Battle for The Abyss (24 page)

Skraal took part of the fusillade on his storm shield, casings striking the grating at his feet like brass rain: bolter fire.

Shadows danced against the muzzle flashes. Huge armoured bodies, helmets and shoulder pads: Astartes. Word Bearers.

One of Skraal’s warriors, Orlak, cut through a hatch in the ceiling with his chainaxe. The slab of metal clanged down and he hauled himself up swiftly. Rorgath stood point as the Legionaries made their way further inwards. Having lost both his weapons in the brutal melee outside the ship, he slammed the bolter he had scavenged into rapid fire and hosed the conduit, punching
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ragged holes into the metal. The other World Eaters lent the fire of their bolt pistols, keeping their enemies at bay.

Half the World Eaters were through the hatch before the Word Bearers returned fire. Only Skraal and Antiges remained, the Ultramarine taking over from Rorgath as he undipped a brace of frag grenades from his belt and rolled them down the conduit.

Skraal leapt up the hatch as return bolter fire blazed past him.

Antiges followed, the World Eater captain hauling the Ultramarine up as the first of the explosions ripped down the conduit, shredding plating and buying time.

‘MOUNTAINS OF MACRAGGE,’ breathed Antiges.

The engine room of the
Furious Abyss
was like a cathedral to machinery. It was vast. The criss-crossing ribs of a vaulted ceiling reached through the gloom. The immense hulks of the cylindrical exhaust chambers were decorated with steel ribbing and iron scrollwork, and inscribed with High Gothic text running along their whole length. Multiple levels were delineated by gantries and lattice-like overhead walkways. Word Bearers’ banners hung from the web of iron above them, bearing the symbols of the Legion’s Chapters: a quill with a drop of blood at its nib, an open hand with an eye in the palm, a burning book, and a sceptre crowned with a skull. The metallic throb of the engines was like the ship’s own monstrous heartbeat.

The conduit in the labyrinthine ship had led the Astartes to this place and though the sounds of pursuit were distant and hollow, the enemy would not be far behind.

‘Find something to destroy,’ said Skraal. ‘Get to the reactors if you can.’

Antiges tried to take in the vastness of the engine room. Even with the munitions they had at their disposal and the fact that they were Astartes, they would still have a hard time doing anything that could cripple the
Furious Abyss
.

‘No,’ said Antiges, ‘we drive onwards. Look for ordnance or cogitators. We can’t sabotage this vessel attacking blindly.’

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Skraal looked back at his squad. The last of them was being dragged up through the hatch. The coolant pipe they had entered through was one of many forming a tangle of pipes and junctions around the exhaust chambers. Between the pipes was darkness and there was no telling how far down it went.

‘We might not find our—’

‘We’re not getting back out,’ snapped Antiges.

Skraal nodded. ‘Forwards, then.’

Antiges led the Astartes up onto the nearest walkway, above the exhaust chambers. The immense shapes of generatoria loomed towards the ship’s stern, connected to the even larger plasma reactors somewhere below. Ahead of them, the walkway wound into a dark steel valley between enormous pounding pistons. Shapes were gathering on a walkway above them, hidden by the solid metal of a control deck. It seemed that the engineering menials had been ordered out of the chamber, which meant that the Word Bearers planned to stop them here.

‘Cover!’ shouted Skraal, but there was little to be had when the bolter fire from the Word Bearers hammered down at them. Rorgath returned fire with his scavenged bolter, but there was little the others could do with pistols and close combat weapons. One of Skraal’s battle-brothers was hit square in the chest and knocked over a guardrail. He fell onto the engine block below and was pounded flat by a piston hammering down on him. Orlak’s arm disappeared in a spray of blood and he fell to the walkway. Anriges hoisted him bodily to his feet and dragged him along as more gunfire streaked from above.

‘Break for it!’ Skraal bellowed, seeing a lull in the fusillade hammering them. Then he was on his feet and running for the cover at the far end of the engine block, where the walkway led up into a great wall of galleries and machinery. Even hurried by Antiges, Orlak lingered behind and was speared through the back by storm bolter rounds. Smoke poured from the backpack of his armour, mixed with a spray of blood.

