[Warhammer 40K] - Victories of the Space marines Read online

  WARHAMMER 40,000 STORIES

  VICTORIES OF

  THE SPACE MARINES

  Edited by Christian Dunn

  (An Undead Scan v1.0)

  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 Emperors 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 Imperial Guard 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.

  CONTENTS

  Runes by Chris Wraight

  A Space Wolf story

  The Rewards of Tolerance by Gav Thorpe

  A Renegades story

  Black Dawn by C.L. Werner

  A Warbringers story

  The Long Games at Carcharias by Rob Sanders

  A Crimson Consuls story

  Heart of Rage by James Swallow

  A Blood Angels story

  But Dust in the Wind by Jonathan Green

  An Imperial Fists story

  Exhumed by Steve Parker

  A Deathwatch story

  Primary Instinct by Sarah Cawkwell

  A Silver Skulls story

  Sacrifice by Ben Counter

  A Grey Knights story

  RUNES

  Chris Wraight

  Baldr Svelok slammed hard into the acid-laced rock. His plate crunched against the stone, sending warning runes flashing across his helm-feed. Instinct told him another blow was coming in fast, and the Wolf Guard ducked. A massive tight-balled fist tore into the rock where his head had been, showering him with shards where the impact had obliterated the cliff.

  Svelok dodged the next crashing fist, his augmented limbs moving with preternatural speed. He almost made it, but the monster’s talons raked down across his right shoulder-guard, sending him sprawling to the ground and skidding across pools of acid. He landed with a heavy crack, and something snapped across his barrel chest boneplate. He felt blood in his mouth, and his head jerked back from the impact.

  Throne, he was being taken apart. That did not happen.

  He spun onto his back, ignoring the heavy crunch as the creature’s clawed foot stamped down just millimetres from his arm. It towered into the storm-wracked sky, a living wall of obsidian, five metres high and crowned with dark, curving spikes. Lightning reflected from the facets of its organic armour, glinting off the slick ebony. Somewhere in the whirl of jagged, serrated limbs was a monotasking mind, a basic alien intelligence filled with an urge to protect its territory and drive the infiltrating humans back into space.

  Svelok had never seen a xenos like it. The closest he could get was a creature of demi-myth on Fenris, the Grendel, but these bastards were encased in plates of rock and had talons like lightning claws.

  “You all die the same way,” he growled. His voice was a jagged-edged rasp, scraped into savagery by old throat wounds. He sounded as terrifying as he looked.

  The storm bolter screamed out a juddering stream of mass-reactive bolts, sending ice-white impact flares across the creature’s armoured hide. It staggered, rocking back on its heels, clutching at the hail of rounds as if trying to pluck them from the air. The torrent was relentless, perfectly aimed and deadly.

  The magazine clicked empty. Boosted by his armour-servos, Svelok leapt to his feet, mag-locked the bolter and grabbed a krak grenade.

  Amazingly, the leviathan still stood. It was reeling now, its hide cracked and driven in by the barrage of bolter fire, but some spark of defiance within it hadn’t died. A jagged maw, black as Morkai’s pelt, cracked open, revealing teeth like a row of stalactites. It lurched back into the attack, talons outstretched.

  Whip-fast, Svelok hurled the grenade through the open mouth. The massive jaws snapped shut in reflex and the Space Wolf crouched down against the oncoming blast. There was a muffled boom and the xenos was blown apart, its iron-hard shell smashed open and spread out like a splayed ribcage. The behemoth crumbled in a storm of shards, toppled, and was gone.

  “Feel the wrath of Russ, filth!” roared Svelok, leaping back to his feet, fangs bared inside his helmet. He seized a fresh magazine, spun round and slammed the rounds into the storm bolter’s chamber. There’d been three of them, massive stalking beasts carved from the stone around them, horrors of black, tortured rock bigger than a Dreadnought.

  Now there were none. Rune Priest Ravenblade loomed over the smoking remains of the largest, his runestaff thrumming with angry, spitting witchfire. Lokjr and Varek had taken out the third, though the Grey Hunters’ armour was scarred and dented from the assault. The xenos monsters were tough as leviathan-hide.

  “What in Hel are these things?” Lokjr spat over the comm, releasing the angry churn of his frostblade power axe.

  “Scions of this world, brother,” replied Ravenblade coolly.

  “Just find me more to kill,” growled Varek, reloading his bolter and sweeping the muzzle over the barren landscape.

  Svelok snarled. His blood was up, pumping round his massive frame and filling his bunched muscles with the need for movement. The wolf-spirit was roused, and he could feel its feral power coiled round his hearts. He suppressed the kill-urge with difficulty. His irritation with Ravenblade was finding other outlets, and that was dangerous.

  “How far, and how long?” he spat, flexing his gauntlet impatiently.

  “Three kilometres south,” said Ravenblade, consulting the auspex. “One hour left.”

  “Then we go now,” ordered Svelok, combat-readiness flooding his body again. “There’ll be more xenos, and I still haven’t seen one bleed.”

