Down In Flames (Cabal Project One)

[Mazer Rackham]

DOWN IN FLAMES

ADEPTUS ASTARTES: FIRE HAWKS

 

PROLOGUE:

This is it, old friend.

 

For those times we saved each other, shed our blood and sweat under the roar of guns and upon the strange tides of war.

To now stand unrecognisable and unrepentant of our choices, blades drawn and bloodied by the bodies of our brothers, and the corpses of our sworn oaths.

 

All we have cherished, what we gave our lives to, broken down with our own hands.

 

How did it all come to this?

 

Is it only now, that we realise both of us are lost?

Edited March 25, 2023 by Mazer Rackham

[Mazer Rackham]

+ PART ONE +

FORGED IN FIRE

It was a deathtrap.

 

The Widowmaker bastion was the last refuge of the heretics and renegade Space Marines of the Bleak Brotherhood. It was the gateway to a fortress-city, and glory. Knight-Sergeant Emeryk Zann looked up at it, took in every grim detail of the fortress. Impervious to drop assault, hardened against cannon, even the Moderati of Legio Venator were rubbing their chins. The lynchpin to the defence of Lycanthos Secundus, it was a ferrocrete and plasteel mace-head, designed to batter any attacker foolish enough to come at it from air or ground.

 

The Fire Hawks were, as yet, involved in neither, playing second fiddle to other Astartes Chapters. This did not sit well with Zann, nor indeed his Chapter Master, the ancient and incorrigible Knight-Commander Stibor Lazaerek. Courageous, and well respected in his example, the Grumpy Old Man stood now in the council meeting, having long been passed over to lead the Imperium in crushing the traitors. At six centuries of age, he was older than three of the Chapter Masters put together, certainly older than Lugft Huron, Lord of the Astral Claws, and Commander of the Badab Sector.

 

And who was in nominal charge.

 

“There can be no finesse,” Huron intoned, his voice smooth, resonating with that depth only an Astartes throat could produce. “Once encirclement is completed, the men of Krieg will lay guns to force breaches.”

 

“We cannot do that whilst the Sentinel Fort commands fire over them.”

Zann followed the voice to a broad-shouldered man in the green uniform of the Kol-Sec Astra Militarum, his chest resplendent with ribbons and awards for gallantry. A long coat draped his shoulders, hiding the gold frogging of his rank epaulettes. Beside him, the grim soldiers of the Death Corps of Krieg looked on, implacable. Their silence was telling.

 

“That is why, General, the Fire Hawks are here.”

 

Power armour hummed around Zann as the news brought interest. The yellow flames, each painted with care and devotion by the individual warriors across their hot orange warplate, seemed to writhe, shifting from a guttering patience to a rousing dance. Knight-Captain Hastor Barancourt, Master of the Eighth, stood a little taller, his retinue exchanging glances. The Captain was po-faced, but his eyes sparkled. Even from here Zann could read his mind, hear the clashing of blades and the slaughter of fools who turned their back on the Emperor, the glory won in taking a fortified breach.

 

Opponents who would burn on the pyre of the Fire Hawks’ wrath.

 

“We will deliver the Fort by dawn, Commander.” Barancourt nodded, albeit to Lazaerek. As an afterthought, the Captain added Huron to the gesture.

 

Bold, thought Zann, given dawn was but a few hours hence.

 

“I will not delay you then, Knight,” Huron smiled, but it was cold. His green eyes were chips of hard emerald in a mountain stream.

 

Zann reflected on how different of character but singular of will they were. Over a decade of war, he’d come to know a few of them well. It was remarkable, how they had coalesced here, the Krieg, Astral Claws and Fire Hawks, all careless of casualties, so long as there was honour. Some ran hot, others cold. Men and women prepared to joyously throw themselves into the meat-grinder.

 

His eyes returned to the hololith, now pulled back, focused on the Sentinel Fort. It commanded the river between them and the Widowmaker, stood on a small hill, even this smaller redoubt was provided with a curtain wall. The air-defences so stiff, jump packs would be useless. No, it would be a ground assault, and relished the opportunity to ride in Terrans Flammae again.

 

***

 

Barancourt and his Command Squad stood up front, to be the first into the fray. Ancient Karak, Veteran of the First, was ever the Captain’s shadow. Stood directly behind his liege, the Company banner bearer gripped the staff, respectfully straightening the gold tassels dripping from the ancient cloth. Zann could feel the strange impatience gnawing at him as he looked at it. Once unfurled, the enemy would see the Fire Hawks colours. By thy banner shall he fear thee.

 

The Company Champion, took Barancourt’s garde gauche, a position of great trust and honour.  On the other side of the group, hovered the Apothecary. In the belly of the Land Raider Crusader, his fire motifs, usually stark against the alabaster ceramite were fittingly bathed in arterial red, painting him as a simple Brother. One with the flame.

 

In contrast, was the Company Chaplain. His black warplate wreathed with licking fire, the tongues of flame burning over bones already charred black. The holy man was a walking funeral pyre, his legion of skull motifs looking like the damned, enslaved to dance forever enwreathed in flames.

 

Even forged to resist fear, Zann shuddered, servo-musculature clattering.

