Sanctus Reach Read online
ANGRON’S MONOLITH
A ‘Third War for Armageddon’ Relictors novella
THE ETERNAL CRUSADER
A ‘Third War for Armageddon’ Black Templars novella
WAR OF THE FANG
A Space Wolves collection
PLAGUE HARVEST
A ‘Plagues of Orath’ Ultramarines novella
ENGINES OF WAR
A ‘Plagues of Orath’ Ultramarines novella
ARMOUR OF FAITH
A ‘Plagues of Orath’ Ultramarines novella
DAMNOS
An Ultramarines collection
CATECHISM OF HATE
An Ultramarines novella
THE WORLD ENGINE
An Astral Knights novel
DANTE’S CANYON
A White Scars novella
THE SIEGE OF CASTELLAX
An Iron Warriors novel
PANDORAX
A Dark Angels and Grey Knights novel
THE PURGING OF KADILLUS
A Dark Angels novel
THE WAR FOR RYNN’S WORLD
A Crimson Fists collection
OVERFIEND
A White Scars, Raven Guard and Salamanders collection
THE HUNT FOR VOLDORIUS
A White Scars novel
MALODRAX
An Imperial Fists novelr
ARMAGEDDON
A Black Templars collection
WRATH OF IRON
An Iron Hands novel
THE DEATH OF ANTAGONIS
A Black Dragons novel
THE DEATH OF INTEGRITY
A Blood Drinkers novel
LEGION OF THE DAMNED
A Legion of the Damned novel
SONS OF WRATH
A Flesh Tearers novel
FLESH OF CRETACIA
A Flesh Tearers novella
THE GILDAR RIFT
A Silver Skulls novel
ARCHITECT OF FATE
A linked series of novellas
VEIL OF DARKNESS
An Ultramarines audio drama
MASTER OF THE HUNT
A White Scars audio drama
TRIALS OF AZRAEL
A Dark Angels audio drama
THE ASCENSION OF BALTHASAR
A Dark Angels audio drama
MORTARION’S HEART
A Grey Knights audio drama
THE SHAPE OF THE HUNT
A White Scars audio drama
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It is the 41st millennium. For more than a hundred centuries the Emperor has sat immobile on the Golden Throne of Earth. He is the master of mankind by the will of the gods, and master of a million worlds by the might of his inexhaustible armies. He is a rotting carcass writhing invisibly with power from the Dark Age of Technology. He is the Carrion Lord of the Imperium for whom a thousand souls are sacrificed every day, so that he may never truly die.
Yet even in his deathless state, the Emperor continues his eternal vigilance. Mighty battlefleets cross the daemon-infested miasma of the warp, the only route between distant stars, their way lit by the Astronomican, the psychic manifestation of the Emperor’s will. Vast armies give battle in his name on uncounted worlds. Greatest amongst His soldiers are the Adeptus Astartes, the Space Marines, bio-engineered super-warriors. Their comrades in arms are legion: the Astra Militarum and countless planetary defence forces, the ever-vigilant Inquisition and the tech-priests of the Adeptus Mechanicus to name only a few. But for all their multitudes, they are barely enough to hold off the ever-present threat from aliens, heretics, mutants - and worse.
To be a man in such times is to be one amongst untold billions. It is to live in the cruellest and most bloody regime imaginable. These are the tales of those times. Forget the power of technology and science, for so much has been forgotten, never to be re-learned. Forget the promise of progress and understanding, for in the grim dark future there is only war. There is no peace amongst the stars, only an eternity of carnage and slaughter, and the laughter of thirsting gods.
Time stretched into the distant future above, banded in the streaked black stone of Obstiria, reaching through another ten thousand years of war to the end of everything. There the Emperor waited, flanked by the billions of warriors who had fallen in His name, to vanquish the Great Enemy in the culmination of all battles.
