Blood and Fire Read online

  The whole site was already in ruin. We heard Volcanus on the wind, as the wind brought the faint sounds of battle from kilometres away.

  Walking through the ruined structures, I almost expected to see corpses. The attackers were long gone, and those that died here had been given over to funeral pyres outside the walls weeks ago. Three Thunderhawks, sandblasted but still golden, rested on the northern landing platforms. Along the edge of my retinal display, an open vox link cycled through channels, seeking a connection.

  ‘Reclusiarch Grimaldus,’ spoke a voice over the vox. ‘You honour us with your presence.’

  We walked on, drawing near to the stilted platforms, ascending to the launch deck on crew ladders. Using elevators and servitors piloting lifter-Sentinels, twenty Celestial Lions were plundering their own firebase’s supplies, loading up their Thunderhawks with brutal efficiency. The warriors themselves hauled crates of ammunition between them, every one of them keeping at least one hand free to reach for a bolter at a second’s notice. It was a clean, impressive resupply, even if it bore a few furtive resemblances to a less-noble looting.

  One of the Space Marines came forward, bearing the black helm of a Pride Leader. He knelt, though he had no true reason to do so, and removed the dark helmet. The face beneath was the warm, rich brown of humans born to equatorial climes, with cultures dependent on the teeming jungle and expansive savannah. I had never been to the Lions home world of Elysium IX, but I had met many of its dark-skinned sons. A culture of hunters: proud people from birth to death.

  This warrior’s face was lined with the faint cracks of age. A Chapter veteran, no doubt. His lack of mutilating scars did him great credit.

  ‘I do not know you,’ I prompted.

  ‘Pride Leader Ekene Dubaku.’ He rose to his feet, the unnecessary honour complete. ‘I lead those of us who remain.’

  Pride Leader. A squad sergeant. This did not bode well.

  ‘Grimaldus,’ I replied. ‘Reclusiarch of the Eternal Crusade. Cousin, when you say you lead those who remain…’

  Ekene took my prompt again. ‘There are ninety-six Lions still drawing breath upon this world, Reclusiarch. I inherited command from Warleader Vakembei, he of the Spear That Hunts Hearts. He walked into the Emperor’s embrace eighteen days ago.’

  ‘I knew Captain Vakembei. The Imperium will miss his blade, and his wisdom. What of Brother-Chaplain Julkhara?’

  ‘Deathspeaker Julkhara is dead to the kine, slain twenty-four days past.’

  ‘The kine,’ I said, without inflection.

  ‘The greenskins, Reclusiarch. Cattle. Beasts. Kine.’

  Disrespect of the enemy should be punished, but it was not my place to chastise them for their hatreds, nor would it be wise to annihilate morale by passing judgement against them for such petty transgressions.

  The Lions kept working, alongside the trundling stomp of Sentinel loaders. At my gesture, Cyneric joined them, assisting with their loading.

  ‘This looks more like looting than resupply, Dubaku.’

  He replaced his helm, speaking through the vox-grille. ‘We have little choice, since it was overrun. Our fallback stronghold is within Volcanus itself, but we risk raids out here every three days. Ammunition is low – production and resupply from our fleet has dropped to almost nothing.’

  For a moment, I wondered why they had not requested aid from the other Chapters, but Dorn’s blood runs thick in the veins of his descendants. It was difficult to lay pride aside, even in the face of devastation. Especially then, for when else was a warrior truly tested? What other time could be finer for proving that a man is strong enough to stand alone?

  Dubaku continued. ‘We have swallowed our pride long enough to request aid from the Flesh Tearers and the Black Templars, but the former are as depleted as we are, and the latter are preparing to set sail. Your brothers are taking the fight out into the stars, Reclusiarch. We have no right to beg for scraps while being left behind. So we exist by plundering our fallen fortress and looting our own dead.’

  So Julkhara’s summons had been a personal one. It had still cost him dearly to send it, I was certain.

  We moved aside as another three modified Sentinel walkers clanked past, bearing aquila-marked crates in their industrial claws.

  I was struck by one thing above all: the Celestial Lions were dead. While a hundred yet remained, they operated now without a single voice from their Chapter’s high command, and their ranking veteran officer was a squad sergeant. I had hoped to find Julkhara. I had hoped to find hope.

