Damnos - Nick Kyme Read online

  In the gun-decks, Overseer Caenen didn’t even have enough time to curse before the torpedo wall was ripped away and the entire gunnery crew, all two thousand, three hundred and fifty souls, burned to death before being expelled into the cold night of space.

  Lord Governor Arxis had not always been in the business of politicking. Unfortunately, it was a necessary evil when running a world of the Imperium. Such a task required a strong hand and a firm belief in the Emperor. Deviation from the creed could not be tolerated; the people lived to serve His greater glory and the glory of mankind.

  Arxis had once been Imperial Guard, a general no less, and now he sat amongst his generals, the trappings of politics forgotten and the familiar mantle of soldier resting firmly upon his shoulders.

  It was comforting.

  The news he’d just received about the Nobilis was not.

  ‘Throne, the entire ship? In one attack?’

  Field-Marshal Lanspur nodded sombrely. ‘Captain Unser bought us some ground, possibly even some time with the barrages the Nobilis was able to make, but the ship is dead, my lord – all twelve thousand, three hundred and eighty-one souls.’

  ‘Merciful Emperor…’ Arxis was staring into space, finding it hard to comprehend what the necrons had done. He looked up at his commanders. The sixteen men arrayed around the metal table in the Proteus bunker looked back with carefully neutral expressions.

  ‘The astropathic message?’

  ‘Has been sent,’ replied the governor’s choirmaster, a robed adept called Fava who was in charge of all interstellar communication to and from Damnos. ‘We got it out just before the blackout.’

  Though most short-wave vox transmissions were still in effect, anything longer range, certainly off-world communication, was utterly dead. The necrons had some kind of jamming shroud fouling it.

  ‘Then we should pray to the Golden Throne that it reaches allies quickly. For now, we marshal what defences we can.’ Arxis was about to address his Master of Ordnance, a short, pugnacious man who was loyal like a bloodhound, when a dull scraping sound stopped the words in his throat and altered them. ‘Did you hear that?’

  The scraping was getting louder, resonating against the metal inner walls of the bunker.

  Several of the governor’s military staff nodded.

  Sytner, his chief bodyguard, drew a pistol. ‘Sire, we have to move you. Now.’ He said it forcefully but without panic. Sytner had been a storm trooper, serving in the same regiment as Arxis back in the day. The lord governor trusted the stocky man, recognised the urgency in his tan face, and nodded.

  Beneath them, the ground trembled. Sytner stepped in, pushing the lord governor behind him and tipping the table back with one hand. Like the pillars of termites that formed in Damnos’s arid zone, a column of metal-flecked earth spiralled upwards from the ground. The bunker floor was several-centimetre-thick ferrocrete, but the tunnellers bored through it anyway.

  A beetle-like creature, silver-backed and dirty with earth, poked out at the apex of the pillar. Sytner shot it with his laspistol, pitching it onto its back, legs twitching.

  ‘By the ice-hells, what…’ Gaben-dun leaned in for a closer look. The pillar erupted in front of him and in seconds the Master of Ordnance was swarmed with the beetle-creatures. He fell writhing, the weight of the diminutive necrons bringing the big man down, and screamed.

  ‘Throne of Earth,’ gasped the choirmaster, seeing moist bone poking up from the chitinous mass assailing Gaben-dun. ‘They’re eating his flesh!’

  ‘Out! Out!’ shouted Sytner.

  Lanspur and four of the other commanders had also drawn sidearms and put themselves between the carnivorous beetles and the lord governor.

  ‘Open fire!’ snapped Sytner and the crack of las filled the chamber along with the stink of fyceline.

  Silver beetle-creatures split in half and spun off the corpse. A few las-bolts even pierced poor Gaben-dun, though the Master of Ordnance was little more than a sack of slowly dissolving meat by now.

  When they were done with their first kill, the swarm converged on the rest.

  Sytner and his fellows were soon shooting at the ceiling and the walls as the beetles scuttled towards them without impediment. A larger tremor shook the chamber and the room just as they were retreating into the bunker’s annexe.

