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

  “Something is amiss,” said the other Word Bearer, studying the approaching Rhino. “The vehicle is gaining speed.”

  And then, the bionic optic in his other eye socket provided him with a close-up image of the transport. Noro saw the distinctive winged blood drop on the armour of someone inside the vehicle, and he knew precisely what was going on. “Warp take them!” he screamed. “Secure the gate!”

  To his credit, his comrade didn’t ask for an explanation. Instead he turned the crank the other way and forced the iron doors to reverse back into the closed position, but the effort he’d used trying to open them made the task twice as hard and twice as long. So the gates to the bunker had three feet of clearance between each edge when the prow of the Rhino struck them at full throttle.

  Lucion handled the tracked transport like a guided missile and rammed the gate at precisely the point where their resistance was least. The impact stunned the Tech-marine into giddying moments of semi-consciousness, but the rest of the team had jumped free just seconds before the collision. Now they poured in behind the broken form of the Rhino, forced like a crimson wedge between the doors.

  Noro’s comrade was gutted by a lucky collateral kill when splintering segments of the Rhino’s tracks took his head from his shoulders. There were other Word Bearers in the bunker, but they had not even understood that anything was amiss until the transport’s explosive arrival. Now all of them were taking up guns, shooting and dying as the Blood Angels brought them death.

  Arkio was at the head of the pack, his bolter a murderous roar of devout vengeance. “Imperator excommunicatus!” he cried, sending the Chaos Marines and their chattering servitors screaming into hell.

  Noro thought about his warp-forsaken luck and crossed gazes with the young Blood Angel. The Word Bearer fired his bolt pistol, but the rounds never seemed to even get close, skipping away as if the human had some charm about him. Noro cried out in Lorgar’s name and rushed forward to bury his knife in the furious face of the whelp, if nothing else, but he was met by a horrific storm of metal-shattering bullets.

  Noro was the last of the Word Bearers in the bunker to fall, and Arkio pitched back his head to cry out in anger. “More!” he spat. “More to slake the thirst!”

  “Aye! More!” Alactus was with him, eyes wide with need.

  Rafen shot his brother a glance as he helped Lucion to extract himself from the crumpled Rhino. “Which way now?”

  “Down.” Lucion indicated a wire-cage lift. “The firing control is below us.”

  Sachiel ran his hand over the white and red of his armour. “By the grail, Sanguinius graces us this day! We turn the tide!”

  As they rode down into the lower level, Rafen chanced another look at Arkio. For a moment, the orange hue of the emergency lamps made his armour seem bronze in colour, and Rafen was reminded of the Riga tapestry again; then the moment passed, and they had arrived.

  A few single-shot kills made short work of the helots cowering amid the consoles, and while the Marines cleaned up, Lucion began the ritual of activation. Above, inside the stone ziggurats, the four gun tubes groaned and shifted, as if the weapons themselves sensed what was about to happen.

  Bellus burst from the gas giant on the shock wave of a nuclear firestorm, volatile elements in the planet’s air combusting around her. Although he had no firing solutions, Captain Ideon ordered every gun to fire blindly, sending up a wall of destruction. The battle barge raced away, and the Cybele moon grew rapidly in its forward screens.

  “This was an error.” Ideon grated, “We will be caught between the ships.”

  Inquisitor Stele shook his head. “Study the aft monitors and tell me, captain, would we have not been destroyed if we had remained?” View-plates aimed astern showed the flaming patch spreading to ignite pockets of gas all across the massive planet. “Those corrupted scum would see the entire world put to the torch just to end us.”

  Ideon’s impassive face twitched slightly. “You may have only delayed our fate, my lord, and not for long.”

  “Contact,” droned one of the servitors. “The Ogre Lord has seen us. She is bringing all weapons to bear. Dirge Eterna is also turning for broadside.”

  “Not for long.” Ideon repeated.

  Fines of rust flickered through the shafts of their biolumes as the massive gun carriages turned to track the Chaos cruiser in orbit. Nerves jerked in Lucion’s cheek as a trio of mechadendrites extended from his skull and into waiting slots in the targeting pulpit.

  Three of the four loading glyphs had now turned green, and Sachiel was becoming impatient. “What is the delay?”

