The Ebonite Archymsts 20 страница

He fired at the beast Thoic had injured. The shot punched into its skull like a trepanning auger and the toxin devoured its brain in seconds. It dropped with its club-like paws clutched to its head as its higher functions were necrotised.

Yet another monstrous Space Marine pushed into the apothecarion and Numen put a burst of fire into its chest before it was upon him. Tarsa went to swing his rifle round, but stopped as he saw three warriors in garishly decorated battle-plate appear in the wrecked doorway. His senses recoiled from the shrieking noise surrounding them, a din of clashing disharmony and a riot of screams issuing from shoulder-mounted augmitters. He recognised the Emperor’s Children from their hideous appearance on Isstvan V and wasted no time in putting a round through the throat of the first warrior as he unlimbered a long wire-coiled stave connected to an amplification device on his back.

The warrior dropped to his knees, a gurgling howl of pleasure torn from his opened throat as the stave flared with a burst of blue fire and a booming bass note that hurled Tarsa against Branthan’s stasis casket. He crashed down on the other side, rolling to his feet and moving away from the fallen captain.

The gurgling warrior slumped forwards as another turned a low-slung weapon around, its neck slender and flanged with whipping steel strings and a vicious barb at its end. The legionary pounded the flared base of the weapon before Tarsa could wonder at its exact function, and the air between them buckled with pure concussive force. Once again Tarsa was hurled back and his armour cracked open under the sonic pressure.

He fell to the tiled floor, his visor a static blur of overloaded systems, his rifle shattered into fragments by the blast.

Bolter fire and a roar of hatred sounded among the bellowing screams and shrieks of the Emperor’s Children’s bizarre weaponry. A head bounced from the walls and rolled towards him, a pink helmet with all manner of auditory pickups worked into the metal. Blood drooled from the ragged edges of the neck, and Tarsa pushed himself to his feet in time to see Ignatius Numen bury his chainsword in the guts of another legionary. The Morlock’s breastplate was cratered in the centre, as though from a tremendous impact, and his battle helm was missing.

Septus Thoic wrestled with one of the gene-spliced Space Marines, but his strength was no match for the boosted physique of the monster. Tarsa climbed onto the end of Branthan’s casket and leapt onto its back, driving the functional end of his reductor into the back of its skull. Drills, blades and organ scoops normally used to remove progenoid glands chewed a fist-sized chunk from its head. Gurgling brain matter and blood filled the tissue compartments of Tarsa’s gauntlet, and the creature let out an anguished howl before its nervous system finally processed that it was dead.

Tarsa dropped from its back as it fell, and – too late – felt a presence dart in close to him. Something long, sharp and slender punched into his flesh through the cracks in his armour, and he let out a cry of agony as a poisonous chemical sent shrieking bolts of pain along every receptor in his body. He fell like a broken automaton, his limbs jerking and his internal organs pulsing as their functions went into overdrive.

Tarsa’s vision blurred with induced pain, but he saw Septus Thoic brought down by a series of clubbing blows from the last of the mutated Space Marines. The creature stamped down on Thoic’s form, but Tarsa couldn’t see whether the Morlock was still alive. Another blast of concussive sonics filled the apothecarion and Ignatius Numen collapsed, clutching his skull as though it were about to burst.

Tarsa tried to crawl towards Ulrach Branthan’s casket, but his nerves were jangling as if an ogryn were hammering the synapses of his brain. Nothing was his to control any more, and he wanted to scream in anger, but even that catharsis was denied him.

A figure loomed over him and turned him onto his back, propping him up against the edge of the stasis casket. Tall and swathed in a long robe of a grotesquely fleshy texture, the figure’s long white hair, sunken cheeks and parchment-yellow skin marked him as a practitioner of the deathly arts, one who in ages past would have been called a necromancer. And yet he still bore the sigils of the Apothecary on his pauldrons, a faded prime helix still visible beneath fresh daubs of mindless vandalism. A squatting machine-like presence clung to the Apothecary’s back, a loathsome mechanised parasite with blackened limbs of blades and hypos. Its waving parts appeared to be studying him.