  A vox-unit switched to open frequency crackled to life, adding to the confusion. Frantic reports came over the speakers from the outside: of the walls being compromised; of the enemy inside the defences, seemingly appearing out of thin air; of high-pitched beam weapons and the screaming of their victims.

  Arxis clenched his fists impotently as the floor caved in completely, taking Lanspur with it, and a much larger insectoid lumbered into view.

  Men were being flayed alive outside…

  One creature, its carapace glistening silver and suggestive of an arachnid construct, became three. Sytner’s las-bolt caromed ineffectually off the hide of the first. Its mandible claw snapped out and severed the man in two. To his credit, Sytner didn’t scream.

  The choirmaster did, just as his face and torso were melted off by the second spider’s beam-spike. It started as a death-shriek then ended in a wet gurgle of sloughed flesh and matter.

  The rest of the command staff didn’t last much longer. Scarabs claimed them – the lord governor could think of no better way to describe the beetle swarms – or the arachnids butchered them.

  Arxis was alone, surrounded by foes, trapped by the illusory protection of his own Proteus bunker.

  He had time to kneel before he died: a prayer to the Emperor on his lips and the barrel of a laspistol to his temple.

  When he squeezed the trigger, the weapon groaned and failed. Exhausted during those first frantic moments, the power pack was out.

  Arxis closed his eyes before the claws took him.

  Chapter Two

  It was good fortune that placed the Ultramarines within the vicinity of Damnos. Although it would later be questioned what exactly was good about it. The desperate astropathic message delivered with Lord Governor Arxis’s seal of verification was deciphered quickly by the sightless adepts aboard the Valin’s Revenge.

  Its captain, the dauntless Sicarius, had no compunction about ordering the vessel and his vaunted Second Company to the beleaguered world with the utmost haste.

  The strike cruiser translated in-system amidst a debris field. Tracking augurs identified the stricken shell of the Nobilis, a vast Navy capital ship. The Valin’s Revenge was undoubtedly smaller and lacking the same level of firepower, but it was also more manoeuvrable and boasted one of the most lethal payloads known to the galaxy.

  Helmsman Lodis, long-serving of the Chapter, drew the vessel in close. In the void, the engine surges, the slight amendments to heading and bearing, might have seemed glacially slow but they were not. Whickering gauss-beams from the necron arc-obliterators on the ground, many kilometres long, tried time and again to skewer the strike cruiser. Each time Brother Lodis manoeuvred the Valin’s Revenge out of harm’s way or used the debris to ward them. Shields flickered with the glancing impacts, several minor hits were confirmed by the damage crews but still the ship drew closer, coming in line with Sicarius’s perfect assault vector.

  Hunks of the Nobilis, floating listlessly through the void, presented a serious threat to the strike cruiser’s integrity. Volleys from the vessel’s laser batteries sheared the larger sections in half. The lesser pieces of debris merely rebounded off the Valin’s Revenge’s armour.

  It was a feat of bravura that finally allowed the exact attack point to be reached. Ventral drop pod bays vented in seconds, like tiny arrowheads launched from an unseen bow. They sped towards Damnos in formation, bearing Angels of Death and slim hope to the populace.

  Finally capitulating under the necron gauss barrage, the shields broke down and the Valin’s Revenge
sustained a critical blow. Its payload delivered, Helmsman Lodis was content to retreat into the void, beyond the range of the guns, and lick his wounds.

  For now, at least, Sicarius and his brothers were on their own.

  Deep percussions shuddered through the walls of the drop pod.

  The gauss-streams were getting closer. Warning runes flickered across the control console, urgent and red. Despite the thickness of the ceramite arrowhead in which the Space Marines were cocooned, the internal temperature was rising, not just with the heat of re-entry but from the proximity of the necron’s anti-aircraft cannonade.

  Sicarius was unmoved.

  ‘Hold to your purpose, Lions,’ he addressed his command squad. Except for Veteran-Sergeant Daceus, the rest of the nine-man retinue was masked by their cobalt-blue battle helms. ‘We roar!’

  The engine drone forced his shout into a bellow. The captain’s retainers voiced a reverberant war cry as one. It was a sound to stir Sicarius’s Talassari blood.