 

The Chaplain, canted his helm. “Does something ague you, Knight-Sergeant?”

 

“No lord, I am ready.”

 

The skull helm twisted back, silent.

 

Within, the assault squad awaited breach. Their green, readiness icons, cycled across Zann’s retina, the armoured assault vehicle crunching over the rough ground. Without, tanks of the Astra Militarum flanked them, a whole Squadron of Kol-Sec Leman Russes, and overhead the covering barrage from Krieg siege Medusas. The battle net was full of chatter as the task force closed on the Sentinel Fort.

 

Weapons fire, probably from a light artillery battery thudded into Terrans Flammae, but the blessed hull was ancient, wrought by hands who knew the devastating punishment the hull must resist, to deliver the Emperor’s flaming sword into an enemy chest. It would have been faster by jump pack, but the rotary point-defence cannons thwarted that brand of swift justice.

 

Zann didn’t spare a hand to steady himself as the Land Raider revved forward, churning the bruised and powder-blackened earth. Magboots held his spare frame, and his fists gripped plasma pistol and power sword, each a minor relic in their own right. Linked to his sensorium, the keen augurs of the Mk VIII suit were matched by the impatience in his armaments. Repressed fury demanded quenching, to slay and slay until not one rebel bastard was standing.

 

Today they would teach that lesson, albeit they may have to do so alone. More thunder rang the hull, the shudder of ordnance driving the Land Raider back onto the haunches of its suspension. Reports began to come in of anti-tank batteries smashing the Militarum tanks into smoking splinters. Zann could believe it. Linked into the tactical map, he could see the blue pips of allied forces wink from existence. He felt a pang of sympathy that they had been denied retaliation, but the Emperor demanded sacrifice.

 

As if reading his thoughts, death tried to cleave inside once more, a double hammer blow that made even Zann’s visor leap with static. The Chaplain’s voice swelled, leading the Eighth Litany, kindling the Fire Hawks’ impotent rage into something focused.

 

“One-hundred yards,” Barancourt said.

 

Small arms rounds skittered and careened from the thrice-blessed ceramite above Zann’s head. All was noise, but where a human ear would only find chaos, Zann could discern the pattern, could visualise how close the fortress was, and in heartbeats could count the seconds until the guttering flame would roar into conflagration as it spewed out into the breach.

 

“Seventy-five!” the Knight Captain continued.

 

“Squad, make ready!” Zann ordered, drawing his weapons.

 

“Fifty, steady now Brothers!”

 

“Melta weapon, now firing,” one of the crew reported, metallic echo in his voice stealing emotion. He may as well have been a servitor. A high-pitched whine drowned him out, then the weapon capacitors discharged. Zann's suit of armour was divorced from the immense heat spike, but he could imagine it, the punishing lance of the anti-materiel beam turning everything in front of the Land Raider into molten slurry.

 

“Twenty-five...” Barancourt warned.

 

Throne, they were close now.

 

The crimson bulbs within the hold began to blink, power shunted to the assault ramp, and for a dreadful moment, the troop compartment succumbed to darkness as the vehicle collided with what Zann assumed to be the bastion wall. There was a moment of resistance before they tore through, suddenly plunging down, through thin air, until Terrans Flammae came to earth with such a jolt, even Zann’s magboots slipped forward a couple of inches.

 

“We are in!” Barancourt bawled.

 

When the light returned, blazing in green spill, the assault ramp opened. Beyond was a hall, dirty half-light punctuated by dripping globules of molten ceramite and plasteel. The Command Squad erupted from the belly of the beast, and he followed, shouting defiance and offering threat as his boots pulverised shattered rockrete within the enemy fastness.

 

***

 

The Sentinel Fort was a pit of the damned and the fallen.  Strange light and errant, oily darkness waxed and waned as battle was joined. The snarl and bark of bolt rounds exploding from the Fire Hawks pistols was replied by the crackling riposte of lasguns.

 

Shots, shouts, screams.

 

Uniforms ruined by soil and blood, defaced insignia and deformed faces confronted the loyalists. A mutated traitor guardsman lunged at him, snarling. The bayonet was foul, rusted and dripping with something that smoked, the vapours lifting free in smirking faces.

 

“Die, traitor!” Zann cried, his voice thunder among the battle-noise of his kin, deflecting the point of the bayonet with a well-practiced parry. The man was overbalanced, and a simple reversal of his powerblade scythed up, decapitating the wretch. The tentacles sprouting from the plated helmet continued to twitch until finally still.

 

“Onward!” Barancourt was in the lead, as was proper. “Up!”

 

The danger was obvious. The Fire Hawks had penetrated the lower foot of a basilica, and the only route up was a single staircase, and as a wound spurred Larraman’s Cells into action, the fort would bleed defenders to clot the injury. The Knight-Captain had already cut his way through the forlorn hope sent to delay them. A recidivist meltagunner peeked from the top of the stairs, lining up on the Captain, and filled with umbrage, Zann levelled his plasma pistol and sent a silver-blue stream out across the shadow-haunted crypt. The white-hot fire cored, and then immolated the filth.

 

“Fire is our fury!” the Chaplain roared, smashing down the milling enemy around him, splitting helmets, and slitting bellies open. The floor was becoming slick with offal and sloshing mess, as squad after squad were torn to pieces, blown into smouldering charnel.

