Feat of Iron - Nick Kyme Read online

  FEAT OF IRON

  Nick Kyme

  Contents

  ~ DRAMATIS PERSONAE ~

  WROUGHT OF IRON

  WILL OF IRON

  WRATH OF IRON

  ~ DRAMATIS PERSONAE ~

  The X Legion ‘Iron Hands’

  Ferrus Manus, Primarch

  Gabriel Santar, Equerry and First Captain

  Vaakal Desaan, Morlock Ninth Clan Company Captain

  Erasmus Ruuman, Morlock Thirteenth Clan Company Ironwrought

  Shadrak Meduson, Tenth Clan Company Captain

  Bion Henricos, Tenth Clan Company Seventh Sergeant

  Xenos Personae

  Lathsarial, Eldar Farseer

  ‘The Diviner’, Eldar Farseer

  ‘What does it matter why he fell?’

  ‘When the fall is all there is, it matters.’

  – Farseer Lathsarial answers a student of the Path

  WROUGHT OF IRON

  It was not supposed to be like this. This was not his idea of how the war would play out. He had envisaged it differently.

  Glorious, vindicating… vengeful.

  I was not meant to fail here.

  He had not expected to be last. He hated to be last. It irritated, like the itch around his neck.

  No matter how he oiled the skin beneath his gorget, or the method he used to affix its clasps, the itch persisted.

  Like a blade across my throat…

  From his first ironclad footfall onto the desert, it had been there. A dark reminder of something as yet unfulfilled, a promise his supposed executioner had yet to make. Sand was everywhere, endless oceans of undulating grains stretched all the way to the blurred horizon, bleached white by an oppressive sun. In his dreams, the sand was black.

  Such moribund thoughts brought an unworthy declaration to taut lips.

  ‘I am the equal of my brothers,’ he muttered to a darkness that deigned not to answer.

  ‘And the better of some,’ he added. Still the uncaring shadows paid no heed.

  Always it came down to this singular truth, ever since he had split the darkness upon a trail of fire.

  ‘I should be first.’

  The interior of the landship and his strategium chamber were black, much like his mood. The blunt refrain of a thousand hammers rang through the armoured flanks, as the tracks that provided motion to his leviathan pounded the desert in relentless syncopation. Beyond the constant din echoed the dull report of heavy ordnance. It reminded him of the forge and its fuliginous depths, of the Anvilarium aboard the Fist of Iron. How he longed for the solitude of its appended reclusiam at that moment. With creation and function came peace. With mental fortitude came strength and the banishment of weakness.

  Weakness was a thing to be abhorred. It had no place in the new Imperium.

  As the hololith flickered into life, revealing a nascent image in grainy grey resolution, he recognised it was the weakness within that he loathed the most. It wasn’t a malady, a social or psychological deviancy that he railed against; rather it was merely flesh and all its inherent limitations.

  I will be as iron.

  Focus turned the grainy hololith into two figures.

  Ferrus Manus glowered at them both from the dimly-lit shadows. For him and his forces, the campaign of One-Five-Four Four was not going well.

  His voice was hard as granite as he addressed his audience.

  ‘Brothers.’

  Descending into the desert basin had not been easy. Hampered by the constant shifting of the dunes and the debilitating effects of the sand on their engines, much of the Army tank divisions and Mechanicum claves had foundered.

  Tracks had mired near the tip of the decline, half-drowned in sinking sand. One battle tank pitched nose-first and rolled, bringing an entire column to a grinding halt. Even the bipedal walkers fared no better, and the broken skeletons of several Sentinels hit the nadir of the desert basin before any foot troops. Their burned-out wrecks were ignored by those that followed behind.

  It therefore fell to stronger, more able, warriors to take up the mantle of battle.

  ‘Bring them iron and death!’ Gabriel Santar bellowed, a machine reverb in his voice, as he announced the attack.

  A war host of Iron Hands answered, advancing in unison as a halo of crackling starbursts erupted from their weapons.

  A horde of massive insect-like creatures wrapped in chitin boiled towards them and in its wake, scores of the cloaked warriors who had first sprung the ambush.

  Eldar.