Tarsa wanted to spit in the traitor’s face, but even as he felt a measure of control in his facial muscles, he knew he would never regain mastery of his body in time to thwart this Apothecary’s plans. His head lolled to one side, and he saw Ignatius Numen spasming uncontrollably, his weapons fallen to the floor as he sought to stem the tide of blood streaming from his ears.

Two Emperor’s Children stood, splay-legged, before him, cradling their howling, squalling instrument-weapons in their spiked gauntlets. One stood a head taller than the other, his armour bedecked in obscene sigils, hooks and vibrational pickups. His face was a viciously stretched and swollen nightmare of mutant bone growth and bionic implantation, making it look as though he were permanently screaming.

Tarsa fought for some defiance, but whatever toxin or nerve agent had been used against him was too potent to overcome. The Apothecary saw the hate in his eyes and grinned, exposing yellowed teeth and exhaling a corpse’s death rattle.

‘Don’t die yet, little Salamander,’ said Apothecary Fabius. ‘I might yet have need of you.’

SIXTEEN

A Matter of Trust
Unconventional Entrance
Sisypheum Unleashed Cadmus watched the readout on his command lectern, swallowing as the power levels in the engine core continued to rise. In a matter of moments the reactors were going to explode and destroy the Sisypheum, and though every fibre of his being rebelled against such a course of action, he knew Wayland was right.

If by their deaths they could kill a traitor primarch then they would have achieved something worthwhile after all.

He knew he should say something to the crew, final words to express the honour he felt at having served with them, but the words wouldn’t come. Branthan would have given a valediction that would have survived his sacrifice, words that would live on beyond his death and be quoted by men and women facing their own demise.

Tyro had nothing, and never had he felt more like an inadequate replacement for Captain Ulrach Branthan.

He looked over at Sabik Wayland, but the Iron Father would not meet his gaze, too fixed on the readings streaming into the engineering station. Garuda flapped its metal wings in the upper reaches of the bridge, cawing and swooping down around the eldar guide. If Varuchi Vohra was irritated by the bird’s attentions, he gave no sign.

‘How long?’ asked Tyro.

Wayland looked up. ‘I’d estimate around three and a half minutes.’

Tyro cleared his throat. ‘We did some good out here, Sabik,’ he said.

Wayland nodded. ‘Aye, captain,’ he said. ‘That we did. Ferrus would be proud of us.’

‘I’ll settle for not being a disgrace,’ said Tyro.

Wayland looked confused by that, but his response was broken off when the vox-station crackled with an incoming transmission. A blare of emergency horns and whooping brays of superheated steam filled the bridge, but through it all cut a voice that was part desperation, part gleeful anarchy.

‘Cadmus? Cadmus, are you there?’ called Frater Thamatica.

‘Frater? Is that you?’

‘Yes, of course it is,’ answered Thamatica. ‘Who else would it be?’

‘Damn you, Thamatica, you’ve killed us all,’ spat Tyro.

‘Not yet, boy, but keep interrupting me and you might.’

‘What are you talking about?’

‘Is Frater Wayland still on the bridge?’ asked Thamatica over the crashing bangs and screeching sirens from the engineering spaces.

Wayland rushed over to the vox-station and grabbed the speaker horn.

‘I’m here, Frater,’ he said. ‘You’re drawing all the excess energy into the engines.’

‘I am,’ agreed Thamatica.

‘They’ll go critical in under three minutes.’

‘I think you’ll find it’s slightly over three minutes, Frater,’ said Thamatica. ‘You can’t beat in situ data recording. But accuracy aside, you need to get Cadmus to transfer command authority to the data engine down here. I need the ship.’

‘Not a chance,’ snapped Tyro. ‘I’m not giving you the ship’s last command.’

‘You have to,’ barked Thamatica, all levity gone from his voice. ‘And do it quickly, captain, or we are all dead.’