 

“Fury is our faith!” a handful of throats replied.

 

“Burn them all!” Zann bellowed. "The Emperor will know his own!" Once again, it proved prophetic.

 

He felt the spatter of burning lasbeams striking his warplate, scoring it, although the weapons found no purchase. The mortal traitors backed into a corner, which only served to draw his ire, and his Squad closing in behind him, he bifurcated one in ozone-lightning with his sword, and the buzzing swipe of chainswords hacked up the rest in keening shriek, blood and gristle painting his comrades.

 

“Into the bastion, and silence the guns,” Barancourt demanded, storming up the exposed staircase, tossing more mutated guardsmen out of the way in utter contempt. Their gurgling screams truncated by the dull slap as they hit the ground. A barred door slammed into place behind the last handful of defenders, in the face of the Fire Hawk assault.

 

The Command Squad redoubled their speed, climbing the steps in bounds, a blur of violence as they finally gained the top. A powerfist exploded with crackling concussion as it punched the door out, a tangle of rubble and shrapnel tumbling down in their wake.

 

It proved a trap – clumsy, but a trap regardless.

 

The chunky thunder of a heavy bolter opening fire chewed into the lead force, battering the ceramite and ablative armour of the Knight-Captain. A flare of gilded silver surrounded Barancourt as his Iron Halo blazed into actinic existence, shattering the bolts before they exploded. The Company Champion thrust his shield in front of him, great divots being rent and piled into the plate. Zann cursed he didn’t have his flight pack.

 

***

Edited February 1, 2023 by Mazer Rackham
Cleanup

[Mazer Rackham]

+ PART 1 CONTINUED +

 

Ancient Karak’s helm exploded under the assault, brains splattering the Company Standard as it fell from his grip. Collective outrage spurred a wall of noise as battle-cries reverberated from the solid walls. Without thinking, Zann launched for the square of sacred cloth as it plummeted towards the ground. He got under it, trapping it in an awkward clutch with his elbows. In a human eye blink, he’d holstered his plasma pistol and was pounding up the stairs with the flagstaff in his hand.

 

“Make way for the colours!”

 

The Command Squad, setting aside their grief at the loss of Karak, redoubled their attacks, forcing through a fresh hail of heavy bolts, with Barancourt hewing left and right as he got inside the passage beyond.

 

Cruel, vox-distorted laughter hammered back, and Zann realised they were now getting to grips with the Chaos Space Marines of the Bleak Brotherhood. Excellent – the mortal heretics were the chaff, the traitor Astartes were the steel in their spine, and once ripped out, this fort would fall to the Imperium. A quick krak grenade silenced the throaty noise of the heavy bolter, and Zann stepped through, nearly tripping on the shattered and broken form of a Chaos Havoc warrior.

 

Rallying behind their Knight-Sergeant, the knot of Marines spilled into the gun embrasures on the next level. The rockrete buttresses, isolating each artillery piece from its neighbour, were stained black from repeated exposure to propellant residue. One of these cannons might have been responsible for the death of a Leman Russ, or even the hammer on the anvil of Terrans Flammae.

 

Stoking his anger further, Zann noticed crude glyphs incised into the metal of the guns, some fane or blasphemous prayer for accuracy. In disgust, he tore open the closed breech next to him, and rammed a krak grenade inside, hurriedly closing it. The Squad had moved on by the time the explosive went off, blasting a wrecked barrel out over the embrasure, to tumble to the earth below.

 

“Well met, Knight-Sergeant!” the Chaplain nodded once.

 

Whoever wasn’t forming the fighting wedge took up the cause. More ruptured guns bounced and clamoured over the side, a strange peal of cursed bells as they struck the walls or each other. Zann hurried to place the Company Banner in the midst of the fighting, as close-range bolt shells and powered blades sundered armour and corrupted flesh.

 

Barancourt’s tally increased with every forward step, and his Squad moved around him without commands, the Champion swiping away poisoned bayonets seeking the Knight-Captain’s flesh, and returning the strikes twofold. The sable and sickly green of the Bleak Brotherhood were sparse, but where the Fire Hawks made for them, the assault slowed.

 

Zann’s greaves were mired in guts and dead. A wrist feebly gripped his ankle, and he looked down to see a Chaos Marine, his arm gone at the shoulder in a blistering slice of disruption sheathed magsteel. A crooked set of horns erupted from the helm, the lenses cracked and marred. Zann chose one, and drove his sword down in a blue flash, the light of the energy field making the shadows of men battling to the death dance along the bloodstained walls. Six guns spiked, this row of embrasures cleared, the Fire Hawks cut themselves free, and drove forward. Thickening flames behind them sought out the wounded and dead alike, cauterising the heresy.

 

***

 

The Chaplain’s heavy maul smashed down a Heretic Astartes with a thunderous crack, and so the Space Marines made entry into the command nexus. Several banks of servitors slaved to cogitators were blackened and weeping from corruption, and the holotable was flickering with odd shapes. Zann thought he saw a face, armoured, yet somehow sneering as the different angles of light and shadow crazed it.

