The Relic - Jonathan Green Read online

  The stompa’s wrecking ball attachment – the krusher itself looking like a huge rusted boulder – came whirling around over the top of its pintle arm mount, crashing down on top of a Rhino with all the force of a meteorite impact. The tank’s adamantium plates buckled under the force of the wrecking ball blow, sending the troop transport bouncing off the uneven ice-gouged bedrock that had lain buried beneath the glacier until the orks had dug it up.

  As Jarold watched, what was left of Neophyte Feran rocketed skyward as an ork skorcha engulfed his body in flame, detonating the krak grenades he carried at his waist.

  Raging to the heavens at the death of another battle-brother, and one who had not yet had the chance to prove himself in glorious battle to his brethren’s satisfaction, the Dreadnought turned his blazing weapons on the ork responsible.

  The barrels of his assault cannon glowing red hot, his mind-linked machine-spirit informed him that his auto-loaders would soon be out of ammunition. But if today was his day to die a second death then he would make it his vow to take as many of the Blood Scar orks with him as possible.

  Jarold surveyed the scorched glacier around him. The remaining Black Templar armour had formed a cordon around the teleporter, every vehicle’s guns pointing outwards towards the enemy now pouring over the ground towards their position. The aliens’ fury at the audacity of the Templars in taking the teleporter spurred them on, the savage brutes giving voice to harsh barks and hoots of wild abandon.

  ‘Brothers!’ Jarold declared, his voice echoing strangely from the derricks and hoists of the corposant-sheathed structure. ‘This day we show the xenos filth that Armageddon is not theirs for the taking. This day we show the orks that we will leave no wrong unavenged, no slight unchallenged. This day we will deliver the Emperor’s divine retribution upon the heads of the greenskin defilers of this world in the name of Primarch Dorn and his servant Lord Sigismund.’

  Jarold turned his storm bolter on another charging ork and took its head off with one mass-reactive round.

  ‘Brothers! Today we sell ourselves dear in the name of the Emperor that we might deny the orks another victory upon the shores of Armageddon. We have a new mission. We will not depart this world until we have ensured that they may never make use of their teleporter or their war-idol again. Today is a good day to die!’

  With a scream of rending metal, lightning-drenched claws tore through the chugging engine of an ork wartrakk as its armour plating melted under the intense heat-blast of a multi-melta.

  As the smoke and flames died back again, the Black Templar Dreadnought watched with grim satisfaction as the still more imposing and ornamented form of Venerable Rhodomanus strode through the devastation to reach the protection of the cordon of crusader armour, crushing a flailing ork beneath one colossal foot whilst snatching the mangled body of another from the wrecked wartrakk and quartering its head between the crimson talons of his colossal power fist.

  ‘No, brother,’ the ancient boomed. ‘I am sorry to contradict you, but today is not your day to die.’

  As he reached the Templar line, Rhodomanus turned his multi-melta on an ork bike, igniting its fuel tank; the vehicle and its rider disappeared in a sheet of incandescent flame.

  ‘It is not your destiny that you give your lives in sacrifice to stop this blasphemy,’ the venerable went on, as if making his decree. ‘Your mission is not yet done. You must live to fight another day.’

  Jarold did not interrupt, but listened, considering Rhodomanus’s words as he targeted the ork manning the flamethrower mounted on the back of a rumbling halftrakk.

  ‘This is my battle, brother,’ Rhodomanus continued. ‘It is up to me to accomplish what I and my brother Fists tried to fifty years ago.’

  The ancient was right. This was not the Templars’ battle. The destruction of the ork war machine had never been their objective. Brother Ansgar still awaited them, somewhere. And it was up to Jarold and the others to find him. It was as they had sworn it.

  But none of that changed the fact that they were severely outnumbered and completely surrounded, with little hope of being able to turn the tide of battle in their favour now, unable to even call for extraction by the fleet.

