[Ultramarines 6] Chapters Due - Graham McNeill Page 8

  “And that would be a terrible shame, eh?” laughed Grendel.

  “It won’t be pleasant,” said Honsou with a smile, “but at least it’ll show M’kar how much it needs us if it wants to bring Ultramar to its knees.”

  “You think that’s what it wants?” said Grendel.

  “Of course, don’t you?”

  Grendel shook his head. “No, it just wants to kill Ultramarines. It doesn’t care about revenge. It even told you vengeance was irrelevant.”

  Honsou took a long look at Grendel’s disfigured features, unable to tell whether or not he was being serious.

  “How do you know? Since when did you become confidante to a daemon?”

  “It’s as plain as day,” said Grendel, as though amazed Honsou hadn’t seen it. “It doesn’t matter how this ends. It’s a creature of the warp. It will endure, but the Ultramarines will be a spent force when the dust finally settles. It’ll see us all dead by the end of this, if we let it.”

  “Once Ventris has been made to suffer and all he holds dear is in ashes, I am done with Ultramar,” said Honsou as the Warbreed’s vast manoeuvring jets fired and forced its enormous bulk around. “M’kar can get itself destroyed killing Ultramarines, but I won’t go down with it.”

  Grendel tapped the plotter screen and said, “You won’t need to worry about that if the Ultramarines break through.”

  Honsou had no intention of allowing the Indomitable to suffer any real damage, but it would do no harm to remind M’kar that it relied on its mortal allies. Yes, the star fort was a potent weapon, almost impregnable and capable of unleashing a fearsome amount of destruction, but without the attendant fleet, it was a static weapon. And if his time as master of Khalan-Ghol had taught him anything, it was that static targets would eventually find themselves brought to ruin.

  ++Notification: incoming vessels,++ said the grating, wet noise of Adept Cycerin’s voice. It was without definite source, simultaneously appearing from every vent and vox-grille and bubbling up from the depths of his grotesque, scum-frothed pool.

  “Identify!” barked Honsou.

  ++Engine signatures, displacement and inter-ship vox protocols identify incoming vessels as follows: vessel on bearing zero-one-nine is Gladius-class frigate, Sword of Ultramar. Vessel on bearing zero-three-seven is Gladius-class frigate, Grand Duke of Tallasar. Vessel bearing zero-two-six is Nova-class frigate, Guilliman’s Spear. Vessel bearing zero-four-one is Hunter-class destroyer, Hera’s Wrath.++

  “That’s a lot of firepower,” noted Grendel.

  “Not as much as Warbreed,” promised Honsou.

  ++Warning: external augurs detecting torpedo launch.++

  “Now it begins,” said Honsou with relish. “Ready close-in defence guns.”

  ++Status: all guns armed and acquiring target information.++

  “Increase speed to full,” ordered Honsou, the words barely out of his mouth when he felt the vibration in the deck plate change in response. As repugnant as Cycerin’s transformation had made him, Honsou couldn’t argue with the results.

  “Launch counter-spread. Target Hera’s Wrath, she’s the only one with torpedoes.”

  Though he couldn’t feel it, Honsou knew the torpedoes were already blasting from their prow launch bays. Sure enough the plotter came alive with a squall of light, though it was impossible to pick out how many weapons had been launched.

  ++Picket screen of rapid strike vessels manoeuvring to intercept torpedoes.++

  “Let them,” said Honsou. “Enough will get through.”

  The Ultramarines rapid strike vessels flew into the path of the incoming torpedoes and unleashed a withering storm of gunfire into the path of the warheads. The odds of actually hitting an object as slender and fast as a torpedo were infinitesimally small, but the captains of the rapid strike vessels knew that, and filled space before them with expanding storms of whickering explosive shrapnel and scrambling flurries of electromagnetic radiation.

  Thirteen torpedoes detonated prematurely as their machine spirits registered false signals and the expanding clouds of spinning debris shredded another dozen. The rapid strike captains dived into the midst of the surviving torpedoes to rake their appointed sector with battery fire. Such a reckless manoeuvre caught yet more of the torpedoes, but not all of them.