 

Defended by the Bleak Brotherhood, they had hastily erected barricades from heaped corpses of the dead loyalists they stole the bastion from, and reinforced this with plasteel doors, databanks, consoles – anything. Bolter muzzles spat a riot of shells in the confines of the strategium, knots of the enemy lacing a pattern of deadly crossfire. The Company Champion was overwhelmed, being hammered a dozen times until his torso and left arm cracked open in a welter of gore.

 

Not unscathed, the Chaplain roared, his voice filling the room, reverberating from the desecrated and slime-caked walls. He charged a barricade, bolts smacking from his armour, and deep blasts of concussive force threw the heretics back. Zann kept close to Barancourt, once more in the van of his men, and as the Fire Hawks cleared the kill-zone in dribs and drabs, more of the orange-red Astartes got in, each taking harrowing punishment as the Brotherhood emptied magazines in desperation before taking up blades.

 

This was where the Fire Hawks excelled. Duelling and bladework went with merit, elevating those who could master the Nine Strikes to the title of Knight. Zann laughed as he fought, cleaving an arm holding a chainsword at the wrist, punching the traitor in the vox-grille, before flicking the blade tip across his exposed throat. The Chaos Marine died with a gurgle.

 

With the Command Squad fallen, Zann found himself shoulder to shoulder with his Knight-Captain, their combined blades falling into mutual patterns. Barancourt used the reach of his blade to open the defence of a traitor, which Zann then exploited with a fatal blow.

The enemy commander chose then to present himself. A brute in Tactical Dreadnought Armour, his form was bedecked with a curtain of barbed chains as a ragged metallic cloak, and matching loin-guard. A chainaxe in his right hand, his left was sheathed in a power glove.

 

“Corpse-lackeys,” the Terminator drawled, with a lisp. Zann caught the wet rasp and slurring. A mutated face lingers behind the Indomitus helm, he thought.

 

Barancourt didn’t respond, other than to drive a trust toward the hulking brute. An explosion of violence greeted it as the disruptive fields of blade and fist met and repelled each other. Hacking both Fire Hawks back with great arcing swings, the Terminator dominated the strategium, gaining the centre. Avenues of attack opened, and Zann watched other Fire Hawks rush into the gaps, flanking. They shot and hacked with chainswords, but the teeth found no purchase, and even outnumbered, this armoured bear held the advantage of his warplate.

 

“Come then, dogs! Die here today!”

 

So saying, the Terminator punched one of the Fire Hawks, completely pulverising his chest plastron, and all within it, sending the Space Marine flying to slam a divot out of the wall. The chainaxe flailed severing another brother’s arm, then head. Barancourt nodded to Zann and the Chaplain, and all three came at the traitor from different angles.

 

The Knight-Captain cut and swept, forcing a defence, chopping rents into the corroded plating of thighs and chest, until the Terminator got his hand around the weapon, and tore it from the Captain’s grip, before reversing it, and driving it into Barancourt’s gut.

 

“No!” Zann shouted.

 

He lunged for the exposed flexsteel of the armour at the hips, enfleshing his blade, but ducking the narrow sweep of the axe. A sable blur flew behind the heretic, and the maul fell, not once, but twice, staggering the giant. Reeling, the weight of the armour now forcing a stagger to get away from the skull-helmed zealot pounding him, Zann slashed again, taking the opponent behind the knee.

Toppled with a might crash, the traitor reeled, the Chaplain taking his maul two-handed and beating the Chaos Marine savagely, in a shower of molten adamantium slivers and golden sparks. The holy warrior grunted and bellowed, a battering of prayers, until the object of his fury ceased offering resistance, lying in a smoking, pulverised wreck.

 

“Quickly, Knight-Sergeant! To the roof. Take the banner and show our allies the fort is ours!”

 

“Aye lord!”

 

The Medicae rushed to Barancourt as Zann hurried up the stairs at the back of the strategium, some of his Squad following for protection. He launched up, shouting  a challenge, until he reached the upper crenulations, and the roof. He was greeted by a wretch in grubby carapace armour, who was using magnoculars to watch the Imperial assault forming. Long range artillery boomed, the shells dropping onto Kol-Sec and Krieger tanks.

 

“More widows for the god! She has a long reach! Ha! Ha!” the man called, withered teeth in his rotting gums.

 

Enraged, Zann charged the faithless swine, his boot thumping onto the human’s chest, propelling him over the bastion wall to fall onto the defensive spikes dozens of yards below, his shrill laughter truncated by a sharp, piercing scream. “Not as long as that fall,” he called after the mutant.

 

Dawn was breaking over Lycanthos Secundus, and he held the banner aloft. The Fire Hawks had won an honourable victory. He looked over to where the Astral Claws were forming up to assault the Widowmaker Bastion.

And saw defeat.

***

 

Long range vox was suffering interference, and frantic signalling would be pointless. Zann tried the repeater relay flashing up in his retinal sensoria, but it was only accepting incoming links. The men of the Astra Militarum hadn’t applied secured protocols then. Disaster threatened as the Astral Claws began their advance. Shells pounded down from the Widowmaker Bastion, erupting in huge plumes of blackened, exploded soil amongst the silver legion, fast-moving tanks and bikers drawing the fire of the powerful batteries.

