Treacheries of the Space Marines Read online

  ‘What is it, brother?’ asks the sergeant. ‘What are you trying to tell us?’

  ‘The nests in these volcanic plateaus were not the only place where ’stealer broods went to ground after the splinter fleet was repelled from the shores of Nova Terra.’

  The atmosphere of joy in the air evaporates in an instant.

  ‘Brother,’ Constantinus says, his voice a sinister guttural growl, ‘be clear. What are you trying to tell us? Do you speak of’ – he hesitates – ‘cult activity?’

  ‘I fear so, brother-sergeant,’ Palamedes confirms, his remorseful tone giving the impression that he is confessing to some terrible transgression of his own.

  ‘Then this world is not yet free of its xenos taint,’ Sergeant Constantinus says darkly, ‘and our work here is not yet done.’

  Suddenly raising his power sword high, he makes a new oath of moment in a voice that booms like an orbital assault.

  ‘I shall not rest until this world is free!’

  Twisting his wrist, Fauchard brings the chainsword back around, the jagged adamantium teeth quickly chewing through the neck of another maniacal cultist. But where one blasphemer falls, beneath the shattered vault of the Great Cathedral of Cirtus city, there are a dozen more ready to take its place.

  Many of the deranged devotees come at them armed with nothing more than dull-edged knives and the insane belief that somehow they have a hope of prevailing against the Iron Knights.

  The cultists possess little in the way of armour either, or even clothing of any sort. Their filthy robes hang like rags about them, what little flesh that clothes their near skeletal frames is covered with all manner of blasphemous symbols. Some have been tattooed on, some are unhealed scars cut with the point of a knife or a ragged fingernail. The glyphs make even Fauchard sick to the pit of his stomach if he looks upon them for too long.

  The flagellants scream blasphemies to their unspeakable masters as they come at the Space Marines – wave after rushing wave of them – but the armour of their unshakeable, unholy faith does nothing to save them from Fauchard’s blade or the Emperor-inspired wrath of his brother knights.

  From out of the pack emerges a bald man, flayed skin peeled back from the top of his head to expose the glistening skull beneath, the blood-wet bone incised with the star-rune of the arch-enemy.

  Fauchard plunges his sword into the man’s stomach. The cultist gasps, the foul invocation that was on his lips cut off in that instant. But the wildness in the man’s stare remains, while a delighted, shark-like smile twists his face into a grotesque grimace.

  The cultist grabs hold of the chainsword and gives a sharp tug. Dark blood gushes from his mouth as the man convulses and pulls himself up the blade. Now with only the hilt protruding from his belly, the fanatic reaches up to claw at Fauchard’s helmet with broken, bloodied fingernails, the same insane smile still etched on his face.

  The Iron Knight raises his bolt pistol and explodes the lunatic’s skull with a single round. Shaking the limp corpse from his chainblade, he turns to meet the charge of the next insane idiot desirous of a hasty death.

  Not five metres away, Brother Adnot takes a cultist’s head in his hands and wrenches it from the woman’s shoulders, the arterial spray of blood that follows send a shower of red mist down upon their gunmetal-grey battle plate, the blasphemer’s unholy blood baptising them all.

  There is a flash of steel to Fauchard’s right and Brother Nihel takes down a mewling, conjoined thing with one stroke of his treasured relic blade.

  Brother Urs gives a bestial bellow and barrels past, the huge Space Marine crashing into the cultist pack, sending the suicidal servants of the Ruinous Powers tumbling to the ground, crushing their skulls under his armoured feet.

  Another burst of bolter-fire and another body performs its own danse macabre before falling to the ground, suddenly eerily still. Then there is no more killing to be done, and the broken ground is awash with the blood of the blasphemers.

  Sergeant Fauchard regards the twisted, pulverised and bludgeoned bodies for a moment, finding himself wondering once again how anyone could choose such a life – and such a death: bodies daubed with unholy sigils, flesh already rotting, minds and souls sick with corruption – over a life of service to the Emperor and the Imperium.

  He doesn’t know what’s worse: that such weak-minded mortals can sink to such levels of depravity, or that the thing they revere as lord of this world was once like the sergeant and those battle-brothers under his command – one of the Emperor’s finest, an inheritor of the genetic legacy of the highly revered Primarch Guilliman. A loyal Space Marine.