‘Dead? We’re already dead, Thamatica,’ said Tyro. ‘You’ve seen to that. You’re going to blow up the ship.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ said Thamatica. ‘I’d never blow up this grand old ship. Well, not deliberately anyway. Now you listen to me, Cadmus Tyro. I’ve been pushing starships to the edge of their tolerances and beyond since before you got your fist lopped off. Now transfer command to my data engine, and I swear by the Seven Sacred Shadows of Karaashi that we will live through this. And if we don’t, well, it won’t matter anyway.’

Tyro looked up at Wayland, who shrugged with incomprehension.

‘What are you planning?’ asked Wayland.

Thamatica’s amusement was audible even over the noise below decks.

‘You’ll see, Sabik,’ he said. ‘But best get that guide ready at the helm. Oh, and one last thing.’

‘What?’

‘Hold onto something.’

The breaching charges were in place and ready to break open the guts of the Iron Hands ship. Every legionary of the Iron Warriors was a demolitions expert, and Kroeger was no exception. Within minutes of the embarkation deck’s clearance, he had rigged charges capable of tearing through the heavy armour of the blast doors. Kroeger checked the ring of explosives around the main shutter one last time and jogged back towards Perturabo.

The primarch had said nothing since the last of the Iron Hands had been killed, walking among the dead as though seeking something lost. Forrix was at his side, the wily old First Captain having delegated the placement of his demolition charges.

‘We’re ready to breach,’ said Kroeger, arriving at Perturabo and Forrix’s side.

The Iron Circle formed a wide ring around the primarch, their number smaller by two. That the Iron Hands had managed to destroy any of the battle robots had surprised Kroeger, but he should have known the X Legion was never one to lie down and take a beating. Once again, Kroeger had been honoured to watch his primarch in battle, and standing in the ruin of another crushing victory, Kroeger had never been prouder to serve the IV Legion.

Perturabo surveyed the aftermath of the fighting: the dead bodies, the wrecked vehicles and the torn-up remains of flesh. Backlit by the flames of a gutted Rhino, he stood taller than Kroeger remembered. His cloak lifted and flapped in the thermals of the fires and the black and gold gemstone in the skull brooch caught the firelight.

Perturabo nodded and dropped to one knee with his hand pressed to the deck.

‘Not yet, triarch,’ said Perturabo. ‘I need a moment.’

Kroeger looked over at Forrix.

‘They’ll be regrouping at choke points deeper in the ship,’ he said, knowing that Perturabo and Forrix must surely be aware of this.

‘They are indeed,’ said Perturabo. ‘And we will root them out and destroy them. It will be difficult and we will lose many warriors along the way.’

‘We lose more the longer we wait,’ said Kroeger.

‘I know that.’

‘Then I don’t understand why you’re hesitating, my lord.’

‘You mistake consideration for hesitation, Kroeger. I am giving our worthy enemies a last stand,’ said Perturabo, rising and indicating the hideously mutated flesh of the monsters Fabius had brought aboard. ‘This was not an honourable victory, so we owe the Iron Hands an honourable death.’

‘That makes no sense,’ raged Kroeger. ‘We need to push on quickly, kill them all before they can turn this ship into more of a death trap than it already is.’

Perturabo drew Forgebreaker and swung it round, letting the killing face come to rest on Kroeger’s breastplate.

‘Careful, my young triarch,’ said Perturabo, his voice devoid of tone. ‘I need a plain speaker in the Trident, not a yapping dog. Be silent.’

Kroeger looked to Forrix for support, but the First Captain had the fingers of his right hand pressed to the side of his helm. His head nodded at whatever he was hearing over the vox and he looked up. His alarm was obvious.

‘My lord,’ said Forrix urgently. ‘We need to get you off this ship.’

Perturabo lowered his hammer and turned to the First Captain. ‘Explain.’

‘Barban Falk reports a massive build-up of power in the ship’s engine reactors,’ said Forrix. ‘They’re almost overloaded; minutes at best from blowing this ship to radioactive debris.’

Perturabo shook his head. ‘It’s a bluff,’ he said. ‘If the Iron Hands are dying here, they’re going to do it fighting.’

‘You can’t be sure of that,’ said Forrix.

‘I knew my brother,’ said Perturabo. ‘And his Legion would not end their own lives like this. Not when there are enemies left to fight.’