 

An ever greater hammer rang on anvil as the Krieg Heavy Siege Korps opened fire. Whistling shells arced overhead, pasting the locations of the enemy artillery emplacements revealed by the Astral Claws desperate advance. Around the lions, the men of the Kol-Sec assault companies suffered the most. A ripe target, replete with gory slaughter for an accurate gunner, and for all the pulverising effort of the tireless big guns at Huron’s disposal, the barrage kept coming.

 

This was not Zann’s greatest concern. As Huron trundled towards his own breach-point, he could see several Tactical squads of the Astral Claws hurrying on the flanks, growing painfully close to the enemy fortress walls, ad provoking a sally from the defenders. Zann saw the troops lying in wait – a handful of the Bleak Brotherhood amongst what appeared to be some kind of fanatical, blood-soaked mob.

 

The silver warriors were attacking uphill, with the revenant heretics on the opposing slope. They were waiting for something, and Zann suspected a trap. The ridge vanished in a heave of rubble and dust, the explosion reaching Zann’s aural receptors a few heartbeats later. Cursing, he turned and ran down the stairs, shouting for his Squad to follow. If the traitors could break through the flank, there was a risk to the main force. This could not be allowed. He met the Chaplain once more, haunting the strategium, and was offered brief counsel.

 

“Go, Knight! Fight fire with fire!”

 

Muscles beginning to burn from the hurry, he reached a parapet on the outside of the fort, facing the direction of the Astral Claws assault. Some thirty yards above the ground, Zann vaulted the battlements, landing with a heavy thud, forcing protests from the abuse of his armour’s machine spirit. He narrowly missed the spiked traps set up by the previous defenders. The assault squad followed without hesitation, and his remaining blades ran across the bare ground, exposed to long range fire. Honour called.

 

***

Edited February 1, 2023 by Mazer Rackham

[Mazer Rackham]

+ PART TWO +

FIRE AND FURY

It was potentially suicidal.

 

The mortals would give the Astral Claws a screen, and plenty of diversion, but Marban Sotha didn’t think much of their staying power or potential. Quantity was a quality all its own, though. He kept up the pace, a steady jog the humans could match as they used the convenient ridge to screen their attack. Maybe too convenient, he thought.

 

It was more than a forlorn hope – or at least Sotha thought so. The first man into the fire of a breach was destined for the eye of the Centurions or even elevation into the First Company. A Sergeant in effect, not fact, securing his position with a coveted honour badge would go some way to furthering his legacy. His tactical map and force interlink were suffering static. This close to an enemy redoubt he wasn’t surprised, but his job was to prevent the Chapter Master’s attack from being enveloped. Other units were doing the same thing across the front of the Widowmaker. Divide and conquer. He hurried the mortals and their Astartes backbone into an assault formation.

 

“Quickly – glory and battle do not bide!”

 

As the Chapter Master’s assault force began racing forward for the main bastion gate, Sotha threw his chainsword forward, and his amalgamated force charged, demo packs and scaling equipment at the ready. He knew something was wrong as soon as the unit gained the ridge, and the guns buried in the embrasures opposite didn’t fire to clear them away. Then he felt the earth move.

 

A great hand rushed up from under his feet to scoop him up in a giant, earthy fist. Flurries of pressure, suit integrity and temperature warnings blazed across his retina, which he dismissed with a curse, even as his body was painfully wrenched in several different directions. Sharp, electric burning as connecting cables of his power armour were snatched from sockets without ritual, forcing his arm and leg to spasm in neural feedback. Gravity asserted itself, and the force which cast him into the air abandoned him, to drop him into a morass of blood and soot, the Militarum soldiers blown into red ruin around him.

 

Breath driven out of him, his sensorial was fizzing and popping, a sure sign of significant harm to his warplate. Stimulant needles bit into his thigh and bicep as he tried to move, implants and gyroscopic augurs reporting he was on his back. Stones and clods of soil pattered his plastron and casque. Broken audio repeated the choppy sounds of a force charging, lasfire crackled and bolt rounds churned the air, finding targets as flesh blew apart in thick chumps of detonation.

 

Sotha realised his bolter was still clenched in his right fist, and he tried to bring it up, but ocular senses were non-existent. With great effort, he wrenched his helmet off, exposing him to the riot of noise and the stench of charred flesh. It took him a moment to realise it was coming from him. He looked up to where the ridgeline was supposed to be, and found only a staggered formation of ragged guardsmen being herded by Heretic Astartes. He had slid down the front slope, the explosives throwing him backwards. His left leg was gone from below the knee – his armour was blasted black and stained red.

 

Crunching the bolter to his shoulder guard, he aimed by eye and experience as the enemy broached the skyline. Silhouetted against the breaking dawn, the targets were about to taste his wrath. Pain from his leg fired his anger, in turn working the firing stud. It was the traitor’s turn to die, his Badabian-wrought shells carrying a heavier propellant and charge payload, blew the mortal wretches into smoking meat, and one of the Bleak Brotherhood, whose Astartes biology managed to level his own boltgun got his faceplate blown through along with whatever malicious matter it contained.

 

“Die! Die, you weak bastards!”

