Battle for The Abyss (22 page)

‘Is that so?’

‘Yes, captain. It doesn’t do to have such an anachronism on the rostrum of the new Imperium. All those gentlemen in their pow-dered wigs talking about good breeding, it hardly speaks of efficiency and impartiality. Our ships are to be refitted for a new Imperial Navy. I’m a part of the last generation. I suppose I should be glad that at least Vorlov didn’t see it. You see, captain, this is really my last hurrah, the last great journey of the
Wrathful
as I know it.’

Cestus smiled mirthlessly. His eyes were cold orbs, tinged with a deep sense of burden and regret.

‘It might be for us all, admiral.’

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SKRAAL’S ASSAULT FORCE sped down the central channel of the dock, a loading bay for fuel and munitions tankers, with reckless abandon. The berserker fury was building within the World Eater captain and he knew his battle-brothers were experiencing the same rush. They were the sons of Angron and like their lord they were implanted with an echo of the neural technology that had unlocked the primarch’s violent potential. At the cusp of battle, the Astartes warriors could tap into that font of boiling rage and use it like an edged blade to cut their enemies down. After several bloody incidents, the Emperor had censured the further use of implants in the false belief that they made the World Eaters unstable killing machines.

Angron, in his wisdom, had eschewed the edict of the Emperor of Mankind and had continued in spite of it. They were killing machines, Skraal felt it in his burning blood and in the core of his marrow, but then what greater accolade was there for the eternal warriors of the Astartes?

Though the orders of the Ultramarine, Antiges, had forbidden it, Skraal encouraged his warriors to kill as they converged on the
Furious Abyss
. A spate of bloodletting would sharpen the senses for the battle to come. The only directive: leave none alive to tell or warn others of their approach. The World Eaters pursued this duty with brutal efficiency and a trail of menial corpses littered the ground between the assault-boat insertion point and their current position.

Such reckless slaying had not, however, gone unnoticed.

‘MY LORD,’ HISSED Ultis into the vox array of the observation platform.

Zadkiel’s voice responded from the
Furious
.

‘It seems we are not alone,’ Ultis concluded.

The novice in command of the Scholar Coven consulted a holo-map of the entire dockyard. His gauntleted finger was pressed against a flashing diode near one of the many refuelling conduits.

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‘Where is that?’ he demanded of the dock-master, still en-grossed in the refit and refuel of the vast starship.

‘Tanker Yard Epsilon IV, my lord,’ said the dock-master, who looked closer when he saw the flashing red diode. ‘An emergency alarm.’ The dock-master moved to another part of the console and brought up a viewscreen. Warriors in blue and white power armour were visible in the grainy resolution surging through the tanker yard. Prone forms, dressed in worker fatigues, slumped in their wake surrounded by dark pools.

‘By Terra,’ said the dock-master, turning to face Ultis, ‘they are Astartes.’

The novice faced the dock-master and shot the man through the face point-blank with his bolt pistol. After his head exploded in a shower of viscera and bone-riddled gore, his streaming carcass slid to the deck.

The rest of the dock crew on the observation platform had failed to react before the rest of the Scholar Coven had taken Ultis’s lead and shot them, too.

‘The Astartes have tracked us here and move in on the
Furious
Abyss
as we speak,’ said Ultis down the vox. ‘I have eliminated all platform personnel to prevent any interference.’

‘Very well, Brother Ultis. You have your orders,’ said Zadkiel’s voice through the array.

Ultis looked down through the building’s windows to the expanse of the docking stage. Baelanos’s assault squad was standing guard there.

‘I shall show them what fates are written for them,’ said Ultis, drawing his sword. ‘Educate them,’ replied Zadkiel.

THE BATTLESHIP DOCK looked like a tangled web of metal as Skraal and his warriors forged onward. Beyond that the massive
Furious Abyss
loomed like a slumbering predator in repose.

The stink of blood from the previous slaughter was heady through the World Eater captain’s nose grille as he raced towards the end of the channel and the open dock beyond. The cordon tightened ahead and the Legionaries were forced together as they
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rifled through it. Just as Skraal was feeling confident that they had not been discovered, a group of Word Bearers in crimson ceramite emerged before them to block their path.