  Arkio answered for Lucion. “We must fire the guns as one, high priest. We may not get a second chance, and the rounds will do the most damage if they strike together.”

  Deep, bass thunder rolled around the chamber and the last glyph changed colour. “Ready.” Lucion’s voice was breathy and distant. “The Emperor’s eye sees the enemy. His wrath is at your command.”

  Sachiel nodded at the young Marine. “Let the honour be yours then, Arkio.”

  “Thank you, lord.” A fierce smile danced over the lips of Rafen’s sibling, and he placed a hand on Lucion’s shoulder.

  “By the blood of every brother dead this day, let their vengeance be fulfilled!”

  “So shall it be,” intoned the Techmarine.

  The guns discharged so close together that the report from the muzzles came as a single thunderous howl of noise. The Shockwave compacted rings of air into dense hoops of vapour around the barrels, and an earth tremor took ill-prepared Word Bearers and Blood Angels alike off their feet.

  Four huge rocket-assisted Proteus-class anti-starship munitions screamed skyward with a sound like tearing flesh. The Ogre Lord did not see them coming until it was too late. The enemy warship, still turning to face Bellus, had put all power to her lances and dorsal void shields, leaving the belly she bared to the moon below utterly unprotected.

  Each of the shells found purchase in the hull metal of Ogre Lord, the staged fusing in their adamantium-sheathed warheads pushing them through the plates of ablative armour and into the soft meat of the ship’s interior. There, the main fusion cores that were the poison hearts of the proteus missiles went critical and detonated.

  Ogre Lord rippled from within, and shattered.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  “Vandire’s oath!”

  The curse slipped from Brother-Captain Ideon’s vox-coder in a spit of static. Wired as he was into every sensor output from the detectors that lined the Bellus, the ship’s commander viewed the death of the Ogre Lord with a thousand eyes. He was witnessing the killing of the Chaos cruiser in ranges of vision beyond ordinary sight. In the higher frequencies of infra-red, Ideon saw plumes of hot atmosphere gush out into the black void; under warp-scan, he saw the twinkles of aberrant daemon-life as they tore asunder in explosive decompression and through the lenses of the rho-field trackers he watched the bright flood of liberated mesons and neutrinos as the enemy vessel’s fusion bottle cracked. Even at this distance, waves of hot energy from the blast licked at the Bellus’s void shields.

  Ogre Lord came apart like rotten wormwood struck by a hammer. Great chunks of the craft span away propelled by the monstrous detonations of the proteus missiles. Chain-fire licked across the upper quarter of the ship as it distended and broke, and munitions blocks of shells all exploded at once.

  “Glorious,” said Stele, the angles of his face lit by the backwash of light from the ruined craft. “Do you see, Ideon? The Emperor delivers us.”

  Under his breath, the officer whispered a prayer of thanksgiving and continued to monitor the fragments of Ogre Lord’s hull, which were now flickering embers as they dropped into Cybele’s upper atmosphere. “I wonder who fired those shots from the surface?”

  “A bold soul, I would warrant,” Stele fingered the purity stud in his ear. “Such a fearless gambit will turn the skies to fire down there, and set the arche
nemy on their heels.”

  Ideon hoped he would live to meet the man who had pulled off so risky a gambit. But perhaps the poor fool would perish along with the Word Bearers on the ground when the Ogre Lord’s remains began to rain down. In the periphery of his normal vision, he noted the way that his astropaths were twitching and cowering as the enemy cruiser succumbed. The psychic death-screams of untold numbers of the corrupted in close proximity disturbed their mental equilibrium. Ideon idly wondered what consequences that effect would have on the enemy psi-sensitives on the planet.

  Stele spoke as if he had read the captain’s mind. “There were a great many slave-psykers on board that ship. I imagine their deaths would have been a mercy for them.”

  With effort, the captain pulled his attention away from the dying ship. “We must act swiftly to enjoy this bounty.” He flicked a glance at his adjutant. “Where is the Dirge Eternal?”

  “Still turning,” the Blood Angel snapped, without looking up from the pict-slate in his hand. “The loss of the other vessel has confused them—they are in danger of extending too far from their attack pattern.”

