Blood Angels - The Complete Rafen Omnibus - James Swallow Read online

  As fallout ash began to settle, all about him the air was cut and slashed by the profane hoots of the enemy. Garbled litanies and exhortations of violence assailed his ears, blasphemous descants warring with repellent pulpit speeches broadcast from speaker horns. Without conscious thought, Rafen’s lips began to move, forming the words of the Barbarossa Hymnal, and as he gave it voice, he heard the song spread to his battle-brothers on the firing line. He drew strength from the sacred lyrics, and advanced.

  Turcio was at his right hand now, a heavy bolter in his grip. Rafen did not ask where he had acquired the weapon, rather he marvelled at his brother’s use of it, as shells cascaded from the muzzle and shredded the enemy advance. The hymn’s words became a dull rumble in Rafen’s ears, as a hot flood of adrenaline charged through his muscles. The eager twitching of his gun-hand’s fingers returned, so he gave it freedom, his bolter joining the chorus of chain-fed death laid down upon the Word Bearers. At the edges of his vision, crimson spectres danced just out of sight—the ever-present ghost of the rage. Rafen kept the dark impulses firmly in check—control was the key to staying alive in a battle like this one.

  Waves of spiny dreadclaw drop capsules landed around them, the earth shaking with each hammer-blow impact. Like vile seedpods, they broke open to spit out fresh Chaos Marines or the warped forms of dreadnoughts. Every one of them added to the bloody discord of the battle, tearing Cybele’s quiet landscape of pious contemplation into shreds. Rafen removed his combat blade from the eye socket of a Word Bearer who had strayed too close, and wiped gore from the serrated edge. Turcio’s gun bawled and cut another Traitor down, splitting him asunder as surely as if he had been gutted by a chainsword.

  “Still they come,” the Marine said through gritted teeth, “How many more?”

  “Too many.” Rafen retorted. “Blood for blood’s sake!” He bellowed, firing to underline his words with lead. More landers came to rest in the distance, the closest collapsing a crypt with a gust of decayed air. Rafen paused, readying a brace of krak grenades to feed its passengers the moment one of them dared to emerge. He waited until the broken slabs of the tomb roof began to move and lobbed them in. He dropped to one knee as the explosion coughed, the muffled report lost in the clamour of the Word Bearers’ advance. Rafen sighted at the ruined crypt, taking a moment to kill any stragglers that might have survived. But instead of a seeing a stunned Traitor emerging from the rock, a thick pincer-like limb extended itself from the stones. The heavy iron armature wavered and then came down hard, biting into the turf. Rafen and Turcio stumbled backward as more legs grew out of the rubble, pushing up a box-shaped body with a toothy fan of blades.

  “Defiler!” Turcio cried out the machine’s name, and rang bolt shells heedlessly against its gore-streaked hull. Rafen was more careful. He placed single rounds into the clusters of weapons along the war engine’s flanks, hopeful that a lucky hit might crack a flamer line or sever power cabling. The red metal of the walker rippled under the strain of sudden movement, as the skin of a vast beast would show the flexion of its muscles. It let out an ear-splitting honk from a war trumpet as it pulled itself up on six fat legs. It was met by an atonal choir of replies. Rafen’s gaze flicked to the other landers that had come down with this one and saw that each had the same cargo: a dozen more Word Bearer defilers were stepping from their pods, swivelling their guns to bear. As the first jets of burning liquid promethium gushed across the Blood Angels’ forces, Rafen yanked on Turcio’s arm to pull him out of the firing zone.

  Somewhere in the melee, he had lost sight of Arkio. He had been distracted by the crack-snap of lasgun shots. Rafen returned fire and ejected a spent magazine, while Turcio covered him.

  “Those grotesques will overrun us!” Turcio snapped angrily, “Where is our armour?”

  Rafen remembered the boiled pools of metal that had once been tanks and said nothing. He ignored Turcio’s words and watched the defilers shirting into position: the walkers were preparing to break the Blood Angel’s line. If they had still had armour, the Marines might have stood a chance at blunting it, but with these light arms… The endless rain of Word Bearer troops was tipping the odds ever further against the Blood Angels, even with the men left behind by the Bellus.