  The so-called Liberator must have known, as soon as he broke faith with his vows of brotherhood, turned his back on his devotion to the Emperor, and renounced the sacred trust that had been placed in him by his Chapter Master, that this day would come.

  ‘Brothers,’ Fauchard announces, the squad gathering together again, forming a ring around their sergeant. ‘Let us swear an oath of moment, to reaffirm the vows we made on coming to this hell-world, that we shall not rest until the traitor’s head adorns the battlements of his own citadel. Swear it now!’

  ‘We so swear!’ the Iron Knights bellow in furious affirmation of their sergeant’s words.

  ‘The Iconoclast’s blasphemous idol has been toppled, and after thirteen long years of fighting his forces are in rout. Now this once great cathedral has been purged of his profane acolytes too. It is now only a matter of time before the Emperor guides us to the place where we shall meet with the arch-traitor himself in battle. With his death, we shall reclaim this world for the Emperor. This I so swear!’

  The knights’ antiphonal response reverberates from the broken pillars of the once mighty edifice like the roar of a Thunderhawk’s engines. ‘So we all swear!’

  ‘Vigilance! Valour! Vengeance!’ Fauchard roars, his brethren quick to echo the battle-cry of their Chapter. ‘Let us be ever watchful for signs of treachery and be ruthless in our prosecution of those who would willingly turn from the Emperor’s light, as we exact His divine retribution upon them.’

  Fauchard thrusts his chainsword high into the sky then, its tip appearing to scrape the hell-storm clouds of blood and smoke that shroud the ruined city.

  ‘For I shall not rest until this world is liberated from the traitor’s tyrannical rule. This I swear!’

  QUOTE

  A case in point is the dark tale of Constantinus – sometimes called the Oathbreaker, sometimes called the Iconoclast – renegade battle-brother of the noble Sons of Guilliman…

  Having renamed the world Constantinium, the renegade sergeant plunged his newly conquered domain into an age of anarchy, darkness and blood sacrifice. Not content with having consecrated one world to the Ruinous Powers, the traitor embarked upon a campaign of savage slaughter, a terrifying pogrom that engulfed planet after planet, system after system, until within the space of ten short years, the entire Viridis Sector owed him fealty.

  It took a unified force of three Space Marine Chapters, twelve Imperial Guard foundings, an entire battlefleet and agents of both the Officio Assassinorum and the mighty Ordos Hereticus to finally recapture the planet. Even then the bloodshed only ended with the death of the traitor Constantinus himself.

  Even now, some three hundred years after the end of his tyrannical reign, it is said that cult-gangs of rebels still hold out in the volcanic plateaus, having made their lair within the labyrinthine lava tunnels found in that region. It is from these hidden cave systems that the rebels carry out guerrilla raids against the Emperor-fearing folk of Nova Terra. It is within those haunted caverns that they continue to make sacrifices to their blasphemous gods in the name of Constantinus the Liberator – a name that will forever be a stain upon the reputation of the noble Sons of Guilliman.

  From the treatise Quis Custodiet Ipsos Angeles Mortes? by Gideon Lorr, Inquisitor, O
rdo Hereticus

  The Long War

  by Andy Hoare

  Ferrous Ironclaw, warsmith of the Iron Warriors Traitor Legion, snarled in bitter derision as the smoke parted to reveal the battlefield across which his grand company would assault the enemy fortress. He barely noticed the sharp crunch of scattered bones beneath his tread, or the hot wind, which carried the stench of propellant, death and the rank fear of the lackeys of the Emperor who cowered behind the towering walls barely a kilometre ahead.

  ‘In the name of Perturabo,’ Ironclaw growled into the vox-pickup mounted in his Terminator armour’s collar, his voice a blasphemous fusion of the machine and the organic, ‘unleash the fires of damnation.’

  There was a brief pause during which stray autocannon rounds whipped in across the battlefield to burst ineffectually against the Iron Warriors’ fieldworks. Muzzle flares blinked along the length of the curtain wall, individual las-rounds whip-cracking overhead, their energy all but dissipated by the dense particulates obscuring much of the killing ground.