  The superstructure of the incomparable ork device in whose shadow they now sheltered hummed and twanged as orkish hard rounds and crackling energy beams spanged off its pylons and girders.

  ‘Do you think you can fathom the workings of this teleporter?’ Jarold asked his Techmarine.

  ‘All ork machines are primitive and alien,’ Isendur replied, ‘but I would predict a seventy per cent chance of success.’

  ‘Then set to work,’ Jarold instructed. ‘By the Emperor, I want this thing operational and locked onto the fleet in orbit as soon as is humanly possible.’

  With a dull crump the speeding guntrukk exploded, obliterated by the massed barrage of heavy weapons that pounded it.

  Standing side by side against the horde, the Dreadnoughts Jarold and Rhodomanus locked onto a new target and a warbike disintegrated into shrapnel.

  Only a matter of metres away, Brother Huarwar died as he was decapitated at close quarters by a heavily mekanised ork. Roaring in grief-stricken pain, Jarold broke from the circle, advancing on the creature responsible, litanies of hate spouting from his vox-casters like bile as he shredded the alien’s augmented body with raking bolter and cannon fire.

  ‘Brother Isendur!’ he bellowed over the howls of the orks and the savage chatter of their guns, ignoring the succession of hard rounds that rattled off his own adamantium body-shell as if they were no more than the stings of rad-midges. ‘Give me some good news!’

  ‘I have subjugated what passes for the device’s machine-spirit, patching a link via one of my servitors and dominating it with a liturgical sub-routine, and, through its transmitter array, have located the fleet in orbit and Forgeship Goliath–’

  ‘Brother!’ Jarold boomed, bisecting an ork from midriff to neck with a barrage of bolter fire. ‘Is it ready?’

  ‘Aye, brother,’ Isendur replied. ‘It is ready.’

  ‘Then begin the evacuation.’

  As the two Dreadnoughts held back the press of the ork horde with bolter and fist, cannon and melta, at Jarold’s command the strike force moved back beneath the beam emitter of the huge gantry, never once turning their backs on the enemy, claiming a dozen ork lives for every step they took in retreat.

  It was not the Templars’ way to retreat in the face of greater numbers of the enemy. But for the brethren of the Solemnus Crusade, this was their last action. They could not afford to sacrifice their lives so freely, not when their holy work remained undone. They were yet to recover Brother Ansgar’s body and repay the warboss Morkrull Grimskar for all the monster had taken from them when the orks of the Blood Scar tribe razed the Chapter Keep on Solemnus.

  They had all sworn it – every crusading battle-brother, from neophyte to initiate, Techmarine to Apothecary, Dreadnought to Marshal, Chaplain to Champion – and they could not relinquish the fight until their vow had been fulfilled, not when a way out of this impossible situation had presented itself.

  So large was the ork teleporter – it having been intended to beam something as gargantuan as the stompa to another arena of battle – that the entirety of the survivors of Jarold’s battleforce could fit within the circumference of the projection plate beneath the enormous beam emitter.

  They would go together. That was how Brother Jarold wanted it. Whether their plan worked, and the teleporter returned them to the Forgeship Goliath, or scattered their component atoms to the stars, they would go together. The only ones they would leave behind were one tech-servitor to initiate the firing sequence of the teleporter’s beam-gun, and Venerable Brother Rhodomanus of the Crimson Fists.

  ‘Brother Jarold,’ came Techmarine Isendur’s voice with something almost like urgency in his usually unexcitable tone. �
�Our departure now waits only on your presence upon the plate.’

  Jarold turned to Rhodomanus, swivelling about the pivot of his waist bearing, as if he were about to address the venerable, blasting a leaping axe-wielding ork out of the air with a single, well-placed shot.

  ‘Go, brother,’ Rhodomanus said, before the other could speak. ‘Go to meet your destiny and leave me to face mine.’

  ‘It has been an honour,’ Jarold stated stoically.

  ‘Aye, it has been that,’ the ancient agreed.

  ‘Die well, brother. For the primarch.’