  As muzzle flares lit, the heavy roar of cannon spoke and the hot air in the desert basin was chewed apart by brass-shelled fury.

  Thick-skinned and ponderous, the first wave of chitin creatures was slow but resilient. Shell impacts rained against their heavy bodies, but did little more than indent flesh. They waded through clouds of explosive discharge from missiles and grenades without pause. Like their slighter kin they had billowed up from the desert in a welter of displaced sand and mournful nasal dirges. Humpbacked and muscular, as bulky as an Imperial battle tank, the beasts were impelled by an eldar kindred wearing what Santar could only assume were some form of mind-goad.

  Such alien technology was to be abhorred, but the first captain knew these were not the true vanguard.

  Infinitesimal vibrations, growing steadily in significance, registered on his helmet’s auto-senses as minute seismological anomalies in the basin’s tectonic structure.

  Earth burrowers tunnelled beneath them, closing on the line of Iron Hands fast.

  A series of subterranean detonations presaged the attack, and as the Legiones Astartes advanced in stoic rows of black and steel ceramite, the creatures emerged from geysers of spurting sand. Swift and serpentine, so utterly unlike the ordered ranks of the Iron Hands, it was difficult to make out the precise nature of the abominations. Crackling discharge flickering off the barbed pikes of their masked riders was visible, as the desert drained off master and beast in a fragmenting veil. It was a form of cavalry, Santar realised, only the most debased kind.

  Santar scowled, and the cliffs of his cheeks hardened into craggy bulwarks. He would see them wiped from the face of the desert.

  A fusillade of small-arms fire and light ordnance erupting around him, the first captain led a company of Morlocks into the onrushing creatures with his lightning claw aloft. The sun glinted from the blades and made the dark metal of his armour gleam.

  At range the elite warriors were formidable; at close quarters they were unstoppable.

  The aliens seemed not to realise, but would soon be educated.

  ‘Be as iron!’ he roared as the eldar hit them.

  A beast, its long torso segmented and armoured with a tough brown carapace, snapped at the first captain in an attempt to bite off his arm. Santar shrugged off the blow and cut its face open, spilling viscous green fluid onto clacking mandibles and many-faceted eye-pits. A second slash severed its razor-edged pincers with a roar of bionic automation that drew a high-pitched mewl of pain from the thing’s puckered mouth.

  Its rider, a sand-cloaked eldar in dun-coloured battle armour that was the mirror of the creature’s natural carapace, brought its electro-pike to bear, but Santar cut the wretch down before it could thrust.

  Servos in his mechanised implants screaming, lending enhanced strength to an already exceptional biology, Santar cleaved the head from a second chitin-worm as the first was still collapsing. Through the gore fountaining from the neck cavity he saw Captain Vaakal Desaan, who was leading the other company, eviscerate a third.

  Beast and rider crumpled. Behind them, more were coming. They were skirting ahead of the larger, beetle-like monsters, their sand wakes just breaking the desert surface in rippli
ng mounds.

  At least four dozen enemy contacts registered on his retinal display. Faint heat signatures, baffled by the sand, suggested there were another four score still fully submerged. A host of dun-cloaked foot troops with anti-gravitic weapon arrays followed them and the air chimed to the shriek of their cannons.

  A heavy barrage was coming off the iron-armoured Morlocks in response, their rattling combination bolter fire taking a brutal toll. Holding the centre of the war host, they showed no sign of capitulation. Fashioned of reinforced plates, with the barrel-like shoulder guards adorned by pteruges that overlaid the thinner and more dexterous arm greaves, their Cataphractii Terminator armour was near-inviolate against the alien weapons. Intended for frontal assault, a tactic in which the Iron Hands excelled, the armour made them giants. Hulking, implacable, they passed through a hail of heavy bow-casters, fusion blasters and shuriken cannon with impunity.

  Little effort was expended in vanquishing the chitin-worms, their numbers decimated for no injury in reply.

  ‘They have obviously not fought Terminators before,’ Desaan said over the comm-feed.