  Then, a deep tremor grumbled through the cratered, bone-wreathed ground, and the warsmith’s mouth twisted at one corner as something like anticipation bloomed inside him. The tremor grew to a roar, and in an instant the air was split by a sonic boom that made even the nearby Traitor Marines pause in awe.

  A barrage of super-heavy munitions thundered through the tortured skies of Bellum Colonia, parting thick banks of black smoke and scattering the debris littering the ground below with their turbulent wake. Ironclaw had paid his apostate Mechanicus allies handsomely for their aid in breaching the Bastion Primus, scouring an entire subsector for the price the fallen tech-priests had demanded in return for fielding their terrible siege engines. The soul-foundries of their daemon forge-world would blaze for decades to come as a result.

  Seconds later, the barrage struck. The Bastion Primus had been constructed in millennia long passed by the finest of the Imperium’s siege masons, yet no stronghold in the entire galaxy was beyond the capability of the Iron Warriors to breach. None except one – a flash of contempt seared through Ironclaw’s mind – but that would come, one day, at the conclusion of the Long War.

  Nucleonic fires burst into being as the warheads obliterated themselves upon striking the invisible void shields thrown up to protect the bastion. But Ferrous Ironclaw knew the science of siegecraft as others knew the wielding of the blade or the application of ballistics. The barrage was staggered, the first warheads overloading the voids. The shield projectors would be forced to shut down to isolate the void generators from the awesome feedback of such an overpowering strike, but Ironclaw knew they would never be fired again.

  When the void shields collapsed, the entire battlefield was pounded by a wave of overpressure that sucked the oxygen from the lungs of scores of defenders, blinded others and exploded the eardrums of those foolish enough to stand unprotected before the might of the Iron Warriors. Most would not live long enough to regret their incaution, however, for with the void shields down the main payload was about to be delivered.

  A dozen super-heavy siege shells smashed into the black walls of the Bastion Primus, the white fusion fires igniting a new sun that rivalled that shining wanly down through the smoke-wreathed skies. Though they blazed for but a fraction of a second, these miniature stellar cores unleashed such fearsome energies that a vast stretch of the curtain wall was reduced to atoms, as the raw stuff of ceramite, plasteel and flesh fuelled the nucleonic fires. Black smoke mushroomed upwards, and soon the entire bastion was obscured from the warsmith’s view. Only the bass roar of the dwindling fusion reaction and the tortuous grinding of collapsing fortifications spoke of the devastation being wrought within the boiling clouds.

  ‘Grand company,’ Ironclaw growled. ‘The command is given. Advance!’

  The warsmith’s order was heard and heeded by every one of his warriors, each a power-armoured veteran of the Long War against the hated False Emperor of Mankind. With the walls of the Bastion Primus wreathed in smoke and its surviving defenders reeling from the shocking devastation unleashed upon them, the Iron Warriors advanced across the cratered no-man’s-land all but unopposed. The Traitor Marines pressed forwards with the combination of cold precision and bitter determination they were known and feared for across the galaxy, their advance long planned and their deployment as exact as a victory procession. Clad in armour the colour of well-oiled gunmetal and bedecked in runes combining the machine and the arcane into a blasphemous hybrid script, the Iron Warriors crushed the bones of the thousands of unhallowed dead that lay scattered and broken across the killing grounds. They cared not at all that the remains were those of slain warriors once intent upon the same objective as they.

  As the ironclad squads pressed onwards towards the shattered wall, a second wave parted the drifting smoke behind them. Ironclaw’s bitter heart pounded in cruel expectation of that which would appear next, for if the apostate Mechanicus had exacted a steep price for their aid, the daemonologist-engineers had asked far more. The warsmith had long ago lost count of the souls offered up to invest each engine with the daemon-thing sealed within its rune-bound shell. As the smoke stirred, dark, jagged silhouettes resolved before the great daemon-engines crawled forwards. From the klaxon-grilles of each blared an atonal dirge that combined the wailing of the machine with that of tortured souls reduced to pulp by grinding gear wheels, the glorious sound growing so loud that even the tumbling of the curtain walls was all but drowned out.

  To Ferrous Ironclaw, the sound was the victory chorus of the Ruinous Powers, the cacophony of the warp resounding across the battlefield to bring shattering insanity to those who refused to acknowledge its power. To deny the glory of Chaos was to deny reality, Ferrous Ironclaw knew, and one day all of the galaxy would know it too.