  ‘For Dorn. Now go.’

  Rhodomanus directed another blast from his multi-melta into the press of the ork pack, the heat blast clearing ten metres around him in every direction.

  Taking his leave, Brother Jarold defiantly turned his back on the orks and marched to join his battle-brothers at the heart of the humming teleporter, the venerable laying down covering fire behind him, like some colossal avatar of the Emperor’s retribution.

  And as he did so, he began to intone Dorn’s litany of service.

  ‘What is your life?’ he began. ‘My honour is my life.’

  An ork fell to scything fire from his storm bolter.

  ‘What is your fate? My duty is my fate.’

  Another was impaled on the crackling blades of his power fist.

  ‘What is your fear? My fear is to fail.’

  As he retreated behind Rhodomanus, Brother Jarold gave voice to the defiant battle cry in one last act of defiance directed at the alien orks.

  ‘No pity!’ Brother Jarold boomed.

  ‘No remorse!’ his battle-brothers responded, taking up his battle cry.

  ‘No fear!’ they bellowed in unison, clashing their weapons against their holy armour in a clattering cacophony of defiance.

  Corposant crawled over and around the superstructure of the ork teleporter in writhing serpents of sick green light. With an apocalyptic scream like the sundering of the heavens, the beam-emitter fired.

  Rhodomanus did not look back. He knew the Templars were gone.

  ‘And what is your reward?’ he asked, his voice rising like a challenge against the ravening greenskins. ‘My salvation is my reward!’

  Three orks fell to a withering hail of bolter fire.

  ‘What is your craft? My craft is death!’

  The multi-melta put an end to another ork bike.

  ‘What is your pledge?’

  The venerable hesitated. He could see the stompa advancing on him now, and him alone, belching smoke into the air from its exhaust-stacks, its colossal mass shaking the ground with its every step.

  ‘My pledge is eternal service!’

  As the stompa closed on the teleporter at last, with heavy, purposeful steps that sent tremors skittering through the bedrock that lay beneath the glacier, an inescapable fact wormed its way into the spirit-linked mind of the ancient. This was to be his last stand, but even the glorious sacrifice of a venerable Dreadnought might not be enough to stop the stompa.

  Rhodomanus and his brother Fists had been unable to destroy it fifty years before, during the Second War for Armageddon, only managing to delay the inevitable by trapping it within the glacier. And now, fifty years on, what hope was there for him as he stood before the devastatingly powerful war machine?

  But still he kept firing, directing blast after blast of his multi-melta at the gun emplacements that bristled from the effigy’s carapace, at the stompa’s armour itself, and its crew, when his spirit-linked targeter could lock onto them.

  The stompa loomed before him, blocking his view of the crater and the rest of the horde, the macabre god-machine filling his world. Nothing else mattered now. There was only the ancient and the idol, two relics from another battle for Armageddon, ready to make the final moves of a power play begun five decades before.

  Sparkling emerald flame consumed the ork teleporter once more, power relays humming as the device came online again. Rhodomanus’s optical sensors homed in on the roasted remains of the tech-servitor fused to the esoteric device by its last firing. The servitor was dead, so how was it that the teleporter was powering up to fire at all?

  It was only then that Rhodomanus realised that in his face-off with the stompa he had backed himself onto the empty platform and now stood directly beneath the beam emitter.

  A nimbus of actinic light formed at the centre of the teleporter, also directly beneath the focusing beam of the vast construction, surrounding him with its suffused essence. Something was being beamed back to the teleporter.

  He felt the tingle of it at his very core, in every fibre of his body that was still flesh and blood. And the machine-spirit of his Dreadnought body felt the exhilarating rush of a trillion calculations as the impossible machine read and recorded the position of every atom within his body, the connection of every synapse, the binary pattern of every recollection-code stored within his memory implants. He was beaming out.

  Framed by the skeletal structure of the alien device, the stompa seemed to peer down at him with the telescoping sights of its cannon-barrel eyes.