‘Ferrus Manus is dead, my lord,’ said Forrix. ‘Who can say what his Legion of flesh-haters are capable of now that he’s gone?’

‘Not this,’ said Perturabo, adamant.

‘No,’ said Kroeger with sudden certainty, confident of what he would do were the roles reversed. ‘You’re wrong, my lord. They’ll gladly blow this ship apart if they think they’re going to kill you in the process. What do the lives of a few hundred legionaries matter against the killing of a primarch? One ship of warriors measured against the life of the Lord of Iron? It’s no question at all. I’m just surprised it’s taken them this long to realise it.’

Perturabo didn’t reply, considering the words of his triarchs.

With every second that passed, Kroeger expected to feel the white-hot instant of detonation as the ship’s reactor core exploded.

‘My lord,’ pressed Kroeger. ‘You wanted a plain speaker, well this is as plain as I can say it. You need to get off this ship right now. They’ll end their lives in a nuclear fireball if they think you’ll die too. But if it’s just us, then they’ll fight. We can take this ship, you know we can, but we can’t do it with you aboard. You need to go and leave the killing to us.’

Kroeger tensed as Perturabo’s cold eyes fixed on him. Berossus had been broken by Forgebreaker for less. At last the primarch nodded and drew the hammer across his shoulders.

‘No,’ he said. ‘We all go. As you say, this ship is a death trap by now, and I’ll lose no more warriors to Fulgrim’s vanity. We will return to the Iron Blood and blow this ship apart with our guns. And if the Andronicus gets in our way then we’ll gut it too.’

Kroeger grinned. This was the Iron Warriors way of war.

Absolute and unrelenting, remorseless and unforgiving.

‘We can’t give the Iron Hands an honourable death,’ said Perturabo, ‘but I’ll take payment for their deaths from Fulgrim.’

Forrix nodded and said, ‘Falk, teleport homers engaged. Get us out of here.’

Atesh Tarsa struggled against the chemical poison keeping his limbs immobile, but it was like struggling against an implacable tide of webgun solution. The traitor Apothecary regarded him curiously, as though they were old friends who had recently been reconciled after a period of estrangement.

‘The device on the dead warrior’s chest,’ he said, his voice the hiss of parched dust in the desert. ‘It is old technology from the times before, is it not?’

Tarsa shook his head. ‘It is of no use to you. It is keyed to Captain Branthan’s genome.’

Fabius grinned and wagged a scolding finger before his face.

‘You Salamanders make such terrible liars,’ said Fabius, running a cracked and grimy fingernail along the line of Tarsa’s jawline, over his cheek to his eyes. ‘I blame Vulkan.’

‘Don’t you dare say his name,’ spat Tarsa.

‘Why not? Is there some tradition of Nocturne not to speak ill of the dead?’

‘Vulkan lives,’ said Tarsa, repeating the words like a mantra. ‘Vulkan lives. Vulkan lives!’

Fabius laughed. ‘Such conviction for one so ignorant of the truth.’

Tarsa gritted his teeth as he felt a painful, awakening sensation in his extremities. His fingertips twitched.

‘Kill him, Fabius,’ said the howl-faced warrior. ‘Take what you want and let us leave.’

‘In time,’ said Fabius, and Tarsa’s nerve endings danced painfully within his flesh. He was able to control the involuntary motions with an effort of will. He pulled his fingers into a fist.

The arachnid machine on the traitor Apothecary’s back hauled Tarsa to his feet, propping him up against the stasis casket. Fabius stared through the glass with a ferocious desire, his hooded eyes alight at the prospect of plundering the Heart of Iron from Branthan’s body.

‘The things I will do with this device…’ he said hungrily.

‘You’ll kill him,’ managed Tarsa through gritted teeth.

‘And you think I–’

Tarsa swung his arm in a perfect right cross and smashed his fist into Fabius’s face. Teeth broke and blood sprayed from the traitor Apothecary’s jaw as he reeled from the blow. The mechanised arachnid released Tarsa and he slumped to his haunches. He tried to push himself to his feet, but the blow had taken everything he had.