  Of the fifty torpedoes launched, barely a handful breached the picket screen, and the close-in defences of Hera’s Wrath blew all but one to pieces. Efficient damage control kept the ship in the fight, with only a barely noticeable loss in performance.

  Together with the other vessels in the Ultramarines fleet, Hera’s Wrath punched through the Iron Warriors’ first line of defence, with Kaarja Salombar’s corsair fleet regrouping in its wake and setting off in pursuit.

  While the bulk of Honsou’s fleet completed the destruction of Talassar’s orbital defences, the gap between the Ultramarines fleet and the Indomitable closed with every passing moment.

  Only one vessel lay between the Imperial ships and the Indomitable.

  The Warbreed.

  Far below Honsou, in the shadowed halls of Warbreed’s lower decks, Ardaric Vaanes moved through the darkness with a predator’s silence. He was an oil-black shape in the deeper darkness, his movements swift and measured. Honsou’s flagship was not a populous ship; barely a hundred Iron Warriors filled its bare metal corridors, its crew a mélange of slaves, servitors and disfigured creatures of indeterminate origin.

  It was easy to move unseen through the ship, yet Vaanes moved as though an army of hunters pursued him. He passed through the cavernous armaments decks where thousands of slaves hauled on chained block and tackle to load the vast torpedoes onto their launch rails. He ghosted through the crackling capacitor bays that powered the sustaining mechanisms of the ship, avoiding detection by the corrupted magos hardwired into its beating heart. His course took him through the crew decks, past sparring warriors and cruel practices designed to attract the favour of the fickle gods of the warp.

  Vaanes felt a subtle pull as he watched these votive rituals, a beguiling and insistent tugging at his soul that he had once welcomed, but now dreaded. Fickle they might be, but the gods that haunted the swells and currents of the warp had long memories and did not lightly take rejection. He turned away and slid into the darkness once again, letting the pungent aroma of oil, hot metal and dust take his mind from vivid splashes of blood, scented incense and the taste of warm flesh on the tongue.

  Such thoughts came to him in the night, reminding him of sensations that could be wrung from each moment: a million ecstasies that could be his were he to once again acknowledge the possessor of his soul.

  Vaanes shook off those thoughts and focussed his will on remaining unseen as he moved from one end of the ship to the other. He heard the groans and creaks of its superstructure as it turned and its master drove it to war. Honsou was a decent enough ship’s captain, but he was no expert in void war. Vaanes doubted the Ultramarines presence around Talassar was enough to seriously threaten the Warbreed, but part of him hoped for that microsecond of fire and light of a torpedo or lance strike nearby that would suck him into space and end his miserable servitude to Honsou.

  That wasn’t going to happen. His experiences with Honsou had shown him the underlying cosmic order to the galaxy. There were no coincidences in events of great moment, and this was one of those moments. Though he was not an arrogant man, Vaanes knew he was too important in these unfolding events to have his life ended by something so arbitrary.

  He eased from the darkness, allowing his oneness with the shadows to bleed away until he stood revealed in the bare-lumen glow of the iron-plated decking. Two serfs robed in bleached grey robes started in shock as he emerged, a towering warrior in black battle plate with the hint of razored claws extending from his gauntlets.

  “My lord,” said one, bowing before him.

  “Don’t call me that,” snapped Vaanes, striding past them and moving into the arched vault of the training decks. He had tr
ained the Newborn here, letting it kill Jeffar San and Svoljard to prove a point. Vaanes moved to the edge of the half-lit chamber beside the weapon racks and swiftly removed his armour.

  Once he had worn this armour with pride. He had a host of personal armourers and squires to attend upon him then, ensuring that every plate was removed and oiled and treated with reverence. Every identifying mark had since been scoured and filed from his armour, leaving nothing to give any clue to its origin, yet no matter how hard he tried to erase his past he could not erase his memory.