  ‘Finish your loading,’ I told Dubaku. ‘Once we are aboard the gunship, speak to me of everything that happened since you first made planetfall. Then I will judge how best to answer Julkhara’s last words.’

  Dubaku saluted, making the sign of the aquila over the winged Imperialis on his breastplate.

  ‘The Deathspeaker vowed that you would come.’

  I did not reply. I merely gestured for him to get back to work. It remained to be seen just what Julkhara truly expected of me, or what I could actually achieve here. It already felt less like I was summoned to save the Lions, and more like I was called to hold a vigil, watching over them as they died.

  Nine hundred and eighty-three warriors. They had brought nine hundred and eighty-three warriors to this world, and ninety-six remained.

  We rode in restraint thrones in the gunship’s dimly lit crew bay. The Celestial Lions had removed their helms, though Cyneric and I left ours in place.

  Ekene’s tale was a grim one.

  Their entire Chapter had landed here, but for the most remote uninitiated training forces, spread across the segmentum.

  Before dawn over the Mannheim Gap, they had been on the surface for three months and sixteen days, defending Hive Volcanus on the west coast of Armageddon Prime.

  In that span of time, all of which was spent bolter-to-blade in the city’s burning streets, they suffered casualties far, far in advance of any other Chapter. Everywhere they fought, the enemy struck back in overwhelming numbers. Countless times they were deployed to reinforce elements of the Imperial Guard that were already long dead by the time the Lions arrived, leaving the Space Marines deep in enemy territory without easy withdrawal.

  On at least fifteen catalogued occasions, they were ordered to advance on specific critical objectives, only to find themselves alone without the planned support forces or the promised reinforcements.

  Casualties mounted, operation after operation, day by day. Ambushes were common, even on routine patrols through pacified territory. The Lions were assigned to hold crucial districts and sectors, and accordingly moved in force to cover all necessary ground. Yet they found their patrols being hit harder than any orbital intelligence had predicted possible. The enemy would appear in numbers undreamed, rising from ambushes in sectors that were recorded as being most viciously cleansed beforehand.

  They were granted orbital picts and auspex-scrye readouts from Hive Command, only to find their intelligence scarcely matched the embattled realities of their deployment zones. Time and again, the Lions jumped into the fire. What choice was there? They would not allow the city to fall. They could not allow the enemy to live.

  It did not take long for them to rely first and foremost on their own scanners and Scouts, but their equipment suffered unexpected deteriorations and frequent jamming; their Scouts often fell silent while out in the city alone. Sometimes, the Lions would find their Scouts’ bodies. Usually, they would not.

  Pict-feeds from their vessels in orbit were distorted from the void war playing out above, but those rare, wrecked visual clues were the most reliable intelligence they could muster. The Lions swore by them, thanking the thrall-captains of their warships for any and all devoted efforts. But these also grew more infrequent as their fleet was massacred in the sky. Less than a month into the campaign, rearming runs from orbit began to grow a
s rare as reliable intelligence. Celestial Lions drop-ships were destroyed high in the atmosphere on two occasions, and on another, Volcanus’s own wall-guns malfunctioned and destroyed an incoming shipment, blowing seven loaded Thunderhawks out of the sky.

  Never once did Ekene’s voice crack as he told me of these misfortunes; never once did he sigh, or glance away, or lament at what had come to be. Contained within him was a deep, nourishing well of resolve that did credit to any son of Dorn.

  It only made my blood run colder with each revealed betrayal, that such a fate had befallen my cousins.

  My hands must have been clenched for some time, for Ekene hesitated in his retelling, gesturing to where I gripped the arms of the restraint throne.

  ‘Reclusiarch?’

  I forced my muscles to unlock. ‘Continue.’

  And continue he did.

  Mere weeks into the war, half the Chapter lay dead, the names of the slain added each dawn to the rolls of honour. The survivors fought on.

  Decades ago, in the Last War, Hive Volcanus fell quickly to the greenskin horde. Like carrion crows, the enemy picked over the city’s bones and went to war with the looted spoils of Imperial manufactories. There would be no repeat of such shameful history this time. The city’s lords and leaders made that clear at each command briefing, leaving the Lions to make their demands into defiant reality. All the while, the city burned. It burned but did not fall.