  As the warsmith and his attendant Chosen – each a champion of the Iron Warriors, and clad in the very oldest and most revered Terminator armour – advanced, the smoke wreathing the breach ahead slowly lifted. Five hundred metres from the breach the ground was littered with rubble thrown up by the detonation of the super-heavy ordnance. The air was hot with the residue of the fusion reactions that had brought the void shields and walls down, and the warsmith felt the actinic sting of radiation on the skin of his bare face. Such a thing was of no consequence to a mighty champion such as he, though he judged that the mortal defenders of the bastion would, should they survive the day, fall victim to its curse within weeks. None, he swore silently, would survive this day.

  At three hundred metres precisely, the warsmith enacted the next phase of his plan. With a fell word of command, he ordered the numerous daemon-engines bound to his Legion’s service to converge on the breach, which was even now becoming visible as the smoke of nucleonic devastation cleared. The machines redoubled their atonal cacophony as they pounded forwards, some on clanking mechanical legs, others on tracks that ground the desiccated remains of former besiegers to dust in their passing. Ironclaw allowed himself a moment’s pause as dozens of daemon-driven mechanical behemoths overtook him and his bodyguard. Some passed so close that he could feel the waves of malignance radiating outwards and sense the primeval rage of the denizens of the warp entrapped within. It was only by the application of the most binding of seals that the machines did not turn upon the Iron Warriors in their savage urge to rend the material universe to shreds. Their thirst for the souls of the mortals before them was tangible. Ironclaw felt that thirst too, for he had known its allure for ten thousand years.

  Soon, the daemon-engines were drawing near to the breach, and as the smoke thinned still further the warsmith could finally look upon the glorious destruction his earlier word of command had wrought. The walls of the Bastion Primus soared a hundred metres and more overhead, and curved around many times further to left and right. Yet, where before the walls had stood proud and impregnable, defiant by their very existence of the glory of Chaos, now they were rent by a colos
sal wound. An entire section of the wall had been consumed by the short-lived nucleonic fires of the super-heavy siege ordnance, a raw scar resembling an axe wound in the chest of a fallen enemy marking the route the warsmith’s forces would take to storm the bastion. Like shattered, exposed ribs, twisted stanchions jutted from the sides of that wound, the super-dense metals melted into organic-seeming forms and solidified with the dying of the fusion infernos.

  A veteran of countless breaching operations, the warsmith had concentrated his barrage in such a way as to bring the fabric of the walls crashing down to form a ramp, up which his forces could climb. Even as the Iron Warriors pressed on, the ground beneath them rearing up this new, artificial rise, the daemon-engines raced forwards in their eagerness to tear apart the soft meat cringing beyond the rubble.

  ‘Warsmith,’ one of Ironclaw’s Chosen barked a clipped warning. ‘’Ware the breach.’

  Slowing his advance up the uneven base of the rise, the warsmith glanced towards its smoke-wreathed summit. His lip curled in derision, baring iron teeth sharper than any predator’s as a ripple of las-fire erupted from hidden firing positions amongst the tumbled masonry. Evidently, the defenders had rushed their second line forwards to defend the undefendable. The warsmith’s expression turned to savage eagerness as the lust to rush the breach all but consumed him. But the Iron Warriors were no mindless berserkers ready to throw themselves carelessly down the gullet of death. They wielded their fury artfully, as a weapon of precision, overwhelming their foe with clinical slaughter.

  ‘Ka, ib norag,’ the warsmith growled, the air around him visibly rippling as the word of power left his mouth. A moment later, the ground beneath his feet shook and great chunks of debris dislodged themselves from further up the ramp, crashing down before being swallowed in the drifting banks of smoke. The reek of burning souls assailed the warsmith’s nostrils, and three dark forms reared up behind him. Without turning, he gestured with one of his lightning claw-gauntleted hands and the three Defilers prowled forwards. Within seconds, the weight of fire had doubled and then tripled as the defenders at the summit saw their doom clawing its way upwards towards their position. Each of the engines was constructed like some huge, mechanical spider, the weapons mounted on the sides of their turrets spitting death as vast, scorpion-like foreclaws flexed in anticipation of the ruin they would soon exact upon the soft flesh of their enemies.