  Beneath the heavy plates, Vaanes wore a faded bodyglove, its fabric stretched and torn in places. With his armour discarded around him, he stripped this from his body as well, leaving him naked in the centre of the training hall. Vaanes resisted glancing down at his shoulder, where Shrike himself had inked a tattoo to mirror the insignia his armour’s shoulder guard once bore. He’d gouged the winged image from his deltoid a long time ago and the pale patch of scar tissue was all that remained of that once proud mark.

  His disrobing complete, he moved through the training hall at speed, performing unarmed combat drills, leaping into the air and twisting with savage chops of his hand and feet. His every extremity was a killing weapon, his every slashing blow a lethal strike. Though a battle was being fought around him in space, he cared only for the fluid perfection of his attacks.

  At last he slammed down on one knee, fist punching the deck where a crippled opponent would be choking on their lifeblood had this been a real fight. He let out a shuddering breath, his entire body taut and his breathing laboured.

  He felt the Newborn’s presence like an infectious itch, and looked up to see it watching him from the chamber’s entrance.

  “How long have you been there?” asked Vaanes, rising to his feet and letting the tension drain from his body.

  “Long enough to see that you are troubled,” said the Newborn with disarming clarity.

  “I am not troubled,” lied Vaanes.

  The creature cocked its head to the side, no doubt trying to figure out why he was lying. It was an incredibly powerful creature, hot-housed in the daemonic wombs of Medrengard and imbued with unnatural potency by its warp-spawned birth. Despite the stolen genetic legacy of Uriel Ventris encoded in its genetic structure, the Newborn had been, in many ways, a blank canvas. Its impressionable mind had been moulded by its creators into something monstrous, a spoonfed soldier of disorder. Vaanes had seen its cruelties and savagery, and knew they had their origins in Honsou’s brainwashing.

  “What might you be if left to your own devices?” he wondered aloud.

  “I don’t understand.”

  “No, you probably don’t,” said Vaanes.

  “Then tell me,” snapped the Newborn. “You are supposed to train me, remember?”

  Vaanes shook his head, irritated at the Newborn’s lack of guile. Everything it was had come from Honsou. Even its anger was fraudulent and unconvincing.

  Vaanes moved with his customary grace towards his armour, hearing the ship groan as it executed another sharp manoeuvre.

  “There’s nothing left for me to show you,” he said, pulling the bodyglove over his legs and setting the rubberised loops over the input ports implanted in his thighs. “You’re already a more deadly fighter than I ever could have trained you to be.”

  The Newborn joined him at the weapon racks and gestured towards the centre of the training area.

  “The fighting style you employed. Can you teach me how to kill like that?” it asked. “I have never seen you fight in that manner.”

  “Even you cannot master that,” said Vaanes, with more than a hint of pride.

  “Why not?”

  “It is a secret fighting style known only to a few select warriors trained by the masters of the Raven Guard. Few can master its subtlety, and you, my friend, are not subtle.”

  “I can learn,” said the Newborn.

  “Not this, you can’t,” promised Vaanes.

  “I could try.”

  “No damn it!” snapped Vaanes. “I said no!”

  “You are unsettled,” said the Newborn. “Is it this war with the Ultramarines? Do you regret that you will have to fight warriors you might once have fought alongside?”

  “You’re full of questions today,” said Vaanes. “Why so curious?”

  The Newborn shrugged, though the gesture was unconvincing. “I… feel as though I have been here before. I know I have not, yet I have a fondness for many of the worlds we are destroying.”

  “That’s Ventris,” said Vaanes. “It’s his memories you’re experiencing.”

  “I am aware of that, but still…”

  “You don’t want this?”

  “I am not sure,” said the Newborn, rubbing the heel of one palm against its temple. “All I know is hatred for the Imperium and Ventris. Everything I have been taught tells me he is the enemy, yet everything I feel tells me of his nobility and the grand ideals that drive him. I will kill him eventually, but I wonder what I might make of him were I not part of this army.”

  “You can’t fight what you are,” said Vaanes. “You’ve been bred for this fight ever since you were… hatched, born, or however you came into this world. You are what you are because they made you that way, but who knows what you could have been.”