  Through his one remaining mortal eye Rhodomanus saw adamantium, steel, ceramite and flesh become first translucent and then transparent. At the same time he saw something else taking shape within the sphere of light with him, becomingly steadily more opaque as it solidified around his departing form.

  For the briefest nano-second he and the object shared the same space – his machine-spirit merging with its primitive programmed consciousness. Fifty metres long and weighing a hundred tonnes – the energy build-up already taking place within its plasma reactor perilously close to the point of critical mass and detonation – the torpedo was capable of blowing a hole in the side of an ork kill kroozer with armour plating several metres thick. The venerable’s own machine-spirit continued the countdown to destruction.

  Five.

  Four.

  Three.

  Two.

  Suffer not the alien to live, he thought.

  And then actinic light blinded his optical sensors and the bleak white wastes of the Dead Lands, the collapsing structure of the teleporter and the impotently raging stompa. Everything vanished, melting into black oblivion, and Brother Rhodomanus was gone.

  The battle-barge Pride of Polux hung in high orbit above Armageddon’s second largest landmass.

  All was still within the reclusiam. Captain Obiareus, Commander of the Crimson Fists Third Company, was alone with his thoughts and his strategium. There were not many minutes in the day when he could say that, and he savoured those times when it was the case. But such precious moments made all the difference to his command. They were those times when he could step back, reflect, consider and plan.

  He sat, the elbows of his power armour resting on the cuisses of his armoured legs, gauntlets locked together before his face. His lips touched the reliquary that hung from his neck on its golden chain and which he held within his hands as reverentially as he might a newborn. He stared out of the roof-high windows of the reclusiam at the silent void beyond, pondering again his Chapter’s gains and losses on the planet below, alone with his thoughts and the stars.

  Footsteps disturbed the captain’s contemplations, the sound of ceramite ringing from the stone-flagged floor shattering the silence of the reclusiam. Obiareus looked up in annoyance.

  Brother Julio approached the strategium, head bowed respectfully.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘My lord,’ Julio began. ‘We have received a hail from Marshal Brant of the Black Templars Solemnus Crusade. He wishes to speak with you, my lord.’

  ‘The Templars wish to speak with us?’

  ‘Yes, my lord.’

  ‘Regarding what matter?’ Obiareus probed further.

  ‘They have news, my lord.’ Brother Julio faltered, as if hardly able to be
lieve what he himself was saying.

  ‘Yes? What news?’

  ‘News of Venerable Rhodomanus,’ Brother Julio said hesitantly.

  ‘Brother Rhodomanus?’ Now it was Obiareus’s turn to express his disbelief. ‘Brother Rhodomanus lost to us these fifty years past since the Second War fought against the xenos for this world?’

  ‘Yes, my lord,’ Julio confirmed, ‘but lost no longer. Venerable Rhodomanus has returned.’

  About the Author

  Jonathan Green has been writing for Black Library since its inception. He is the author of the Black Templars Armageddon novels and a pair of Path to Victory gamebooks, amongst many other credits.

  This short story collection focuses entirely on the Space Marines and their evil counterparts, the Traitor Marines, telling high-action tales of heroism and savagery.

  A Black Library Publication

  First published in Great Britain in 2010, in the Legends of the Space Marines anthology.

  This eBook edition published in 2011 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd, Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

  Produced by Games Workshop in Nottingham.

  The Relic © Copyright Games Workshop Limited 2011. The Relic, GW, Games Workshop, Black Library, The Horus Heresy, The Horus Heresy Eye logo, Space Marine, 40K, Warhammer, Warhammer 40,000, the ‘Aquila’ Double-headed Eagle logo, and all associated logos, illustrations, images, names, creatures, races, vehicles, locations, weapons, characters, and the distinctive likenesses thereof, are either ® or TM, and/or © Games Workshop Limited, variably registered around the world.

  All Rights Reserved.

  A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library.

  ISBN: 978-1-78251-339-1

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

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