  Then came Mannheim.

  The Mannheim Gap was a canyon running through the mountains north of Hive Volcanus. A rent in this planet’s priceless earth, torn open by the slow, active dance of the world’s tectonics. Any who dwell here for more than a handful of weeks know that Armageddon is not a world that sleeps easy, whether due to groundquakes, dust storms, or yet another war.

  The Lions were told the canyon had to be assaulted, for there lay a nest of mechanical heresy, where the aliens were forgebreeding their scrap iron god-machines. Volcanus’s forces had to strike before the alien Titans became active, or the tide would forever turn against the city’s defenders. The Guard could not be trusted to deal such a surgical strike, nor could the city organise a mass withdrawal and redeployment of its deeply entrenched Guard elements to make it a plausible option. It had to be Space Marines. It had to be the Lions.

  Primitive void shielding protected the site from orbital bombardment. The Lions had to strike overland, without drop pods, marching into the ravine alongside their tanks, attacking in battalion regiments like some echo of the Heresy and the millennia of crude warfare before it.

  The Lions reconnoitred, of course. They scouted and watched, deeming Imperial intelligence reliable. None of the alien god-walkers were infused with life.

  But time was not on their side. Every hour they spent behind their fortress walls was another hour that brought the Gargant machines closer to awakening.

  Five hundred Lions attacked. The last half of the Chapter went to war, knowing that the enemy numbers were beyond the capability of the Guard to confront. They chose to bring overwhelming force, to strike fast and hard, countering their crippling inability to strike from the skies.

  Five hundred Space Marines. I have taken whole worlds with a quarter of that number. Even though human resistance and greenskin forces are impossible to compare, five hundred Adeptus Astartes warriors is an overwhelming weapon in any imaginable reckoning. The Lions commanders were right to commit their full fury. Any Chapter Master would do the same. There was no possible way the enemy could have known such a force was coming to destroy them, and there is simply no way to prepare for five hundred Space Marine warriors.

  Strike with choking ferocity. Destroy the enemy. Fall back before getting entrenched in a full-scale battle. It should have worked.

  The Season of Fire was still weeks away when they charged, but dragon’s breath in the air already heralded the storms to come. Gritty, stinking air howled down the canyon as the Lions advanced behind their Warleaders and Deathspeakers. I could picture it so clearly, down to their banners tearing in the wind.

  Along the canyon’s walls, huge industrial rigging rose against the rock: great construction yard platforms, as the greenskin beasts built their iron avatars higher and higher. Hundreds of them, never of uniform size, each one a bloated, scrap-fleshed icon to foul gods, crawling with screaming aliens.

  Still. Five hundred Space Marines…

  ‘When did you realise you had been betrayed?’ I asked.

  Ekene took a breath before replying. ‘It did not take long.’

  ‘The Gargants,’ Cyneric interjected. ‘They were active.’

  Ekene gave a bitter laugh, sharp as a gunshot. ‘If that was all we had to deal with, we might still have fought our way clear without being slaughtered. We might even have won, despite dying to the last man.’

  He was more solemn as he continued, letting the tale reach its inevitable conclusion. The Gargants were not sleeping, they were waiting. Searing heat spread through the canyon from the solid fuel burners deep in the alien Titans’ bellies – beneath the crash of bolters and the cracking rattle of alien rifles, came the clank of gears, with the landslide grind of coal and scrap being fed into the Gargants’ heartfires. Great guns whined downward on protesting joints, while the ground shook with each newborn Gargant’s first steps.

  The Lions gold battle tanks raged skywards, streams of lascannon fire bursting thin shields and scoring holes in the hulls of towering enemy war machines. Warleaders shouted orders, in control of their warriors even in the heat of the battle, establishing where to strike, where to push through the orks’ lines, where to move in defence of tank battalions threatened by enemy infantry.

  My heart soared at his words. Even when the Gargants awoke, Ekene and his brothers – the last half of a noble Chapter – were still fighting to win. They would purge the canyon at the cost of their own lives. Dorn himself would have stood with them that day.