  Kolja Ravenblade loped alongside the others, feeling his armoured boots thud against the unyielding rock. Gath Rimmon, the planetoid they’d been on for less than an hour, was a hellish maelstrom of acid-flecked storms. The sky was near-black, lit only by boiling electrical torment that scored the heavens with a tracery of silver fire. In every direction the landscape was dark and glossy, cut from unyielding rock and glinting dully in the flickering light. Acid pooled across the jagged edges, hissing and spitting as it splashed against the Astartes’ armour. The four Space Wolves ran south through narrow defiles of jet, each worn down by millennia of erosion, each as pitiless and terrible as the ice-fields of Fenris in the heart of the Long Winter.

  This world was angry. Angry with t
hem, angry with itself. Somewhere, close by, Ravenblade could feel it. It was like the beat of a heart, sullen and deep. That was the sound that had drawn him here, echoing across the void, lodged in the psychic flesh of the universe. Something was hidden on Gath Rimmon, something that screamed of perversion.

  And it was being guarded.

  “Incoming!” bellowed Varek, halting suddenly and sending a volley of bolter fire into the air.

  Ravenblade pulled out of his run and swept his staff from its mag-lock. His helm-display ran red with signals—they were coming from the sky. He spoke a single word and the shaft blazed with fluorescent power, flooding the land around.

  Above them, dozens of creatures were flinging themselves from the high rock, talons of stone outstretched. They were carved from the same material as the planet, each of them crudely animated creatures of inorganic, immutable armour. Eight spindly legs curved down from angular abdomens, crowned with extended rigid plates for controlled gliding. At the end of the metre-long body, wide jaws gaped, lined with teeth of rending daggers. They plummeted towards the Space Marines soundlessly, like ghosts carved out of solid adamantium.

  “Fell them!” ordered Svelok, his storm bolter spitting controlled bursts at the swooping xenos. The rounds all hit, sparking and exploding in showers of shattered rock. The Wolf Guard made killing look simple. A shame, thought Ravenblade, that he had no time for anything else.

  Varek’s bolter joined in the chorus of destruction, but some xenos still got through, wheeling down and twisting through the corridors of fire.

  For those that made it, Lokjr waited. The massive warrior, his armour draped in the pelt of a white bear and hung with the skulls of a dozen kills, spun arcs of death with the whirring blade of his frost axe.

  “For the honour of Fenris!” he roared, slamming the monomolecular edge in wide loops, slicing through the glistening rock-hide and tearing the flyers apart as they reached him.

  Watching the carnage unfold, Ravenblade grasped his staff in both hands, feeling the power of his calling well up within him. The wind spun faster around his body, coursing over the rune-wound armour. Acid flecks spat against his ancient vambraces, fizzing into vapour as raw aether rippled across steel-grey ceramite.

  “In the name of the Allfather,” he whispered, feeling the dark wolf within him snarl into life. The runes on his plate blazed with witchlight, blood-red like the heart of a dying star. He raised the staff above his head, and the wind accelerated into a frenzied whine. A vortex opened, swirling and cascading above the four Space Marines, billowing into the tortured air above them.

  “Unleash!”

  A column of lightning blazed down from the skies. As it reached Ravenblade’s outstretched staff it exploded into a corona of writhing, white-hot fire, lashing out from the Rune Priest in whip-fronds of dazzling brilliance.

  The surviving flyers were blasted open, ripped into slivers by the leaping blades of lightning, crushed and flayed by the atomising power of the storm. The Rune Priest had spoken, and the creatures of Gath Rimmon had no answer to his elemental wrath.

  As the last of them crunched to the ground, Ravenblade released the power from the staff. The skirling corona rippled out of existence and a shudder seemed to bloom through the air.

  By contrast with the fury of the storm, the Rune Priest stood as still and calm as ever. Unlike his brothers, his pack-manner was stealthy. If he hadn’t been picked out by Stormcaller, perhaps the path of the Lone Wolf would have called for him.

  Kilometres above them, the natural storm growled unabated. The planet had been cowed, but remained angry.

  “Russ damn you, priest,” rasped Svelok, crushing a fallen flyer beneath his boot and crunching the stone to rubble. His helm was carved in the shape of a black wolf’s head, locked in a perpetual curling grimace. In the flickering light its fangs glistened like tears. “You’ll bring more to us.”

  “Let them come!” shouted Varek, laughing harshly over the comm.

  Svelok turned on him. The Wolf Guard was a hand’s breadth taller and broader than the Grey Hunter, though the aura of his ever-present battle-lust made him twice as terrifying. His armour was pitted and studded with old scars, and they laced the surface like badges of honour. Rage was forever present with him, frothing under the surface. Ravenblade could sense it through the layers of battle-plate, pulsing like an exposed vein.

  “Don’t be a fool!” Svelok growled. “There’s no time for this.”