  “Perfect.” Ideon’s eyes narrowed as he willed the hololithic screen before him to display a fresh series of firing solutions. “Bow guns to ready condition. Bring us to bear.”

  “Complying,” answered the servant at the helm. “Number three gun does not answer.”

  The inquisitor raised an eyebrow and made a tsk noise. Ideon ignored him, a feral heat building in his chest as the screen drew about to show the other Chaos vessel. “We’ll shoot with what we have. Fire at will.”

  A sensor-servitor let out a chirp of warning. “New target entering the firing line!” As the sightless bondsman bound into his scanner pulpit registered the incoming Idolator-class ship, Ideon saw it too in his mind’s eye. Raw jags of data streamed into him down the lines of his mechadendrites. The dagger-form of the raider copied the same manoeuvre that had crippled its twin in the earlier engagement, physically placing itself in front of the Bellus’s war shots to protect the Dirge Eterna. Some higher element of Captain Ideon’s tactical intellect turned this over, wondering just what it was about Dirge that made it so worthy of protection, but that was a matter for consideration after the second raider had been punished for its audacity.

  His synthetic voice spat and hissed. “If they are so eager to court oblivion then they’ll find we have it to spare. The order is revised: strike that idolator from my sky.”

  “Your will,” nodded his adjutant, and the junior officer repeated the command to the cannon-servitors.

  The raider rotated to present its prow to the Bellus. The idolator ship was distinctive: the broken red tooth of the bowsprit was dominated by a huge brass-plated dome in the shape of a human skull. The eyeless shape was tipped backward, as if it was screaming, and from the open jaws a blunt gun muzzle emerged. Ideon had once been told that the figurehead skulls of these vessels were made from metals recovered from the bodies of the dead. They were forged with the iron recovered from the blood furnaces of slaughterhouse worlds in the Eye of Terror. He did not care if the rumour was true; the archenemy’s, ships could be made from the bones of the Chaos gods themselves, for all that it mattered to him. They would die like all the other traitors that ever dared to cross the Blood Angels.

  “He means to ram us,” said the adjutant, half-statement, half-questioning.

  “Then show him the error of his ways,” rumbled Stele.

  Bellus obeyed.

  The battle barge’s hammer-shaped bow sported four massive gun tubes each the length of a Cobra-class Imperial destroyer, and in a glare of violent discharge, all but one of them spat their death-loads at the idolator. Each cannon was powerful enough to deal a shattering blow to void shields or hull armour, and to use them against a lighter capital ship like the Chaos raider was complete overkill. Shots from the first, second and fourth guns—the third was still inoperative—savaged the vessel and opened it to the vacuum. Unlike the Ogre Lord, whose crew had moments of screaming fear to understand what was happening to them, the raider simply ceased to exist.

  In one murderous detonation of energy, steel and twisted bone-metals flashed to atoms and became gas; it was as if the ship had been flung into the heart of a star. Under Ideon’s command, Bellus pushed on through the expanding wave front of the ship’s vaporous remains and bore down on Dirge Eterna. With the balance of power tipped back towards the Blood Angels, the enemy ship fell away from the gas giant and made speed for Cybele’s orbit, raked by the barge’s sub-cannons as she passed. With her engines still below full capability, Bellus could only begin a slow turn to follow it.

  The very air itself was aflame on Cybele as Rafen and the rest of the strike team stumbled from the defence battery bunker. The night sky was no longer dark: wide trails of hot orange fire criss-crossed it in a web of glittering colour. Wreckage screamed through the ragged remains of clouds overhead. Vast slabs of metal as big as islands threw themselves from horizon to horizon, scattering rains of dirty, molten droplets behind them.

  Arkio’s face was lit with savage fury, and he stooped to drag a leg’s-length of iron bar from a shallow impact crater.

  It was a fragment from the Chaos cruiser after the fall. The rod went slack, the heat of re-entry making it distend. “What worthless things these creatures are,” he grimaced, “Curse them for forcing us to sully our hands with their blood.”

  Lucion held up his hand. “Listen… Do you hear that?”

  Rafen’s brow furrowed. The ceaseless screeching of the Word Bearer demagogues and the noise of weapons fire had been such a constant companion over the past day that changes to the cacophony were not immediately apparent to him. But then he caught it too, and strained the sensitive lyman organs in his ears to separate the sound from the hypersonic shrieks of falling debris.