  But the tide truly turned. As Ekene described this latest twist of fate, Cyneric leaned forward in his restraint throne, scarcely believing what he was hearing.

  The enemy ambush unfolded further. Greenskins spilled from the earth, pouring in hordes from warrens within the canyon sides and the rocky ground. Thousands of them, roaring beneath fanged war banners and standards made from crucified Lions taken in other battles. This fresh army surged into the ravine, filling it like sand in an hourglass, blocking all hope of withdrawal and eliminating any chance of victory.

  ‘They knew we were coming,’ said Ekene. ‘What other reason could there be to bury whole war-clans under the rock, waiting for such an assault? They knew we were coming. Their overlord was a beast clad in scrapwork armour – the biggest greenskin we had ever seen. He ate the dead: his own, and ours. Captain Vularakh buried the war-sword Je’hara in the beast’s belly and carved three metres of stinking alien guts free. It did nothing. We fought as we fell back, but we knew we were betrayed.’

  I could not argue with that. A traitor, somewhere, had fed word to the enemy, and the orks made the most of their ambush. Five hundred Space Marines could take a star system. At Mannheim, they had barely been able to escape alive. It was difficult to imagine the sea of alien flesh necessary to butcher so many of mankind’s finest, but having seen the ocean of greenskins spilling over the plains towards the walls of Helsreach only months before, I had a fairly clear frame of reference.

  ‘That is not all.’ Ekene gave a grim smile. ‘Sniper fire, brutally accurate, rained down from the canyon walls. I am not speaking of the solid shell rattle of greenskin projectile throwers. I know how these aliens fight, Reclusiarch. This was viciously precise laser weaponry, knifing through our officers’ helms from above. Warleader Dakembe, shot through the throat. Spiritwalker Azadah, taken before he could unleash his powers, his skull blown open by two crossing las-shots an arm’s length away from me. Deathspeakers, Warleaders, Spiritwalkers… even Pride Lead
ers, cut down with fire too precise, too clinical, to be the enemy.’

  He paused, and I could see in his eyes that he was no longer seeing the gunship bay around us. He was seeing his brothers die at Mannheim – some to crude iron blades rending through ceramite, others to spikes of white-hot las-fire lancing down into the ravine.

  ‘It took four hours to fight free. We carved our way back the way we came, abandoning a sea of dead tanks, slain brothers and butchered enemy bodies. The gene-seed of half our Chapter lies rotting at the bottom of that canyon, unharvested by our Apothecaries and defiled by the thousands of foes we left alive. We fled,’ he made the word into a spat curse, ‘from the field, and the most valiant battle the Celestial Lions ever fought was in that retreat. Never had we faced such odds. The last of us cut our way free, pulled our brothers from the storm of blades and fell back to our fortress with the enemy at our heels.’

  ‘The fortress fell,’ I said quietly.

  ‘That implies we even had a chance to defend it.’ Ekene shook his head. ‘The xenos flooded it before most of our survivors had even arrived. We had to fight just to escape our own falling fortress. Even then, for every gunship that raced free, another two were shot down in flames.’

  ‘Throne of the Emperor,’ Cyneric swore softly.

  Ekene nodded. ‘Our survivors returned to Volcanus. We had three officers left at dusk of that day, three officers above the rank of Pride Leader. Deathspeaker Julkhara, who called you a brother, Reclusiarch; Warleader Vakembei, the last captain; and Lifebinder Kei-Tukh, our last Apothecary. The Chapter’s future rested on his skills. And can you guess the final insult, Reclusiarch? The last gasp in this drama of shame and treachery?’

  I wanted facts, not my own speculation. ‘Say it,’ I said.

  Ekene smiled. ‘Our territory inside the city walls was a cold foundry, nearly lightless, with a perimeter of rockcrete patrolled by our remaining warriors. Kei-Tukh did not survive the first night. We found him at dawn, slouched against our last Land Raider, shot through the eye-lens. The gene-seed he had carried was gone, and he would harvest no more. So now you see the depths of our plight, Reclusiarch. We have lost our fleet, our armoury, our officers and almost all hope of rebuilding our Chapter. We cannot even cling to pride, after the shame of retreat. All that remains to us is the truth. We must survive long enough to speak it. The Imperium must know what happened here.’