  Wherever he was, Brother-Sergeant Koris had come to the same conclusion. The veteran’s gruff voice issued out of the Marine’s ear-bead. “Fall back to the inner fence by squads!” came the order. “Let these warp-spawn come at your heels, but don’t get caught up!”

  “Let’s move,” Rafen shot a glance at Turcio. “Come now, we’ll give them their push and then shove it back down their throats.”

  Turcio glanced over his shoulder as they ran, fighting down his disquiet.

  A chain-reaction of short-circuits sent sparks ripping across the portside gun console, and frying the synapses of the cannon-servitor connected there. Stele wafted a hand in front of his face to dispel the burnt meat stink that assailed his nostrils. The other gripped the brass rail that bordered the warship’s giant glasteel porthole. They were close enough to one of the idolator raiders to actually see it with the naked eye, the tumbling dart of metal stark against the emerald hue of the gas giant. The quick application of a tactic refined by Ideon’s anti-ork sorties had granted Bellus first blood against the Chaos flotilla. A high-gravity turn, more akin to the manoeuvres of Thunderbolt fighters than capital ships, had allowed the battle barge to rake Dirge Eterna with her bow guns, although the nearest of the small raiders had surged forward to protect the large ship, as if its crew would receive some cryptic honour for accepting the hell storm intended for the cruiser.

  The wounded raider was bleeding gases into the void and Stele’s servo-skulls relayed scans of a cracked fusion bottle. He pressed one finger on the glass, blotting out the shape of the vessel. The ship was a cripple, and so the inquisitor had already dismissed it from the complex game board arrayed in his mind.

  Captain Ideon was conversing with one of his subordinates. “Set to work on repairing the torpedo tubes first,” he ordered. “The warp drives can wait.”

  Stele took a quick step forward. “So our damage is worse than you first stated, captain?”

  Ideon’s face remained fixed but his voxcoder’s tones were terse. “I have revised estimates.”

  As they pulled away from their first strike, the second raider had come about to flank the Bellus, taking advantage of her weakened void shields to the aft. Hard impacts on the stern quarter had sent tocsins wailing on every deck, and although Ideon had said nothing, Stele knew that they had been disabled—at least, temporarily.

  Time was short, there were only moments now until the Dirge Eterna’s commander moved into formation with the undamaged raider and advanced on Bellus. The odds were poor with the ship in this sluggish condition. Stele studied the Blood Angels’ officer, aware that Ideon was courting the same thoughts. “We must not allow the enemy to place us on the defensive. Bellus must maintain the initiative, or we are lost.”

  “I concur, my lord, but if we move on our previous heading, we will be caught between the Dirge and the Ogre Lord.”

  “Correct.” Stele noted, dipping his hand into the holosphere. “Instead, we will draw away, toward the gas giant.” He indicated the huge green orb streaked with white cloud. “Take us into the upper atmosphere. The vapour will conceal us long enough to return the ship to full readiness.”

  Ideon considered this. “To do that would mean that my brothers on Cybele would have no hope of rescue. We would be leaving them to an uncertain fate.”

  “On the contrary,” said the inquisitor. “Their fate is all too certain, but if we do not wish to share it, this is the course we must pursue.” He nodded at the captain, and allowed himself an expression of rueful sadness. “Execute my orders without delay, and by Terra, let His light protect those who stand and fight on Cybele.”

  The starport’s ornamental gates had been wilted by a plasma blast, and the cannon turret that o
nce defended it was now a black stump. Sachiel had ordered a pair of Trojan tenders parked across the road as a makeshift barricade, but none among the defenders fooled themselves into thinking it would do more than slow the Word Bearers’ advance.

  Rafen ran toward the stone revetments that edged the fence. Crossfire from his brothers and traitors alike cut past with high-pitched screams. One instant they were in open ground; the next they were inside the port. Rafen blinked away the moment. In the thick of the fight, there were often flashes of time that seemed stretched thin or compacted without rhyme or reason. The Marine had learned to take them as they came and trust in his training. “Assault troops inbound!” a voice called. “Look sharp!” Rafen reloaded for what seemed like the thousandth time that day. His hands worked the bolter by touch alone as the grim visage of his helmet scanned the low cloud. He saw them instantly: the bulky shapes of Traitor Marines bobbing up in jet-fuelled skips, every one of them rising and falling on dirty orange plumes of flame that spat from their mammoth thruster backpacks. Streams of energy hotter than a sun’s core issued from the pistols in their mailed fists. The plasma guns carved blackened streaks across dirt, stone and flesh alike. Other men close to him were already opening fire, stitching tracer into the sky in lazy red threads. The Word Bearers’ assault cadre wove in and out of the lines of shot, with grace that belied their obdurate mass. Rafen held back. It was better to wait until the jump-packs slowed the Traitors for a landing, he reasoned; it was better to hesitate and pick that instant when the enemy hovered like a hawk about to swoop.