Fabius stood above him, the lower half of his face a mask of red, his black eyes furious.

‘You will suffer for that,’ he said. ‘You will beg for death over the years I can keep you alive to endure my tortures.’

Tarsa looked up and the ghost of a smile touched his lips.

‘Why do you smile?’ demanded Fabius.

‘Brother Sharrowkyn,’ said Tarsa. ‘Is there something wrong with the floor?’

Fabius turned to see the Raven Guard drop from the tangle of cables and pipework on the ceiling. Two black-bladed swords plunged into Fabius’s chest, and oily black gore squirted from the wounds. The Apothecary fell back, his rictus features twisted in open-mouthed horror. Sharrowkyn wrenched the swords out and pivoted on his heel to hurl one of his blades. It spun in the air and punched through the helm of one of the Emperor’s Children, who dropped with a strangled shriek of dissonant sound that echoed painfully in Tarsa’s skull.

Before Sharrowkyn could finish Fabius, the last of the monsters threw itself at him. The Raven Guard flipped up and over Ulrach Branthan’s casket, landing by the far wall with his slender-bladed gladius held high at his right shoulder. The creature smashed into the wall of the apothecarion, its body swelling before his eyes and crimson veins standing out on its muscles like hydraulic feeds on the verge of rupturing from the pressure. Whatever biological processes were at work within the beast, they were driving it into paroxysms of rage and strength. Blackened claws erupted from its fused hands and rippling bone spikes exploded along the length of its spine as hissing drool spilled from its elongating, crocodilian jaw.

‘Right now would be good, brother,’ said Sharrowkyn, though Tarsa had no idea to whom he was talking.

The gene-maddened beast charged at the Raven Guard with a bellow of hatred.

Sharrowkyn threw himself to the side.

And the wall of the apothecarion exploded outwards in a cascade of sparking metal, snapped cabling, ribbed supports and coffered panels. A towering construction of bare steel and black-streaked warplate smashed through with powerful mechanised strides and pounding arms. A rotating fist of crackling energy and hyper-dense fibre-bundle muscles took hold of the brutish Space Marine mutant and slammed its head against the wall.

Incredibly, the beast’s skull remained intact. It reeled from the blow and attempted to focus on the thing that had somehow managed to hurt it.

Brother Bombastus, the Iron Thunder of Medusa, shrugged himself clear of debris and cable runs from the interior of the wall spaces. Too large to enter the apothecarion by any conventional means, Bombastus had made an unconventional entrance.

Still bloating with rampant self-consumption, the mutant reared up on legs that cracked and swelled as they realigned themselves to some new and unfathomable genetic instruction. Its elongating arms slammed into Bombastus, its slavering jaw crunching down on his skull-stamped sarcophagus. Acid-drooling fangs tore deep gouges in his bare metal plates, and diamond-hard claws tore into his armour like plasma cutters on a Techmarine’s servo-harness.

Bombastus took hold of the creature’s thickening neck and smashed the upper arc of his iron casket into its face. Bones shattered and fangs snapped as the entire front half of the creature’s skull became instantly concave. Just for good measure, the storm bolter slung beneath Bombastus’s fist roared. A mushrooming fountain of blood and brain matter sprayed the ceiling as the explosive shells detonated within the monster’s brain cavity.

The creature flopped like a rag doll in the Dreadnought’s grip, and its shredded remains were dropped to the floor with a harsh grate of distaste.

‘Apothecary Tarsa,’ boomed Bombastus. ‘You called for help.’

Tarsa almost laughed in relief as Sharrowkyn attended to him. His body still felt weak, but at least he had command of it again.

‘That I did, Brother Bombastus,’ he said, struggling to his feet and enclosing one fist in the palm of his hand. ‘Your assistance is most welcome.’

Tarsa looked around for the Emperor’s Children who had come so close to killing him and disrupting Captain Branthan’s stasis casket. They had fled at the sight of Bombastus, and Tarsa couldn’t say he blamed them.

‘Are you all right?’ asked Sharrowkyn.

‘I am fine, or at least I will be soon enough,’ said Tarsa.