Bolter fire wreathed the opening, lighting up the half-dark of the channel with four-pronged muzzle flares. Kellock, the warrior next to Skraal, took a full burst in the chest that tore open his armour and left him oozing blood. Kellock crumpled and fell, both his primary and secondary hearts punctured.

The combat squads were pinned on either side by fuel drums, stacked against bulky warehouse structures. Fleeing menials and mindless servitors, alerted by the commotion, wandered into their path and were cut down with chainblades or battered by shields as the World Eaters sought to close with the foe and wrest the advantage back. One of the drums was struck by an errant bolter round and exploded in a bright bloom of yellow-white fury. A fiery plume spilled into the air, like ink in water, and a wrecked servitor was cast like a broken doll at the edge of its blossoming blast wave. Three World Eaters were shredded by the concussive force of the explosion and smashed aside into the metallic siding of a warehouse unit. The siding didn’t yield to the sudden impact of massed flesh and ceramite, and the two warriors were crushed.

Skraal felt the heat of the explosion against his face even through his helmet as the warning sensors went crazy. He staggered, but kept his footing and yelled the order to charge.

ANTIGES WAS STALKING through the refuelling bay when he heard the explosion from across the dock and saw fire and smoke billowing into the air. They were close. The
Furious Abyss
, a dense dark wall, filled the Ultramarine’s sights.

‘Antiges, report,’ Cestus’s voice said through the helmet vox, the tactical display obviously registering the sudden influx of heat.

‘An explosion in the central channel. I fear we are discovered, brother-captain.’

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‘Get over there, unite your forces and push on through to the
Furious
.’

‘As you command, captain,’ he replied and ordered his combat squads through a maze of piping that connected to the central channel where he knew Skraal and his insertion team were placed. As they moved, Antiges at the lead, a shadow fell across the Ultramarine, cast by the vast observation platform overlooking the dock above.

Out of instinct, he looked up and saw the line of crimson armoured warriors bearing down on them with bolter and plasma gun.

Death rained down in a hail of venting promethium and spent electrum. Antiges rolled out of its way into the shadow of the docking clamp. Hargrath was distracted and a fraction slower.

He paid for his laxity when a bolt of searing plasma blasted a hole in his torso, cooking the World Eater in his armour. He fell with a resounding clang, the wound cauterised before he hit the ground. Several of his brothers heaved his body towards them, but to act as improvised cover, rather than out of any sense of reverence for their dead comrade.

Antiges replied with barking retorts of his bolt pistol, half-glimpsing the target above between bursts of chipped plascrete and metal as the docking clamp was chewed up around him.

The rest of the World Eaters followed his lead, stowing storm shields and drawing bolt pistols, their weapons adding to the return fire.

Menials, put to flight at the start of the attack, and spilling into the rapidly erupting war zone were ripped apart in the crossfire.

The roar of gunfire and the shriek of shrapnel mangled together with their screams.

Antiges pressed up against the closest docking clamp and looked around it, gauging the terrain leading the rest of the way to the
Furious Abyss
. The docks formed a landscape of narrow fire lanes between clamps and fuel tanks. Above was the observation platform, strung on metal struts, and beyond that rings of steel
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holding fuelling gantries, defence turrets and bouquets of sensor spines.

Antiges slammed himself back against the steel of the docking clamp as bolter fire continued to pin them.

‘Captain, we are ambushed!’ he yelled into the vox, in an attempt to overcome the din. Despite his volume, the Ultramarine’s tone was calm as he cycled through a number of potential battle protocols learned by rote during his training.

There was a moment’s pause as the message went through and his captain assessed the options open to him.

‘Relief is incoming,’ came the clipped reply. ‘Be ready.’

AFTER A SECOND bout of return fire, a chain of small explosions erupted across the observation platform, showering frag.

Beyond the destruction and across the dockyard, embarkation ports were opening in the side of the
Furious Abyss
.

Antiges was on his feet and bellowing orders before the resulting smoke had cleared.