Below, the past rolled out into the darkness, falling down to Obstiria’s core through millennia of past glories and tragedies. Through the Altigenos Purges and the Black Crusades of the Arch-Traitor, the Age of Apostasy and the hellish vistas of the Scouring. There lay the Great Crusade and the Great Heresy, the crumbling obscurity of times that lay before the coming of the Emperor. The Age of Strife boiled like a river of black blood at the nadir of time, rushing over the forgotten horrors of the Dark Age of Technology.
Mighty heroes stood astride the burning worlds of myth. First amongst them was the Emperor Himself, the beginning and the end of all history, His face hidden by the glare of His divinity. His son, the Primarch Guilliman, bearing the weight of the Imperium on his shoulders. Fulminos, the greatest Obsidian Glaive who had ever walked the galaxy, echoed the image of Guilliman as he struck down alien, daemon and heretic with his blade of black glass.
Brother Molkis saw from the beginning to the end. The Obsidian Glaives were not just an army, not even just a Space Marine Chapter. They were a pillar of the history of mankind, forged by the will of the Emperor to bear up the shield that staved off the extinction of the human race. All their glories, past and present, spun around Molkis at a thousand years a moment.
He could see it all, from the Great Crusade and the Heresy to the Age of Imperium and the founding of the Obsidian Glaives Chapter, through the endless wars to defend humanity and on to the future. Those myths that had their origins in the prehistory of the Imperium ran on through the present, that arbitrary point where Molkis himself stood, and on until the end. It was a comfort to Molkis, who had fought in those wars, to know the victories that he had bled for would roll on until the end of time.
Then he saw his hands. The hand that had held his chainsword and his bolter were gone. They were ugly masses of metal, painted black and pitted with old battle scars. One was a cylindrical power fist, four fingers radiating out, powered by pistons to seize and crush. The other ended in a pair of lascannon barrels. Not hands at all, but the weapons of a war machine.
His body was not his body, but the massive body of that machine. A power plant thudded its slow rhythm behind him. His eyes were not eyes but the lenses of picters mounted on the front of his hull, transmitting flickering images through his optic nerves.
And around him was not the endless vista of his Chapter’s history but dark and dismal cloisters, with a vaulted ceiling overhead and implements of incarceration and punishment on the walls. Manacles hung alongside thumbscrews and paring blades. On the ceiling was mounted a full-length body harness of spiked iron bands, a testament to endless suffering.
Someone was speaking. Molkis looked down and felt his whole body tilt, a tank-sized sarcophagus clad in ceramite. He saw his massive steel feet against the cracked flagstones of the cloisters, and the enormous shadow he cast in the light of the torches burning on the pillars.
A Space Marine Scout stood beside Molkis – an Obsidian Glaive, his demi-armour in the black and bone of the Chapter. He was young, midway through his transformation into a full Space Marine, the surgical scars still pink against t
he skin of his face and scalp.
‘Molkis!’ repeated the Scout. ‘Brother Molkis, come back to us! The time has come to fight!’
Molkis felt connections sparking in the back of his mind, accessing the data-medium stored in his sarcophagus. The name ‘Desaan’ was projected onto his consciousness. This Scout was named Desaan. Brother Desaan of the Tenth Company.
‘Are you with us, Brother Molkis?’ continued Desaan. ‘We need you now. Of all times, of all battles, we need you now.’
Molkis’s picters scanned around. The data-medium told him he was in the Penumbral Spike, in the Cloisters of the Bold, where the cold of the earth met the heat of Obstiria’s core. Below were the generatoria and forges, and above were the sparring halls and cell blocks. He had once walked these halls, marching alongside his brothers. Now this machine walked in his place – this Dreadnought, this war machine in which he was the pilot.
‘I am with you,’ said Brother Molkis.
‘Do you remember?’ asked Desaan.
‘Remember?’
‘You are Brother Molkis of the Fourth Company,’ said Desaan. ‘You fell to the Kraken at Devilin Reach. You were wounded but the Apothecaries stayed your death, and you were mounted in this Dreadnought. Do you remember?’
Flickers of pain burst at the back of Molkis’s memory. He remembered a tide of monstrous flesh, and the chill of a bony blade spearing through him. He remembered the cold of the blood draining from his body.