Sharrowkyn nodded and moved off to check on the two fallen Morlocks. Tarsa took a moment to collect himself as Bombastus leaned over to look down into Ulrach Branthan’s casket. The captain’s immobile face stared up, unmoving and frozen in mid-sentence.

‘I offered to give him this body of iron and steel,’ said Bombastus.

‘And he refused,’ said Tarsa. ‘He would not take what is not his.’

‘It is not right that I exist and he does not.’

Tarsa gestured to the rapidly decomposing corpse of the last mutant beast. ‘Right now, I am very glad that it is you that walks among us, Brother Bombastus.’

‘You are Salamander,’ said Bombastus. ‘You do not understand. Flesh is inherently flawed, and his will not long endure this drawn-out death. I have lived long enough in this iron shell, and it would better for a Captain of Battle to be abroad than a simple warrior.’

‘You are wrong,’ said Tarsa.

‘You presume too much familiarity,’ said Bombastus. ‘You do not know me, and I would die a thousand times over if it gave my captain life again.’

Tarsa had no answer for the Dreadnought, and left him to his melancholy. He helped Sharrowkyn lift Septus Thoic onto a listing examination gurney. The Morlock’s armour was torn and bent out of shape, but he had survived the beating he’d taken. Both his arms were bent at angles that suggested multiple dislocations.

Ignatius Numen pulled himself to his feet, wearing a dazed expression that told Tarsa he was clearly concussed from the sonic barrage that had felled him.

‘Are you all right?’ he asked as Numen retrieved his weapons.

Numen did not respond, and Tarsa reached out to place a hand on the Morlock’s arm.

‘Brother Numen?’

‘Are you speaking?’ asked Numen, his words coming too loud.

‘Yes,’ said Tarsa. ‘Can you hear me?’

‘What?’

‘I said, can you hear me?’

Numen shook his head. ‘I can’t hear you. You’ll have to shout.’

Tarsa looked at the dried blood and tissue on Numen’s cheeks and knew that whatever rudimentary hearing had been left to him after the plasma blast on Isstvan was now gone.

The Morlock was completely deaf.

Wayland watched the power levels rising in the engine cores and felt the iron fingers of his left gauntlet twitching. He wasn’t afraid, as such; it had long been his secret belief that they would all die out here in the northern marches, unremembered and alone, at best a footnote in the future histories of this war. What concerned him was the fact that they might be about to die by the reckless actions of an Iron Father many had considered unfit for the position, a dangerous rogue element in the Legion machinery.

Thamatica was brilliant, no question of that, but the nature of his brilliance was that he learned more from his failures than he did from his successes.

Wayland hoped the Sisypheum wouldn’t be the last of Thamatica’s failures.

Blazing circuits of light flared around Forrix as the last of the teleportation energies dissipated into the damping coils encircling the chamber. Superconducting conduits bled the power required for teleportation into the energy soakaways, and a klaxon brayed in time with the pulsing bleed-off. Moments later, the teleport disc, a skull-etched podium of electrically-scoured iron plates, was thronged with armoured figures. Forrix felt the nauseous, stomach-punch dislocation of teleport and clamped down on the familiar sickness.

‘You don’t like teleporting, do you?’ said Kroeger.

Forrix shook his head. ‘No. Being broken up like that, it’s like dying each time.’

Kroeger nodded as though he understood, and they stepped down from the podium as the warriors of the Iron Circle buzzed and clicked inside their armoured chassis. Their onboard systems would take a moment to realign after the translation. Perturabo strode from the disc and made his way from the chamber through an irising doorway as the energy coils dropped into the floor.

Kroeger and Forrix followed the Lord of Iron, feeling imminent violence in his silence as they made their way back to the bridge. Falk was at the command station, a hololith floating in the air before him that displayed readings from the Iron Hands ship and its unmistakable reactor overload.

‘How long?’ asked Perturabo.

‘Less than a minute,’ said Falk.

Beyond the shimmering graphic, the main viewscreen showed the snub-nosed bullet of the enemy ship as it wallowed in space like the carcass of a brain-dead void whale.

Дата добавления: 2015-11-13