Orlak: Skraal had led him through a dozen battlefields. He was a brother, as they all were.

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The World Eater captain took that grief and locked it away beneath his consciousness, where it mixed with the pool of rage that he would call on again when the time was right.

Skraal reached cover. The
Furious Abyss
closed around him. He was in an equipment room, the walls covered in racks of hydraulic drills, wrenches and hammers. Human deck-crews fled in wild panic as the World Eaters burst in, followed by Antiges.

There were just three left. It was hardly the raiding force they needed to bring the vast ship to heel.

Skraal noticed something inscribed on the ceiling of the chamber.

BUILD THE WORD OF LORGAR FROM THIS STEEL LIVE AS

IT IS WRITTEN

‘Move! Move! They’re heading down after us!’ bellowed Antiges, demanding his attention.

‘We need to hold them up. No way we can dodge bolter fire and wreck the ship at the same time,’ said Skraal, slamming the portal shut behind them and using a stolen wrench to wedge it.

‘Three squads at least,’ Antiges replied, his breathing heavy, but measured. ‘No way we can beat them.’

‘I’ll slow them,’ said Rorgath, planting his feet and checking the clip in his bolter.

Antiges regarded the World Eater. The white and blue of his armour was already scored by bullet wounds and scorched by plasma burns.

‘Your sacrifice will be remembered,’ said Antiges, reverently.

No such sentiment was evident from the World Eater’s captain, who tossed Rorgath his bolt pistol.

‘Give them no quarter,’ he snarled, turning abruptly to lead what was left of the raiding party through the tangle of ante-rooms and corridors. The shouts of pursuers relaying their position followed them like hollow, ghost whispers, and the thud of armoured feet on the floor was dull and resonant in their wake.

Together, Antiges and Skraal moved swiftly across the hinter-lands of the engine room and through a doorway in the bulk-171

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head. Not long before they had left the chamber, the fierce bark of bolter fire erupted behind them.

It didn’t last long and deathly silence reigned for a moment before their relentless pursuers could be heard once more. Mangled with a cacophony of voices emitted from the ship’s vox array, it became obvious that a widespread search had begun. The
Furious
’s warriors were converging on the Astartes. They were getting closer every second.

Passing through an empty storage chamber, Skraal kicked open a door to reveal another corridor. The atmosphere was close and hot, the walls lined with burning torches. The sight was incongruous amongst the decks and trappings of a spaceship, but it also led downwards and prow-wards, in the direction where the Astartes guessed the primary ordnance deck would be.

‘What did they build in here?’ hissed Antiges, giving voice to his thoughts as they moved down the corridor. The Ultramarine got his answer as he emerged from the far end of the tunnel.

A vast plaza stretched out in front of them. Walls lined with baroque statues of deep red steel rose up into a domed ceiling. The vault at the apex of the massive chamber was hazy with incense and supported by dramatic false columns. Prayers were inscribed on the flagstone floor. An altar and pulpit stood at the far end of a central aisle. There was only one word to describe it: a cathedral. In the supposed age of enlightenment, when all superstition and religion was to be expunged from the galaxy to be replaced by science and understanding, all that the Emperor had decreed was dishonoured by the chamber’s very existence.

Antiges found that it left a bitter taste in his mouth and was ready to tear down the effigies and rend this temple of false ido-latry to the ground with his bare hands, when a voice echoed out of the surrounding gloom.

‘There is no escape.’

The Ultramarine saw Skraal throw himself against a pillar. Antiges swiftly adopted a crouching position, bolt pistol outstretched in a two-handed grip, scanning the darkness. He could just make out the crimson armour at the far end of the cathedral.

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The speaker, his tone eerily calm and cultured, was sheltering behind the altar. The Word Bearer was not alone.

Booted feet clacking against the stone floor behind the Astartes confirmed the threat. Antiges and the World Eater were covered from both sides of the chamber.

‘I am Sergeant-Commander Reskiel of the Word Bearers,’ said the speaker, identifying himself. ‘Throw down your arms and surrender at once,’ he warned, all the culture evaporating.

‘After you fired on us and slew our brothers!’ Skraal raged.