  None would ever eclipse the Second, they were preeminent amongst the Ultramarines. Even Agemman’s First were looking over their heavy-armoured shoulders.

  His wide eyes flashed like stars as he roared again. ‘Victoris Ultra!’

  The reply was in mid-repeat when the gauss-beam clipped them, shearing away a portion of drop pod. Part of Brother Argonan went with it, most of his right shoulder and a chunk of torso. The blood vacating his body in the high-velocity pressure release of the pod vented like red streamers through the breach.

  ‘Apothecary,’ said Sicarius, donning his helmet and nodding to the only one of the squad armoured in white.

  Brother Venatio leaned over to the stricken Argonan, unclasping one of his grav restraints to do so. Situated alongside him, Veteran-Sergeant Daceus instinctively seized the Apothecary’s cuirass to steady him.

  Punching a hole through Brother Argonan’s gorget and chestplate with his reductor drill, Venatio quickly removed the sacred progenoids within and secured them in an ampoule-chamber mag-locked to his belt.

  ‘Remember him,’ Sicarius told his warriors. The wind had built to a shriek inside the compromised drop pod. Outside, visible only through the ragged trench in the hull, the world blurred like smeared paint. ‘Avenge him,’ the captain concluded.

  His gaze flicked to a series of read-outs on the control console. Their trajectory was still sound. The metres to planetfall clicked past on electronic tumblers at a fearsome rate.

  ‘Twenty-eight seconds and counting, High Suzerain,’ Veteran-Sergeant Daceus announced, using one of Sicarius’s many honorifics.

  The physical testament to his many deeds was plain for all to see in the medals and laurels that bedecked his armour. Sicarius was a warrior born but he was also not one to shy from ostentation.

  ‘Bolters and blades ready, sergeant,’ he growled, gripping the hilt of the sword of Talassar. Tempest Blade was its name. Even Sicarius’s weapons had laudations.

  ‘Hot hands and ready swords!’ barked Daceus to the rest.

  Snap-slides from bolters being primed filled the noisy drop pod interior. Flames were tearing off the point where the gauss-beam had glanced them and ended Argonan’s life. None aboard gave them notice. All eyes were on the embarkation hatch.

  Like the thunder-smite of a storm god, the drop pod touched down and sent impact cracks webbing across the surface of Damnos. It was one wound amongst many the planet had suffered.

  A pneumatic pressure hiss preceded the exit ramp slamming down. Seconds later Sicarius was bounding through it, cape flaring, Guilliman’s name on his lips.

  He speared a necron warrior, half-cooked by the drop pod’s incendiary flare. Another nearby had rapidly self-repaired and was advancing with automaton-like implacability. Sicarius pummelled its torso with a blast from his plasma pistol. Breaking into a run, he got close enough to behead it. The green balefires in its eyes guttered and died.

  Behind him, the hard chank-rattle of bolters sounded as Daceus and the others opened up. Energy beams, viperous and emerald green, streaked through the smoke before Sicarius’s retinal scanners could resolve a better view. A gauss-beam scudded over his pauldron, stripping it back to naked ceramite with the barest touch.

  The necrons’ balefire eyes appeared in the gloom like dead stars. The few they’d destroyed around the drop pod were just part of the vanguard.

  More were coming.

  The Thanatos foothills loomed in the distance like bad omens. The drop pods had got them as close as they could.

  The ground running up to the snow-crested mounds was over three kilometres of debris-choked mire. Fanged by ice shards and dotted with arctic sinkholes, it was treacherous.

  Scipio Vorolanus ate up the metres eagerly, his ‘Thunderbolts’ keeping pace alongside him and in spread formation. He checked the dispersal on his retinal display. A series of ident-runes showed good separation and fire-arc discipline.

  ‘Move!’ he said into the comm-feed, spurring his warriors as one.

  Through the smoke-fog and the dust palls from the sundered refinery complex, shapes were moving ahead of them. They strode, slow and purposeful. Whickering emerald gauss-beams preceded them.

  A grunt of pain, an armoured silhouette crumpling to Scipio’s extreme right signalled a hit. Brother Largo’s rune went to amber as the tac-display in Scipio’s helmet registered a serious injury.

