only the bellows of the greenskins remained, loud and bestial on the wind.

  Though Vinyar hated Kastor with every iota of vitriol he could muster, he wondered if the orks knew what was coming. And for the first time since the war, he smiled.

  In the wake of the asteroid strike, the greenskins had erected a fortified settlement in the citywide crater. It was a peculiar trait of the ork that they found utility in wreckage, for there had been precious little left of Hive Hades. The orks had infested it, seeing a wound they could infect and thrive in. Based on reconnaissance, current estimates had the greenskins in the region of thousands.

  Lying on his stomach and supported by his elbows, Vathed observed one of the ork patrols at the perimeter with a pair of scopes pressed to his eyes. Thickly armoured, carrying fat-looking cannons and cleavers, their appearance was crude but also formidable.

  ‘Tough,’ he said to Narlec. ‘One of the more developed strains.’ Vathed panned the scopes across, tracking past an enclosure wall of riveted and spot-welded metal sheeting. As well as several ramshackle gun towers, the wall also marked the border to the ork slum itself. A cluster of ugly, stacked hutments rose and sank at the false horizon line created by the wall, giving the impression of an undulating urban sprawl of closely abutted structures and narrow avenues.

  Vathed spied two relatively scrawny specimens manning the watchtowers. They bracketed a large iron gate that was wrought into the wall. Eight metres across, it was wide enough for a vehicle column to pass through.

  It was also the least heavily guarded approach into the hive.

  ‘Two spotters in the gun nests,’ said Vathed.

  ‘We’ll need to take them first,’ Narlec replied, rising into a crouched position so he could ready his bolter.

  Vathed was still at the scopes. ‘No search lamps.’

  ‘Orks have good night vision,’ Narlec replied, patting Vathed on the shoulder to let him know he was ready.

  Vathed nodded, panned the scopes across the gate area again to be sure, then opened up the vox. ‘I estimate eight targets defending this approach.’

  ‘Received,’ Kastor’s voice crackled over the other end of the link. ‘Ingress in one minute.’

  Narlec nodded this time, and contacted his brother sniper in the field.

  ‘Sykar…’

  ‘Left or right, brother?’

  ‘Right,’ said Narlec without hesitation, adding, ‘synchronising,’ as a chrono flashed up on the squad’s retinal displays already counting down from sixty seconds.

  Vathed packed up the scopes, staying flat, and brought up his bolter.

  ‘We won’t need you,’ Narlec told him.

  Vathed didn’t answer.

  Part of his left retinal lens was synched with his brother’s visual feed. The green
skin on the right had just come into focus through Narlec’s stalker sight. He aimed for the ear, knowing, as they all did, that this route presented the path of least resistance to the ork brain.

  For a few seconds, the wind howled and the deep, distant bellowing of greenskins continued as they revelled in whatever crude entertainments occupied and diverted them. Scattered gunfire added to the clamour as the greenskins randomly discharged their weapons.

  The chrono counter struck zero.

  Two simultaneous coughs of ballistic discharge sounded, one close, the other much farther away.

  Through his bolter’s iron-sights and Narlec’s feed, Vathed saw the orks in either watchtower crumple at the same time, a short puff of crimson misting the air before their skulls exploded.

  The larger orks patrolling the wall were slow to react. By the time they did, two warriors armoured in black and yellow were already amongst them.

  Ballack had drawn his knife. Like the lighter parts of his armour, he had dulled the blade’s gleam with ash but not its monomolecular edge. Approaching the first ork from behind, he rammed the knife into its neck all the way to the hilt and then began to drag it through its rugose flesh.

  He dropped the ork, letting the heavy body slump against the battlement, already moving to the second greenskin. It had half turned before Ballack managed to jab his knife under the beast’s armpit where its armour was thin and push the blade all the way to the heart. Forgetting its weapons, the ork clawed at Ballack, raking the Malevolent’s faceplate and gorget. Though lean, Ballack was strong, but the ork was overpowering him even in the midst of its dying. Wrenching the knife free, Ballack released a fount of dark blood and then stabbed again.

  The ork convulsed in agony, barely able to croak let alone roar, and bit down on the joint between Ballack’s gorget and pauldron. He cried out, managing to muffle his pain but felt savage greenskin fangs tearing at the vulnerable flesh of his neck.

  Ballack clamped his free hand over the ork’s skull and began to squeeze. After a few seconds, the bone began to yield but it only made the greenskin bite down even harder.

  An anguished gurgle escaped Ballack’s lips as he faced the genuine and unpleasant prospect of being killed by an enemy in its death throes. He jerked the knife, striving to saw upwards through vital organs but the ork’s bone cage was tough and Ballack was getting weaker.