 

His savage cry was answered, and more of the heretics, mutated and rasping, with lungs full of mucus or malignant growth converged. He could hear them; see the wicked blades come for him, the sting of the lasgun fire as they pelted him at close range. Runnels of molten ceramite stung his nose. Frag and krak grenades gone, Sotha worked his bolter left to right, killing the closest, until his ammunition expired. Instinct and muscle memory tried to reload, but his left arm had suffered the same fate as his leg, and his unpowered suit made it impossible.

 

He spat acidic phlegm into the slitted helm of one mortal, close enough to smell his stinking body, the ripe reek of corrupted flesh, and the man fell away screaming. Sotha laughed, his whole body shaking with it, defying the pain and fate. He threw his empty bolter and crushed another skull, which prompted even greater amusement.

 

Just as they were about to cut him to pieces, a rip of bolt shells burst them open, felled others. Not core shots, but limbs went flying. Someone was firing, on the run, at extreme range. As dawn lifted into the sky, blanketing the world with light, another blast of blinding light flew over him, striking a glancing blow on a Chaos Marine, and showering his attendants with boiling plasma.

 

He twisted his head around, and got a view of brilliant red-orange and deep yellow. His vision swam, under shock and awash with chemical compounds. A fire was raging, rushing towards him, spitting hatred and hard rounds.

 

“Fire is our fury!” said the brightest spark.

 

“Fury is our faith!” the conflagration roared.

 

Chainswords revved and screeched, as aid unlooked for, arrived.

 

***

 

“We have you, brother,” the Astartes stood over him, plasma pistol blazing blue-white silver ribbons as bolts of roiling steam hissed from the cooling bell muzzle.

 

In close proximity, Sotha could make out the heraldry of the Fire Hawks. He knew little of their customs, except they revered the Emperor as a deity, not just a powerful and great man, but he was also aware of their hunt for acclaim and honour.

 

“Have you come to steal my glorious last stand?” he demanded, gruff.

 

A laugh. “I thought it stolen already, since you are lying down.”

 

“I am not so easily robbed – and yet it has cost me an arm and a leg!” Sotha spat the humour through his teeth, chewing on bitterness and pain.

 

The fighting continued around him, the Fire Hawks forming a line to defend the remaining Astral Claws and the wounded. One of them granted the Emperor’s peace to those who were already too far gone, the blood of friends and foe alike on his blade.

 

“We saw you from the sentinel fort,” the Sergeant continued, “the enemy mass for a counter-attack. We go to blunt them.”

 

“Help me up to the ridge, I will cover you,” Sotha growled.

 

The Fire Hawk grasped his intention, reloaded his bolter for him and dragged him up to the highest point of what remained of the ridge. Inspired by this, the other Hawks gathered the wounded men and Astartes and formed a hedge of guns which would support their attack.

None too soon.

 

Sotha saw it first. “Chimeras!”

 

Three of the Militarum troop transports burst from cover where the sally party amassed, obviously placed there to counter a frontal assault. Desperate, and Heretics, the enemy may have been, but idiots they were not. The Fire Hawks attacked immediately, and the saviours receiving some payment for their valour, as Sotha aimed and fired, blasting a tank commander in half, the remains of the corpse trapped in the hatch as it closed, flopping about absurdly as the vehicle rumbled and churned through the mud to crush the gnats around it.

 

Three armoured carriers would not defeat Lord Huron’s column, but they would swamp it with threats that must be dealt with, robbing the assault of focus, buying time for the defenders to react, reinforce and delay. This could not be allowed. Sotha felt a stab of admiration for the Fire Hawks, they saw the danger and were doing what they could. He must also play his part.

 

He killed and killed, blasting at periscopes, lasgun barrels, any fool who showed himself. One of his men still had his plasma gun, and like the Sergeant, sent blistering bolts down into the tanks, going for the treads, Kol-Sec lasguns spat, all of them covering the Fire Hawk charge.

 

***

 

Zann thanked the Emperor they were the responders. As an assault squad, his men carried flamers and melta bombs, and destroying vehicles like this was bread and butter work. Dangerous enough, under the fortress guns, he hoped there would be enough reason for them to hold fire whilst there was a chance for the sally to succeed.

 

He charged the armoured fist units at an oblique angle under the covering fire of the Astral Claws and Guardsmen. They could shoot! He doubted a single driver had a clear view, and had too much to worry about than spotting the counter-attack. A commander popped up out of his turret, carefully peeking around the cupola hatch, but a bolt shell tore him in half. Nobody dared that again.

 

Lacking melta bombs, Zann was dwarfed by the tank as he reached it, the clank and thump of treads filling his senses. The track guards were complete, but there were several hand-holds, and as he clambered up on the carrier, the lasguns manned by those inside swivelled to blast him at point blank, but even though they scored gouges, he was too close, and suddenly behind their menacing muzzles.

 

Activating his magboots to prevent them throwing him through manoeuvres, Zann jammed krak grenades under the turret and clung on, the bomblets detonating, and preventing traverse of the autocannon turret. A formidable weapon in its own right. Smoking plasteel debris spattered him. He tore the dead commander from the turret, and hurled frag grenades down into the hatch, autosenses relating the gasps and cries of dismay before the muffled thump of the explosives, and the sharp sounds of ricocheting shrapnel pieces.