‘Yes,’ said Molkis. ‘I remember.’
‘Good,’ said Desaan, with obvious relief. Molkis realised that Desaan had gone through this same conversation many times. ‘War has come, my brother. We need you at the front line, on the battlements.’
‘But we are at Penumbral Spike,’ said Molkis, ‘on Obstiria. We are not at war. This is our fortress-monastery, where we are inviolable. Or do I remember wrongly, Brother Desaan?’
‘You remember right,’ said Desaan. ‘Obstiria is invaded. The Penumbral Spike is besieged. The greenskins are here.’
The Penumbral Spike shuddered, slabs of black stone tumbling down its vertical sides. The irradiated rocky valleys around it shuddered too, momentarily as fluid as water. The lesser peaks around the Spike shed their caps of caked grey ash and new raw gashes opened up in the ground.
One of the peaks was punctured by a dozen explosions, throwing black plumes of pulverised rock into the sky. The mountain collapsed, millions of tonnes of rock plummeting into the mountain’s roots. Rockslides flooded the valleys with rushing waves of stone. Another peak went down a moment later, closer this time, the deep thud of the explosions shaking the Penumbral Spike as if by a giant hand. In a few moments the craze of valleys and crevasses had changed, the map around the Obsidian Glaives fortress-monastery rewritten.
Augmented eyes were just able to make out the ramshackle halftracks and warbikes tossed end over end by the landslide, the tanks swallowed by the dark earth, the greenskins fleeing before the collapse.
On the battlements halfway up the Spike, beside one of the fortress’s turbolaser emplacements, a cadre of Space Marines looked down at the changing landscape. Chapter Master Midnias was one, his black armour edged in gold, with a purple cloak over one shoulder and the spiked silver crown of Obstiria on his brow. He was the lord of this planet, though only the Obsidian Glaives lived there. It was his planet being mutilated below. The captains of the Fourth, Sixth, Ninth and Tenth companies stood alongside him. The Captain of the Tenth, Terundel, the Master of Novices, wore an ornate version of the Scout armour worn by the recruits who fought beneath him. Also with the group was Techmarine Javan, his armour in red, his face half steel and one eye replaced with a set of overlapping crimson lenses.
‘Mount Scalen did not fall,’ said Midnias.
‘The charges were laid more than a thousand years ago,’ replied Javan. ‘Truth be told, I am surprised any of them fired.’
‘Then you have done well, Brother Javan,’ said Midnias. ‘That will slow them down.’
‘Not by much,’ said Captain Elhalil of the Sixth. ‘Days, my lord. Not months.’
‘Then we will take the days we are given,’ said Midnias. ‘Do not be so quick to see defeat, captain. Not every turn of the tide is to be greeted with such ill humour. Greenskins lie dead. Rejoice in that.’
Terundel stood up on the battlement and lifted a magnocular to his eye. The dust below still billowed but the deepest of it was clearing from the valleys outlying the destruction.
‘Their vanguard has tested us enough,’ said the Scout-captain. ‘Their patience has been used up. They attack in force. See?’
Midnias took the magnocular and followed Terundel’s outstretched finger. Through one valley streamed an armoured wedge of tanks, a collection of treaded and wheeled vehicles with no uniformity of order. Some were bolted together apparently from junk, with crude and violent symbology daubed on their armour plates. Others had been Imperial tanks, refitted, upgunned and driven recklessly into battle. Midnias counted two hundred of them with the first glance, half as many again with a second at another valley winding between the low peaks that formed the Nineteen Sisters. Hordes of orks on foot ran alongside them, trying to keep up with the bikes and halftracks that raced ahead.
‘The opening moves are concluded,’ said Midnias. ‘Now the battle can begin. Give thanks for this test, my brothers. Give thanks for the punishment.’
‘More new punishments with every moment,’ said Keshuma, Captain of the Ninth. A veteran of the Devastator heavy weapons formations, Keshuma carried a heavy bolter on his shoulders like it was a holy burden to bear. He nodded up at the Obstiria’s pale, blue-streaked sky. There a flock of black flecks rounded one of the peaks, leaving trails of filthy black smoke as they flew. ‘They come at us from the air. Everything this greenskin lord has, it throws at the Spike.’