  Santar’s reprimand was swift but light. ‘Just kill them, brother. As efficiently as you can.’ Cataphractii war-plate was rare amongst the Legions, but the Iron Hands boasted a great many suits, especially amongst the clan companies of the Avernii, the Morlocks. It was cumbersome, akin to wearing a battle tank bereft of tracks, but still retained all its resilience and stopping power. Santar revelled in the machine-strength it gave him. They all did.

  The Iron Hands’ blows fell like metronomes: precise, methodical and without profligacy or flourish. It was a functional combat doctrine, merciless and unrelenting. The eldar withered before it.

  In concert with Captain Desaan, Santar pressed the advance. The thickly-armoured Morlocks were steam-rolling across the dune. Nothing escaped their wrath, which was punitive and absolute.

  Renewed tremors jagged across the first captain’s retinal display, indicating further tunnellers. Initially, he expected a secondary wave of the chitin-worms but realised his error as the vibration returns came back louder and more resonant.

  ‘Stand and prepare to repel the enemy,’ he barked down the comm-feed.

  Both Morlock companies fell into line in perfect unison, weapons locked on the dead ground ahead of them. Their bolter storm abated, allowing the battered eldar to scurry back behind their ponderous barricade creatures.

  Behind the pitiless lenses of his battle-helm, Santar’s narrowed eyes promised retribution upon those cowards later.

  The Army ordnance had managed to find position at the cusp of the rise overlooking the basin. The gunners now had range and pummelled the mind-goaded chitin monsters anchoring the eldar kindreds.

  The next wave, he knew, was coming.

  ‘Show no mercy,’ he said to his warriors.

  Cracks webbed the base of the sand valley, swallowing the carcasses of dead chitin-worms and their slain riders, as a much larger strain of sand-burrower emerged.

  Massive pincers married to a serpentine torso that ended in a whickering stinger gave them the aspect of the scorpiad that Santar had heard the XVIIIthlegionaries speak of prior to deployment on One-Five-Four Four. Apparently the beast was indigenous to their volcanic home world. It mattered little to the first captain; he just needed to know how to kill them.

  A crackling line of bolter fire stitched across a scorpiad-creature’s midriff but the shells failed to penetrate, and exploded with little effect against its hardened exoskeleton.

  One look at the barbed stinger and serrated claws attached to its ribbed torso, told Santar that these beasts could penetrate power armour. It was theoretically possibly they could wound the Cataphractii too. He decided to test it, but not before he had thinned the ranks a little.

  Santar raised Erasmus Ruuman through his battle-helm’s comm-feed.

  The response from the Morlock Ironwrought was immediate.

  ‘At your command, first captain.’

  In his mind’s eye, Santar painted a blood-red crosshair over the advancing scorpiad-creatures.

  And with our iron fist…

  ‘Heavy divisions on this position,’ he grated with machine-like cadence, relaying coordinates sub-vocally. ‘Rapiers and missile launchers.’

  A glance and a clenched fist from Santar to Desaan held the Morlock captain in place and also brought both Cataphractii companies to a halt.

  Seconds later, a storm of ordnance lit the desert basin in magnesium white, so bright it almost overloaded the retinal buffers in Santar’s battle-helm.

  …we shall bring down such fury.

  He blinked away the after-flare quickly and was already stomping into the smoke-clouded blast zone ahead. Vitrified sand crunched underfoot and fire licked at the edges of his boots as he crushed a burning eldar skull.

  He waved Desaan and the Terminators on. ‘Forward, Clan Avernii.’

  After the barrage from Ruuman, there were a few score remaining of the aliens’ hundreds-strong kindreds. The scorpiad-creatures were all but wiped out. A few dogged defenders were left, together with any creatures deep enough beneath the earth to have survived the blast. They waged war amidst the smouldering carcasses of their fallen, but rather than dismay them, the visceral reminder of their mortality seemed only to embolden the creatures.

  Santar would crush them regardless of their resilience.

  A thousand legionaries followed his lead, the Iron Hands reserves joining the Morlocks, many times more than enough to eradicate a recalcitrant xenos warband. Quickly he appraised the tactical dispositions of his forces.