  Ravenblade regarded the Wolf Guard coldly. Svelok was as angry as the planet, his hackles raised by a mission he saw no use or glory in, but he was right. Time was running out. They all knew the acid tide was racing towards them. In less than an hour the ravines would be filling up, and ceramite was no protection against those torrents.

  “I’ll be the judge of that, brother,” warned the Rune Priest. “We’re close.”

  Svelok turned to face him, his bolter still poised for assault. For a moment, the two Space Wolves faced one another, saying nothing. Svelok had no patience with the scrying arts, and no faith in anything but his bolter. He had almost a century more experience on the battle-front than Ravenblade, and took orders from no one but his Wolf Lord and Grimnar. Handling him would be a test.

  “We’d better be,” he snarled at last, his voice thick with disdain. “Move out.”

  Six kilometres to the north, Gath Rimmon’s dark plains were deserted. The tearing wind scoured the stone, whipping up the acid that remained on it and sending curls of vapour twisting into the air.

  In the centre of a vast, tumbled plateau of rock was a circular platform. Exposed to the atmosphere, it looked raw and out of place. Lightning flashed across the heavens, picking out the smooth edge of the aberration.

  Suddenly, without any signal or warning, a crystalline pinprick began to spiral over the platform. It span rapidly, picking up speed and flashing with increasing intensity. It moulded itself, forming into a tall oval twice the height of a man. At its edge, psychic energy coursed and crackled. The rain whipped through it, vaporising and bouncing from the perimeter.

  Then there was a rip. The surface of the ellipse sheered away. One by one, figures emerged from the portal. Eight of them. As the last stepped lightly from the oval, the perimeter collapsed into nothingness, howling back into a single point of nullity.

  The arrivals were man-shaped, though far slighter than humans, let alone Space Marines. Six were clad in dark green segmented armour. They carried a chainsword in one hand and a shuriken pistol in the other. Their closed-faced helmets were sleek and tapered, and all had twin blasters set into the jowls. They fell into position around the platform, their movements silent and efficient.

  Their leader remained in the centre. He was arrayed in the same armour, though his right hand was enclosed in a powerclaw and the mark of his shrine had been emblazoned across his chest. He moved with a smooth, palpable menace.

  Beside him stood a figure in a white mask carrying a two-handed force sword. The blade swam with pale fire, sending tendrils of glistening energy snaking towards the ground. He wore black armour lined with bone-coloured sigils and warding runes. Ruby spirit-stones studded the surface, glowing angrily from the passage through the webway. He wore no robes of rank over his interlocking armour plates, but his calling was unmistakable. He was a psyker and a warrior. Humans, in their ignorance, called such figures warlocks, knowing little of what they spoke.

  “You sense it, Valiel?” asked the claw-fisted warrior.

  “South,” nodded the warlock. “Be quick, exarch; the tides already approach.”

  The exarch made a quick gesture with his chainsword, and the bodyguard clustered around him.

  “Go fast,” he hissed. “Go silent.”

  As one, the eldar broke into a run, negotiating the treacherous terrain with cool agility. Like a train of ghosts, they slipped across the broken rocks, heading south.

  Svelok felt battle-fury burning in his blood, filling his muscles and flooding his senses
. He was a Space Wolf, a warrior of Fenris, and his one purpose was to kill. This chase, this running, was horrifying to him. Only the sanctity of his mission orders restrained him from turning and taking the wrath of Russ to every Grendel-clone on the planet. He knew the acid ocean was coming. He knew that the entire globe would soon be engulfed in boiling death. Even so, turning aside from the path of the hunt for the sake of a Rune Priest’s dreams sickened him.

  They were coming to the end of a long, narrow defile. The stone walls, serrated and near-vertical, blocked any route but south. A few metres ahead, hidden by a jutting buttress of rock, the route turned sharply right.

  Svelok’s helm-display flickered, and he blink-clicked to augment the feed. There were proximity signals on the far side of the buttress. Plenty of them.

  Varek whooped with pleasure. “Prey!” he bellowed, picking up the pace. By his side, the bear-like Lokjr kicked his frost axe into shimmering life and returned a throaty cry of aggression. “Fodder for my blade, brother!”

  Only Ravenblade remained silent, and his wolf-spirit remained dark. Svelok ignored him. Energy coursed through his own superhuman limbs, energy that needed to be dissipated. He was a Wolf Guard, a demigod of combat, the mightiest and purest of the Allfather’s instruments of death, and this is what he’d been bred for.

  “Kill them all!” he roared, his hearts pounding as he tore round the final corner and into the ravine beyond. His muscles tensed for impact, suffused with the expectation of righteous murder. A kind of elation bled into the fanged smile under his helm.

  Past the buttress, tall cliffs of stone soared away on either side, cradling a narrow stretch of open ground. The massive Grendel-creatures were there, stalking like Titans across the stone, silent and dark. Flyers swooped among them. There were smaller creatures too, all encased in the acid-washed rock-hide of their kind, multi-faceted and covered in diamond-hard spikes and growths. Their vast mouths opened, each ringed with armour-shredding incisors.