  As that thought formed in his mind, Rafen saw his opportunity and trimmed a falling flyer as a gardener would prune thorns from a plant. He took off the Word Bearer’s left leg below the knee, then his arm at the shoulder. Suddenly unstable, the Assault Marine tumbled out of the air and landed in a mud slick at the base of a bomb crater. Puffs of heat overhead marked the deaths of a handful more. But a few of the Chaos Marines had made it over the fence and had dropped into firing crouches, guns ripping with mad abandon.

  Turcio’s vision filled with the foetid shape of a Word Bearer as an enemy soldier bore down. He jerked the trigger of his heavy bolter, but something gave a hollow click inside the breech and the fat-barrelled gun stayed silent. Turcio swore a curse that would have earned him fifty lashes if a senior brother had heard it. He brandished the inert weapon like a club as the Word Bearer felled him in a bone-shaking tackle. The enemy warrior had a deformed power claw where his right arm should have been, and he used it to cleave the jammed bolter in two. Locked together, Turcio punched the Word Bearer, but the clawed Chaos Marine took the blows without pause. Lukewarm spittle bubbled out from the attacker’s faceplate, and seething emerald eyes peered at Turcio from behind dirt-flecked lenses.

  The young Marine’s gorge rose; the stench of the beast made his gut rebel. He drew back and head-butted the Word Bearer, getting a string of unholy invective in return. The claw-hand raked down the breast of Turcio’s armour, ripping through the ceramite and cutting vital connections. The Blood Angel felt cold air touch his bare skin.

  Then the Word Bearer said the first words that Turcio could actually understand. “Give your flesh,” it burbled.

  “Not today.” Rafen’s voice was right in Turcio’s ear, and he jerked away as a red flash blurred into his line of sight.

  The Chaos Marine barely had time to recognise the shape of a godwyn-pattern bolter pressed to its head, before Rafen fired point-blank and turned its skull into a grimy mist of filthy blood and brain matter. Some nerve connection still firing in the Word Bearer’s glove control jerked. Abruptly the headless soldier flew back up into the sky, and spiralled wildly; he had become an unguided missile. Rafen saw it spin and fall like a mortar shell—back into the advancing enemy line.

  Black with exhaust soot, Turcio struggled to get up; the myomer muscles in his broken armour whined. “Brother, are you able?” Rafen asked, helping him to his feet.

  Turcio coughed. “Give me a weapon that works and I’ll show you just how able!” He failed to keep a waver from his voice.

  Rafen smiled grimly. “Good man. Here.” He handed him a laser pistol, an Imperial Guard-issue weapon he’d found discarded by the gates. “Make do.”

  Undisturbed by the ceaseless thunder of weapons’ fire, wisps of haze drifted across the open landing field of the port from discharged smoke grenades and the wreckage of burning Thunderhawks, obscuring the far edge of the broad ferrocrete oval. Rafen could see shapes moving out there, but even the enhanced sensory capacities of his auspex could not give him anything more than the most basic information. Metallic fumes thrown into the atmosphere by the fighting baffled the scanner and roughened every breath the Marines took. It would have cut an ordinary man’s lungs like broken glass, but there were no ordinary men left alive on Cybele.

  Patchwork blobs of sunlight crossed the tarmac now and then. They caught the haze and conjured ghost images in plays of light and shadow. Rafen found himself glancing over his shoulder, to make sure that the enemy was not coming up behind them. There could easily be hundreds of them out there, concealed in the fog of battle and waiting for the right moment to strike.