‘Thus do the greenskins fight,’ said Midnias, handing the magnocular back to Terundel. ‘These have shown more patience than most in sending their outriders to test us. No doubt their leader counts as a master strategist among their kind. Now it reverts to the alien’s type and runs at us as animals. And we will be here to meet them. To your duties, my brothers. Prepare the defence. This punishment too we shall endure.’
‘This too we shall endure,’ echoed the assembled Space Marines as one.
In the valleys below, the orkish artillery began to bellow.
Fulminos would have cried out a chant of war, and the brothers around him would have taken up the cry. He would have surged forward like a living tide of steel and beaten back all who stood before him. So Brother Molkis did the same.
‘Who will follow me?’ he blared from the vox-casters mounted on his hull. ‘Shall I wade alone through this sea of xenos blood?’
The Cathedral of Victory spun in front of him as his pict-lenses cycled, bringing him a full picture of the battlefield. The rear wall, with its statue of Guilliman, had fallen to the ork artillery that had crashed against the side of the Spike. Now it was a drift of torn stone with greenskins swarming over it. They were elites by ork standards, with yellow and blue painted on their armour, their fangs tipped with gold, and each with a banner or totem strapped to his back. They carried guns as long as they were tall and fired them off as if competing to have the most barrels or the loudest report. Some had massive cleaver-blades, notched with kill-marks, hung with bones.
Gunfire rattled against Molkis’s hull. The ceramite was thickest on the front of the sarcophagus and the armour held. The offending ork stood on top of Guilliman’s fallen statue, which had previously depicted the primarch poring over the Codex Astartes. Molkis willed his lascannon to fire, as if a mental finger was squeezing around the trigger. Twin bolts of crimson flashed, lighting the dark reaches of the cathedral, and sheared the ork clean in two.
Space Marines of the Fourth Company ran into the fray alongside Molkis, bolter fire stre
aking across the cathedral. Ork bodies shredded and burst. Captain Seharra led them, holding his power sword high as a beacon for them to follow.
The two sides clashed in the centre of the cathedral, the orks surging through the breach and the Obsidian Glaives rushing to meet them. The fire cut down orks in their dozens but they continued seething from the fallen wall like blood pouring from a wound. Steel smacked into flesh as they crashed into the Space Marines, cleavers rising and falling, guns blazing at point-black range.
Each Obsidian Glaive was worth ten orks, but it seemed there were a hundred orks in that melee for every Space Marine. In the close confines they could swarm the Space Marines and drag them down, and Obsidian Glaives were being swamped under waves of green flesh. Seharra cut a great bloody swathe around himself with wide swings of his two-handed power blade, like an eye in the centre of the orkish storm.
The greenskins swarmed around Molkis’s legs. One of them carried a crude flamethrower and grunted with laughter as it adjusted a valve so the nozzle spat a cutting lance of blue-white fire. The ork’s skin was scorched black and its yellow fangs were bared with delight beneath a pair of scarred welding goggles. It must have rejoiced in the idea of cutting open Molkis’s sarcophagus and ripping out the crippled flesh inside.
Molkis grabbed the ork in his power fist. Neural feedback from the arm’s actuators gave him the sensation that his own arm, long since atrophied, was moving. He lifted the ork in the air so that its fellow greenskins could see it, and crushed it in his power fist. Molkis felt the reports of the ork’s bones cracking like a volley of gunshots and threw the mangled body to the cathedral floor.
Molkis’s twin lascannon were fine weapons for punching through tanks and armour, but against a swarm of enemies it could shoot down only one or two at a time. In this scrum Molkis relied instead on his power fist, and on his massive feet and the armoured weight they bore. His torso pivoted on its waist bearing with a speed the orks had not expected and he bowled over a clutch of them trying to clamber onto his back. He stepped over them and stamped down, flesh and bone turning to jelly beneath the weight of a Dreadnought.