  Just a few more metres…

  A long line of silver-grey, flecked with pieces of ceramic, opposed them. The necron fire was a relentless barrage now. Another Ultramarine battle-brother fell to its fury.

  Halt!+

  Scipio was stunned into obedience by the figure running just ahead of him. The word resolved in his mind rather than his comm-feed, a psychic impulsion that could only be defied by one with sufficient will.

  Varro Tigurius dropped into a crouch, gauss-beams flashing against a kine-shield the Chief Librarian had raised around him.

  ‘Get to cover. Hunker down!’ Scipio ordered, slamming behind a shattered wall in the gutted remains of the half-destroyed refinery.

  The place was a grim mortuary, littered with the bodies of Damnosian labourers and indentured Imperial Guard troopers. There’d been a battle here, a hard-fought one that had ended badly for the human natives.

  Scipio barely gave them a second glance. It had not always been so. Black Reach and the many hard years that followed had changed him.

  Fifty metres of spar-studded, wire-drenched courtyard stood between the Ultramarines and the necron firing line. Tigurius had brought the Space Marines to a sudden stop behind a ragged barricade before the final charge.

  Peering through the gauss-laced haze, Scipio engaged the comm-feed. ‘Specialists to point, on Vorolanus.’

  Brothers Cator and Brakkius moved up, crouch-running, a few seconds later. Scipio clapped Cator on his shoulder guard. ‘Plasma and meltagun at either end, brothers.’ Both nodded as one, taking position at the edges of the wall.

  Chips of rockcrete and semi-flayed plasteel slivers forced Scipio to duck.

  ‘What are we waiting for, brother-sergeant?’ asked Naceon.

  Scipio had his eyes on the courtyard – there was more than merely war-churned earth beneath its shattered flagstones – and didn’t look back.

  ‘For thunder and lightning.’

  Telion had taught him when to wait and when to strike; the Master Scout’s expert tutelage and influence, presently engaged in other war zones, would be missed on Damnos. Scipio gestured towards Tigurius, a couple of metres ahead of them. ‘Watch and be ready.’

  A coruscation of electricity suddenly wreathed the Librarian’s ornate battle armour and he pressed one gauntleted palm to the ground. Instantly, the azure energy banding him leapt into the earth and ripples of psychic force went searching through the

  no-man’s-land.

  Lik
e gruesome marionettes jerking to horrific un-life, the necron ‘flayed ones’ sprang from their ambuscade. They’d been buried just beneath the surface of the earth, poised to attack the Ultramarines as they charged. A minefield of sorts, but one littered with an animate and deadly enemy rather than merely explosives.

  Two of the ghoulish creatures juddered and expired from Tigurius’s lightning arcs, the flayed human skin draped across them like cloaks and cowls burning off in a noisome flesh-smoke. Several more came on, having lost the element of surprise, but slashing with razored finger-talons anyway.

  Scipio roared, ‘Space Marines – unleash death!’ The flare of his bolt pistol framed the hard edges of his crimson battle-helm in jagged monochrome.

  A plasma bolt took one of the flayed ones in the chest, annihilating mechanical organs and processors. The necron collapsed in a heap, quivered and then phased from existence as if it had never even been there.

  Another sloughed away under the beam of Cator’s meltagun. Despite the rapid self-repair engines of the necron’s advanced mechorganics, the damage was critical and it too was teleported away.

  Naceon had leapt the barricade, full-auto adding thrust to his battle cry. ‘Ultramar and the Thunderbolts!’

  Impact sparks riddled the onrushing necron, jarring but not stopping it. Naceon saw the danger, bringing his bolter’s combat-bayonet low to block, but was too late. Finding the weak points of Naceon’s armour joints, the flayed one punched several fatal wounds into the Ultramarine before slicing open his gorget.

  Naceon’s head rolled like a dud-grenade into the dirt.

  ‘Guilliman and the Temple of Hera!’ Scipio invoked a blessing as he cut into the metal clavicle of Naceon’s killer. The chainsword bit deep and jammed.