 

The vehicle shuddered to a halt, the rear hatches still dogged tight, the upper hatches were pinned shut by his own weight. Zann had to act quickly, he was unsure if this pattern had a connecting hatch to the driver’s compartment, and didn’t want the lumbering chassis to rumble onwards. He stood up, presenting himself as a target – one which hadn’t gone unnoticed, searing crimson beams flashing around him as a supporting Chimera opened up with its multilaser.

 

Runes sprang into his vision as shots struck home, lancing into his ceramite skin, shedding ablative spall in sublimated gasses. He felt the pain as the three beams burrowed deeper until they struck the adamantium undershell. Fire blossomed from the resin paint which bedecked his left shoulder, peeling away his Chapter heraldry, igniting the potent mix in a giant fireball which pushed him sideways, his weight forcing the magboots to safety disconnect or break his ankles.

 

As he slewed over the back hull, fingers and toes biting into vents. He looked up to see two Fire Hawks avenge him, slamming meltabombs on the APC hull, before rolling off. The tracked carrier erupted with dual thumps of melta heat, sloughing into white-hot liquid. The screams of the frying men inside were short, as superheated air fried them inside out.

 

When the third Chimera went up, it was over, and he moved to finish it.

 

Growling, Zann reversed his power sword, bringing it down on the hatch leaves, slicing open a gap wide enough for his fist. His empty right hand delved inside, closed on yielding flesh, and he ripped upwards, crushing the unfortunate human against the ceiling. It had the desired effect.

 

When the humans dropped the rear ramp, he heard their urgent pleas to get outside. He allowed it, refraining from using his grenades on them, and instead, dropping don on one of them when they were all out. He crushed the female soldier into the ground, shattering her spine. Levelling his sword at them, some hesitated, others readied their lasguns. Again, he permitted it, until three of them got the idea, and charged him.

 

Laughing, Zann loosed himself to the perfection of the blade, parrying, deflecting, using half-sword techniques to delay them. After the fight in the keep, this was glorious, outnumbered, alone and only the naked edge. One brandished a pistol – he cut the hand off at the wrist and shoulder barged the man, before caving in his skull with a boot heel. He disembowelled a second, beheaded a third – moving, always moving, footwork leading and the blade followed.

 

Generations of Preceptor-Sergeants had carried the traditions of the sword all the way from Cousteau XI, the Feudal Knights there practicing the arts of dancing and fencing together, sometimes indulging in ritualised combat where the objective was to tap a small shield medallion on the chest of their opponent without causing bloodshed, and therefore wars between houses.

 

The true art was the quick kill into the heart.

 

Zann performed this now, a flick of the point to parry a bayonet, and the lunge. Cuts were only to defend or open up a foe’s defence. The point always beats the edge, Emeryk. He could hear Preceptor-Veteran Surtur even now. The venerable warrior preferred lightning claws in either power or Tactical Dreadnought Armour.

 

Only one of the traitors surrendered, tearing off his helmet and throwing up his hands, but it didn’t save him. Zann cleaved him nape to groin, and kicked the carcass over. There was a thump of wall-mounted artillery, and the curtain wall embrasures wreathed with smoke and fyceline gas. The ground churned around the Fire Hawks, with the first shot, but by the time Zann rallied them, and led them away, the other shells hit nothing.

 

The Space Marines were gone, heading back to their wounded allies.

 

***

Edited February 1, 2023 by Mazer Rackham
Updates

[Mazer Rackham]

+ PART TWO - CONTINUED +

 

Being dragged through the mud and soil was nothing new for Sotha. He remembered, with great bitterness, the day upon Hellsiris, when his chest cavity was blown open, and stuffed with catoplasm by the apothecary. Reeking of counterseptic and dazed, he recalled the harsh laughter of his companion, Ayanna Sevaris, as the tall Astartes dragged him with one hand, and toted his M.34 pattern autocannon in the other.

 

Just as now, the speed of his extraction was geneforged, rocketing along at a good twenty miles per hour of the rough ground. The humans he’d gone out with were much slower, and consequently harried by the lighter guns of the fortress. The Space Marines left them to it, the Emperor looking after them.

 

“How fare you, brother?” the Sergeant bore him with his own hands.

 

“Tolerable, although the suspension could be improved.”

 

The Sergeant laughed. “Knight-Sergeant Zann.”

 

“Like the Templars? I am Marban Sotha,” he replied, solemn. Pain stimms were beginning to wear off, and the ache of his wounds was fraying at his humour. The introductions were necessary, with Sotha’s armour unpowered, Zann’s noospheric interface would not have absorbed his IFF identity tags.

 

“Perhaps, in some respects,” Zann shouted over the noise of battle, “but we are of Guilliman’s line.”

 

Sotha shut his mouth. One of the few shames the Astral Claws endured was ignorance of their lineage. The want within his breast, to add glory to his Progenitor was only natural, although the Chapter had acquitted itself with great honour for the better part of five millennia, and was honoured by their banner hanging in the Hall of Heroes – within sight of the Emperor himself. These knights were not so vaunted as the sable crusaders who stood with the Astral Claws in the depths of the Maelstrom, yet they had stormed to his aid, and well deserved his thanks. He shrugged off his misgivings, blaming the pain of his wounds as the culprit.