  “The Traitors… What are they doing?” Gone now were the spitting blasphemes of the Word Bearer war-priests, and in their place were anguished yelps and utterances of wretchedness and woe.

  Sachiel spared Rafen a grim smile. “We have dealt them a terrible blow, kinsmen. They feel keenly the deaths of their foul brethren and it vexes them. Listen to them, they nurse the pain like it is a physical wound!”

  The priest was correct. The Word Bearers’ chants were no longer monotonous litanies and corrupt hymnals, but keening wails and funereal chants.

  Alactus laughed. “Then we’ll give them something to weep for, eh?” He hefted his bolter and made a show of cocking it.

  To the west, the fighting between Koris’ unit and the main force of the Word Bearers was still going on, but now the exchanges of fire were desultory and sporadic, as both sides reeled from the eruption of death-flame from the heavens.

  “Your orders, then, high priest?” Arkio asked. Strangely, it seemed that none of the Blood Angels had thought to move until the young firebrand had brought it up.

  “Yes, of course.” Sachiel said, distracted from the burning sky. “We should regroup with Sergeant Koris before the enemy gather their wits.”

  “I’ll take the lead.” Arkio snapped, and with that he was away, racing across the starport fields, dodging from cover to cover. Rafen kept pace with him, pausing to conceal himself in the lee of a wrecked Thunderhawk as once more the sky tore open with the passage of another piece of ship. The dense fragment of hull struck the hills a few kilometres distant with a white flash that underlit the smoke clouds. The shock of the impact reverberated through the ground as the sound of the landing snapped past them. Bits of the Ogre Lord would be raining down on Cybele for days to come.

  Rafen considered the ashen landscape. “Blood and martyrs, brother. We may have done more damage to this world with one shot than the Traitors did all day.”

  “What does it matter as long as we kill them in kind?” Arkio’s voice was cool and distant. “I am the Emperor’s servant, and by my hand his enemies perish.” The younger Marine leapt from cover as a lo
ose knot of firing Word Bearers approached. Rafen joined him.

  Iskavan the Hated gave one of his flamer-troops a savage kick, pushing the wounded Chaos Marine face-first into a mouldering pile of dead men. The injured Word Bearer was one of the lucky ones; the Dark Apostle’s accursed crozius had already fed on the life of a dozen more Marines who had been too slow to follow their master’s commands.

  The lord of the ninth host was literally incandescent with rage. Discs of turbulent electro-telepathic force encircled his head in coronets of lightning. They glowed about his bony horns like Saint Elmo’s Fire. In the near distance, cracks of bolter rounds signalled the places where Word Bearers and Blood Angels fought, but around the main mass of the Chaos Legions were disordered lines of hand-to-hand fighting. Every member of the host had felt the death-throes of the war-psykers on the Ogre Lord, the black shroud of their screaming minds reaching out to hammer all the warp-touched who walked on Cybele. The Word Bearers stood fast and weathered the shrieking. Their disciplined mentalities were rigid and resistant, but the cackling minor daemons and countless legions of helots they had brought with them went mad from the sound in their heads, and they turned on one another.

  The unexpected side-effect from the Blood Angels’ sneak attack now changed the Word Bearers’ forces from precise, mechanical formations into a raging, uncontrollable rabble. Iskavan roared with inchoate anger as a dozen gun-servitors dared—they dared!—to attack him in their maddened fury. Slug-throwers burped fat discs of serrated metal at him and blunderbuss horns vomited rains of lead shot, every pitiful round rebounding off his ruby armour. He replied with the most terrible blades of his crozius, sweeping the slave creatures away in a screeching arc of gore and entrails. The Dark Apostle could not reach the enemy Marines for hundreds of his own helots were now attacking the Word Bearers and each other alike, tearing at the sallow skin of their faces in vain efforts to quell the insanity boiling through them. Iskavan’s crozius jumped and sang in his mailed fist, rattling the chains that bound it to him. The weapon was spooked by the thick taint of mind-death in the air, and it craved blood to drown out the sensation. The Word Bearers’ leader gave it what it desired by the gut-load: he buried the seething blade head into the bellies of the men-forms around him.