‘Don’t give them time! Hit them! Hit them now!’

The Astartes broke cover and charged, leaving the dead in their wake.

Two hundred robed cohorts in the crimson of the Word Bearers emerged from the
Furious Abyss
, and charged right back.

‘Open fire!’ shouted Antiges. The Ultramarine felt the immediate pressure wave of discharged bolt pistols behind him as the World Eaters obeyed.

The effect was brutal. Lines of the crudely armoured Word Bearer lackeys fell beneath the onslaught. Bodies pitched into their comrades, jerked and spun as the munitions struck. Blood sprayed in directions too numerous to count and the corpses mounted like a bank of fleshy sandbags, tripping those following. There was only time for a single volley, and the disciplined Astartes holstered pistols before closing with the first of the
Furious
’s cannon fodder.

A brutish cohort, scarred and tarnished like an engine ganger, came at Antiges with an axe blade. The Ultramarine met the
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ganger’s roar with the screech of his chainsword, plunging it into the man’s chest. The cohort fell, wrenching the weapon from Antiges’s hand. The Astartes didn’t pause and threw the wretch aside with such force that the corpse spun in the air before crashing into its debased brethren. The Ultramarine drew his short-blade, duelling shield already in hand and cut down a second assailant with a low, arcing sweep.

Rorgath, a World Eater sergeant, came alongside Antiges and forged into the melee with brutal abandon. Limbs fell like rain as he churned through his enemies, his face a grisly mask of wrath without his helmet.

Out of the corner of his eye, Antiges saw another of Rorgath’s kin decapitate a cohort officer trying to ram home the charge and extol his warriors to greater fervour. Others disappeared in clouds of red mist and the dreadful din of chainaxes rending bone. Yet, despite the relentless carnage wreaked upon them, the lowly cohorts refused to break, and the killing ground became mired in blood.

‘They’re fanatics,’ grumbled Rorgath, burying his blade in the face on an oncoming cohort.

‘Drive them back,’ snarled Antiges through gritted teeth, smashing an enemy with the blunt force of his duelling shield.

About to redouble his efforts, the Ultramarine fell back, as two or three bodies flew at him. In the madness, he dropped his short-blade, but as he foraged for it in the sea of pressing bodies, he found the hilt of his chainsword. Tearing the weapon loose, Antiges cut a path through bone and flesh to free himself. Hands were grabbing at him to drag the Astartes down, and even as he tried to emerge, bullets rang off his armour. One of the World Eaters yelled in anger and pain. The
Furious Abyss
disappeared from view as more enemy crewmen threw themselves forward.

This was not how men fought. Very few xenos were content to simply die, even when there was something to be gained by it.

That was why the Astartes were such lethal warriors; they were the ultimate weapon against any enemy tainted by natural cowardice, since a Space Marine could control and banish his own
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fear. The Word Bearers had created another kind of enemy, one that even Space Marines could not break.

‘Damn you,’ hissed Antiges as he threw another man off him, and was sprayed by a shower of blood as Rorgath disembo-welled yet another. ‘Now we have to kill them all.’

Driving on, pain burst against Antiges’s side as a blade or a bullet found its way through his armour. He staggered and it gave the enemy the opening they needed. A sudden flurry of cohorts sprang on the stricken Astartes. Then the weight of the attacks was dragging him down, their death-cries and the smell of their sundered bodies fuddling his senses.

BRYNNGAR HEFTED HIS last belt of frag grenades at the observation platform. A cluster of explosions rippled over the pitted surface, hewing off chunks of ferrocrete and scorching metal. The assault had achieved its desired effect, forcing the ambushers above Antiges’s position back for a few moments, who were unseen from the channel the Space Wolf and his Blood Claws charged down, and switching their attention.

Fire erupted again from the platform before the last of the grenades had even detonated, but this time their focus was upon the Wolf Guard and his squad. Brynngar’s highly attuned animal senses picked up on the stink of cordite and blood, and the sporadic clatter of weapon’s fire, and he assumed that his brother Ultramarine was otherwise occupied, hence their popularity.