 

Like the Unknown Liege, another spectre loomed over him, that of the Sentinel Fort. Smoke poured from the redoubts on all sides, showing the completeness of the Fire Hawks’ endeavours. Vox clicks from the Knight-Sergeant’s helm revealed some communication, and as the Apothecary came out of the main gatehouse, his alabaster plate gleaming white and scarlet, Sotha realised his pain was going to get a little worse before it got better.

 

“Peace, Astral Claw,” the surgeon said, kneeling down and beginning his work.

 

Sotha grimaced as his armour was breached, the saw cutter slicing through the plate to get to undamaged, bare flesh. The wounds were inspected, before something cool and soothing flooded him, and he smelled the grisly perfume of his wounds being cleansed and treated, before emergency cauterisation. Once done, the medic vanished, to tend his other brethren and do what he could for the mortal survivors.

 

It gave Sotha time to look around, as another Land Raider powered towards the fort. Although the tone of the battle had changed, he could still hear brutal punishment being inflicted – the whoosh of heavy flamers, the chattering of twin-linked boltguns. His brothers were eradicating the heretics, and his Chapter Master, Lugft Huron was winning the war. As he thought of his own lord, another entered the battlefield.

 

The Land Raider carried exceptional embellishment. Gold and sanguinite filigree adorned a handsomely decorated flank, carrying the panoply of the Fire Hawks’ Master. Each of the red-and-yellow warriors sank to one knee, save the apothecary, whose duty was greater.

 

***

 

Zann drew his sword, inverting it to bury the tip in the ground as he went to his knees. Next to his charge, the Astral Claw, he was in prime position to see his Master, Stibor Lazaerek decant with the honour guard around him, a shield of large blades. The ancient warrior strode out with purpose, and it was only then Zann’s heart dropped, for as he arrived at the foot of the gatehouse steps, a bier emerged, upon which he could see the body of Knight-Captain Barancourt.

 

A hero had fallen.

 

The Chaplain came out close behind the bier, which was no-doubt carried by those closest to him when he fell, and guilt besieged him. I should have stayed. He heard it resound in his skull, watching as the banner he’d left behind to help their allies was held over the fallen knight so that its shadow would caress him forever.

Helms were doffed, and words were exchanged, but Zann was lost to grief and anger, that he could have done more. He hardly noticed when his Chapter Master bade him rise, and suddenly flushed with embarrassment at the hesitation. He clumsily removed his own helmet, so that they were face-to-face.

 

“Knight-Sergeant Zann, at your service, lord.”

 

“I saw you watching the bier. We share in the sorrow,” the old warrior, his voice harrowed by age and experience was cold, firm. Zann expected nothing less.

 

“Yes, lord.”

 

“You abandoned your liege, but you upheld our honour. The Holy One,” he indicated the Chaplain, “has spoken highly of you. Yet I am, troubled.”

Zann waited, pulling himself straight, rigid.

 

“Your initiative is laudable, and your intentions true, but there is shame here.” He looked down, flicked his eyes to the Astral Claw, then at two of the Fire Hawks from Zann’s squad, jerking his head. The wounded Marine was borne away to be placed in line with others awaiting evacuation. The roar of Thunderhawk turbines rolled in the distance, inbound to pick them all up.

 

“Shame, lord?”

 

“We had our valour stolen!” Lazaerek snarled, but not directed at Zann. “If Huron’s attack failed, he would have been proven false. I would never have made that assualt. Foolish. Reckless.”

 

“I crave your forgiveness, my liege. Name penance.”

 

“No. Your fault is burden enough.”

 

Zann didn’t respond, nod, or even breathe for a double-heartbeat.

 

“We must appoint Barancourt’s successor,” Chapter Master Lazaerek added, offhand. He wandered off a few paces, his stern eyes cast over the devastation, and a reluctant if bitter smile stirring as the fighting took a sharp drop in intensity. They both understood what that meant: the impregnable bastion was breached, and Huron was inside, putting the raw power of his artificed Terminator Armour to good use. “You will be invited to the Veteran Company. Do not refuse this honour.”

 

“As you will, lord,” he replied, rote. It was all he could trust as his grief warred with triumph.

 

With that, Lazaerek was gone, the Fire Hawks resuming the kneeling posture of obeisance as he left, Barancourt’s bier escorted into the hold of the Land Raider Crusader by the Chaplain, who stared at Zann until the assault ramp closed. With a belch of smoke, the engines of the powerful tank revved and slewed it around to vanish into the distance as the Chapter’s warriors stood.

 

Zann wondered about the exchanges, letting his gaze roam over the Krieg Regiment beginning to settle and site their artillery in the shadow of the Sentinel Fort. The Widowmaker may have been taken, but now the rest of the fortress would be silenced, and the liberation of Lycanthos Secundus would be finalised.

The levity of the war being almost over, and his induction into the Veteran Company didn’t help. He sensed something dark and terrible on the horizon, as grim and fateful as a Chaplain’s gaze. His enthusiasm guttered.

 

He went to find the Astral Claw.

 

***

 

END