  Shot after shot from the Chaos host pitted and nicked the sparse stone fortifications. Lasers carved down great curls of razor-chain fence where they melted through the links. Ahead, the leading elements of the Word Bearers’ force were pressing into the Blood Angels’ barricade, and one of the defilers gave the parked Trojans a desultory kick.

  The red war engine crouched down and threw itself at the tracked vehicles, ramming them away in a gout of orange sparks.

  In reply, a blue-helmed devastator Marine sent a pair of missiles into the defiler’s prow. The rockets leapt eagerly to meet their target, and a dozen tactical troopers poured fire into the same place, forcing the machine to stagger backward.

  “Rafen!” The Blood Angel turned to see Koris, his gun smoking. “Report!” The veteran absently brushed rock chips off his armour as a stray round shattered a decapitated statue close by.

  He jerked a thumb at the sky to indicate the Chaos command ship. “They must be spawning up there like maggots, brother-sergeant. There are four of them to every one of us…” His words trailed off. “Tycho’s blood, this isn’t the kind of hit-and-fade we’ve handled before. They mean to raze the planet and make trophies of us!”

  “Aye.” Koris said with a dour nod. “This world has no tactical value, but they choose it because their very presence here is an affront to the Emperor.” He shook his head. “A world full of graves and just a handful of men to guard it? Bah! We’re standing on the lip of a corpse-grinder!”

  Shapes moved in the smoke, white and red flickering amid the grey. “Take care, Koris.” Sachiel’s voice was clear and hard. “Defeatist talk belittles us all.” The Sanguinary High Priest approached with a unit of men at his heels. Rafen noted with slight concern that none of them was Arkio.

  Koris stepped closer to Sachiel, his voice low. “Pragmatism is the watchword of any Blood Angel, priest. I taught you that lesson when you were still a whelp.”

  Sachiel’s eyes narrowed. “I’ve had other teachers since you, old man,” he said, “other lessons learned.” He gestured with his chainsword. “I gathered the men who survived the bombardment intact. I’ve ordered them to come forward and reinforce the line.” Sachiel threw a nod to the Marines with him and they rushed forward to take up firing positions at the barricade.

  “To what end?” Koris demanded. “We are assailed on all sides—those blighted scum are tightening the noose around us as we speak! Surely you see that?”

  “Lord Stele’s orders were to hold,” the priest shot back, “and hold we will.”

  The sergeant showed his teeth at Sachiel’s tone. “Hold what, priest? Tell me that. What patch of ground? A metre? A kilometre?” He shook his head. “We stand and we die, and Stele—if he is even still alive—returns to find the Word Bearers chewing on the bo
nes of my men.” He flashed a glance at Rafen. “I will not allow it.”

  “The port must not fall—”

  “It has already fallen!” The words bubbled up out of Rafen before he was even aware of it. Sachiel gave him a barbed look. “We’re just slowing them, not halting them.” As if to lend its agreement to the words, one of the defilers spat out a deafening hoot of sound as it speared the husk of a smouldering speeder. “We need to regroup, before it’s too late.”

  Despite himself, Sachiel hesitated. The priest’s many battles over the decades had been in conflict with xenos scum of every stripe, but this was the first time many of the warriors of the Bellus had met their traitorous brethren at close hand. As much as he loathed admitting inferiority in anything, he had to admit that Rafen and Koris had the greater benefit of experience against this foe. Sachiel’s fingers strayed to the bone wings on his breastplate and the ruby blood droplet depicted there. There would be no glory in dying in a graveyard after surviving so much to recover the spear.

  “Give the order,” he told Koris, after a long pause. “But watch your tone in future.”

  The sergeant turned away and relayed the command, leaving Sachiel and Rafen together. “You dislike me, don’t you?” The priest said suddenly. “You have never given me any more than what is expected of you.”

  Rafen covered his surprise at Sachiel’s words. “It is my duty to respect the holders of the grail—”

  Sachiel waved him into silence. “You respect the office, but not the man, brother. Even after all these years, you slight me.” The priest turned as the rest of the Blood Angels began to draw back. “But I will have your respect, Rafen,” he said gently. “You will give it to me.”

  Rafen tried to form an answer, but none came to him. Koris’ voice in his ear-bead pulled his attention away.

  “There is a gap in the Word Bearer line to the north. Take the lead and secure a regroup point at the reservoir dome.”