  The Morlocks held the centre, whilst the right flank was anchored by Shadrak Meduson and his own company of Iron Hands. The left was clenched in the unyielding fist of Ruuman and another company of heavies. Despite the inclusion of the slower moving Terminators in the war host, the Ironwrought’s section was the least mobile. Logic suggested an oblique line as the most efficient and employable tactic. Santar relayed his orders.

  ‘Ironwrought will forge the hinge. Tenth captain, you are our swinging fist.’

  Meduson’s affirmation icon flashed once on Santar’s retinal display as he then isolated the ninth captain’s comm-channel.

  ‘Desaan, keep your Cataphractii at pace. Move up to assault speed, mauls and blades.’

  Desaan nodded simultaneously with his own flashing icon as the Terminators maglocked their bolters and armed for close combat. Crackling hammers and burring blades were swung into readiness.

  Though they were slow, the beetle-like chitin creatures possessed enough bulk and mass to crush tank armour. Santar wanted them down; they were all that was left of the eldar resistance.

  Meduson struck first, the ‘swinging fist’, just as Ruuman’s last salvo abated. Seeking to envelop the isolated company, the beasts rounded on the Iron Hands who fought them to a standstill.

  Less than a minute after the beasts were fully engaged, Santar, Desaan and two entire companies of Morlocks crashed into their exposed flank.

  Eviscerator saws and seismic hammers cut and bludgeoned the massive creatures who died by degrees to the legionaries’ relentless attack. Slowly, one by one, they crumpled and lay still. The desert resounded to their demise, sand banks demolished in the shock waves radiating from where the beasts had fallen.

  Standing at the edge of a blood-slicked impact crater, shucking his blades from an eldar’s ruptured skull, Santar surveyed the carnage he and his brothers had wrought.

  ‘Glory Imperator!’ he roared.

  A thousand voices chorused back.

  ‘Glory Imperator,’ said Ruuman over the comm-feed, ‘and in the name of the Gorgon.’

  Santar’s reply was rueful before he cut the link.

  ‘I doubt this victory will satisfy him, brother.’

  The eldar were broken, smashed against the unyielding resolve of the Iron Hands. Santar was wiping the alien gore from his lightning claws when Desaan lumbered alongside him
. In their Cataphractii Terminator armour they were much taller than their legionary brothers and had a commanding view of the battlefield.

  Alien dead and their enslaved chitin-creatures lay in sundered heaps, putrefying in the sun. Kill squads of Iron Hands were working their way around the battle site, executing survivors. Santar had ordered no prisoners to be taken. Eldar were not vulnerable to coercion, even when violently encouraged, and they had a talent for misdirection and sowing confusion. Strength of mind and purpose, no mercy – these were the tenets of engagement the first captain had insisted upon.

  One of the alien wretches was attempting to speak, its tongue lilting and offensive to Santar’s senses even through his battle-helm. He finished the eldar off with his lightning claw.

  ‘We should pursue and harry them, brother-captain,’ said Desaan. The visor he wore in place of his eyes blazed coldly, as if in emphasis. His ‘blinding’ had been courtesy of an eldar acid-spitter, a strain of the xenos more feral and barbed than the sand-nomads they currently engaged. Due to the intervention of the Mechanicum, the ninth captain now saw more than he ever had before.

  Santar averted his gaze from the dead alien to the summit of the distant dune where the remnants of the surviving eldar were retreating. Heat haze obscured the view, throbbing and thick, but the aliens were ragged. Such disorder would not last. Santar would have preferred to chase them down and destroy them, but they were already far behind where the father desired them to be.

  ‘No. We’ll regroup our forces and have them ready to march again as soon as possible,’ he said, before adding, ‘It will give some of the slower elements opportunity to catch up.’

  ‘You mean weaker.’

  Santar met Desaan’s impassive gaze through the visor.

  ‘I mean what I say, brother-captain.’

  Desaan nodded without reaction but Santar’s upraised hand kept him from heading off. The first captain looked away, appraising the desolation of the chitin creatures in the desert basin. Most were open and raw, bleeding green lifeblood across the sand and creating a noisome stench; others were half-submerged, slain before they could escape. Any survivors had burrowed deep, away from the noise and the fire, taking their riders with them. If allowed to roam unchecked, broken or otherwise, such creatures could become a needless thorn.