‘This need not end in further bloodshed,’ Reskiel added.

Antiges felt the enemy converging on them, heard the faint scrape of ceramite against stone as they closed.

‘What is this place, Word Bearer?’ asked the Ultramarine, pan-ning his sights first across the pulpit and then further out until he had swept the gloom around them. ‘Such religiosity is not con-doned by the Emperor. You openly defy his will. Have you re-verted to primitive debasement and superstition?’ he asked, trying to goad them, trying to find time to devise a plan, expose a weakness. ‘Is all Colchis like this now?’

‘There is nothing primitive about the vision of our primarch or his home world,’ said Reskiel levelly, clearly wise to the Ultramarine’s stratagem. Stepping out from behind the altar, the sergeant-commander allowed the diffuse torchlight to bath him in its glow.

He was young, but highly decorated judging by the honour studs and medals on his crimson armour. The trappings of heroism and glory warred with strips of parchment and leaves of tattered vellum scripted in wretched verse.

A squad of Word Bearers emerged into the cathedral behind him, their bolters trained on the shadows where Antiges and Skraal were in cover.

‘Show yourselves, and let us speak brother to brother,’ said Reskiel, allowing his guardians to move in front of him.

‘You are no brother of mine!’ shouted Skraal.

‘Get ready,’ Antiges hissed to his ally as Reskiel raised a hand.

The Ultramarine knew, with an ingrained warrior instinct, that
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he was about to give the order to open fire. He trained his bolt pistol on a cluster of Word Bearers at the front of the advancing guards.

Skraal roared, surging out of cover and throwing his chainaxe.

He thumbed the activation stud as it left his hand and the weapon shrieked through the air. With a scream of ceramite on metal, the axe bypassed the guards and sliced clean through Reskiel’s wrist, embedding itself in the altar. Shield upraised, a war cry on his lips, the World Eater charged.

Antiges cursed the son of Angron’s impetuous battle lust and triggered the bolt pistol, running forward as the muzzle flare gave away his position. Bolt rounds hammered into the approaching Word Bearers and three of the warriors collapsed in a heap against the fury.

Bedlam filled the cathedral. Skraal covered the distance between him and his enemy so fast that none of the opening bolter shots hit him.

Antiges followed, acutely aware that he had foes behind as well as in front. An errant shot clipped his pauldron, another chipped his knee guard and he staggered briefly but kept on into the maelstrom, the name of Guilliman in his furious heart.

‘This is sacred ground!’ wailed Reskiel, clutching the stump of his arm as blood spurted freely from it. Skraal battered the Word Bearers in his path aside and when he reached the sergeant-commander, backhanded him across the face with his shield by way of a reply, and wrenched his chainaxe from the altar. He spun and slammed the head of the axe into the head of a red-armoured warrior charging behind him. The Word Bearer was thrown off his feet and skidded along the floor on his back, his face a red ruin of bone and shattered ceramite.

The ambushers from behind the two Astartes fell into the fray.

Skraal fought as if possessed by the spirit of Angron, slaying left and right as a terrible bloody rage overtook him. He embraced the cauldron of fury within and used it to kill, to ignore pain. Word Bearers fell horribly before his onslaught, so fierce that those surrounding the assault gave ground and retreated to
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the cathedral door. The one who called himself Reskiel was dragged out by one of his battle-brothers, the blood clotting on the stump of his wrist as he screamed his choler.

Bolter fire was hammering away towards the rear of the cathedral. Antiges could hear it echoing loudly inside his helmet as Skraal turned from the carnage he was wreaking to look at him.

A line of pain sketched its way down the Ultramarine’s back and he realised he’d been hit. This time the shot pierced his armour. Something warm welled in his chest and Antiges looked down to see a wet ragged hole. As his mind suddenly made the connection to what his body already knew, he slumped against a pillar, spitting blood. Lungs heaving, he tried to force his augmented body back into action and cranked another magazine in-to his bolt pistol. One hand clamped over the wound, the other triggering the bolter, Antiges resolved to go down fighting. In the distance, vision fogging, a shadow fell.

White spikes of pain were flashing before his eyes as he turned to look back at Skraal amidst the bloodbath at the altar.