  “But does that mean this is all I am capable of being?”

  “Who knows?” said Vaanes. “Honsou and Grendel are relishing this chance to fight the Ultramarines, but this war holds no glory for me. The idea that I might face Uriel Ventris fills me with nothing but dread.”

  “You fear he will slay you?”

  Vaanes laughed. “No, I can kill Ventris easily enough.”

  “Then what?”

  “He reminds me of what I used to be,” said Vaanes. “He reminds me of what I could have been, but turned my back on.”

  “Then maybe it isn’t the thought of facing Ventris that makes you so uneasy, perhaps it is the thought that your former Chapter has sent the hunters after you.”

  “Perhaps,” said Vaanes, turning away. “Or maybe I’m afraid of what I might become if they don’t catch me.”

  “Maybe it is not too late,” said the Newborn. “For both of us.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  The Newborn reached out and tapped his shoulder, and Vaanes looked down.

  Beneath the pale knot of scar tissue on the rounded curve of his deltoid a tattooed black raven could clearly be seen.

  Once it had been a grand muster hall for the garrison of the Indomitable, but the pale stone walls and grand marble columns of the Hall of Ancients now sheltered warriors of a very different stripe. Blue and gold banners had once hung from adamantine flagpoles, but they had been torn down and those that hadn’t been burned were now bedrolls for kroot mercenaries. Bronze statuary of Ultramarines banner bearers lay shattered on the inlaid terrazzo floor and the air reeked of alien excrement where fonts of water filled from the rivers of Macragge had been defiled.

  Honsou smiled to see the icons of his enemy cast down, relishing this chance to bring the hated Ultramarines low. Grendel, Vaanes and the Newborn followed him into the vast chamber. He held his head high, as befitted the master of this fleet, walking with earned arrogance through the ranks of warriors towards the grand plinth at the far end of the chamber.

  As he had promised, the incoming Ultramarines vessels had nowhere near enough firepower to match Warbreed, and she had crippled the smaller vessels in the opening moments of the firefight. Even now, all three were being repaired and reconfigured in the dock facilities of the Indomitable, and it gave Honsou no small amount of satisfaction to be turning these vessels against their masters.

  “What’s so important our new… ally needs to call us all together?” asked Vaanes, and Honsou caught the careful choice in his words.

  “The next stage of our attack on Ultramar,” he said. “The Ultramarines know what we can do now, and it’s time to keep them on the back foot.”
br />   “What does that mean?” said Grendel.

  “They’re used to us going after one world at a time, so we have to step up a gear.”

  Honsou strode off before anyone could ask him anymore. M’kar had summoned every warlord to the Indomitable in the wake of ravaging the surface of Talassar. Honsou hadn’t bothered to watch the destruction this time, already bored with the tens of thousands of daemons rampaging through the cities of the great continent that was the sole landmass standing proud of the planet-wide ocean.

  Talassar’s cities were now tombs, graveyards of torn flesh and blood, though not a single structure had been toppled or reduced to flattened rubble by siege artillery—a notion that troubled Honsou’s Iron Warrior soul. There was joy to be had in watching the precisely applied mathematical force of bombardments, approach trenches, saps and countermines. A siege was as much science and art as it was blunt force, and after the thrill of taking the iron to the stone in the battle for the Indomitable, Honsou felt as though he were leaving a crucial aspect of this war undone.

  He marched past Ekoh’s host of stinking kroot, their skin oily and reeking of biochemical sweat. Their crests were a mix of vivid greens and yellow, their beaks mottled black and purple. Across from them were the reptilian forms of Xaneant’s loxatl warband, and Honsou saw that even among this assembly of pirates, rogues and renegades there was a hierarchy. The xenos species were forced to the back of the chamber, while the grander warlords took centre stage before their daemonic patron.

  Kaarja Salombar sketched him a roguish salute, her wild blue hair swirling around her thin features. Honsou supposed that she was beautiful, with pale skin and warm, almond-shaped eyes of striking violet. There were some who said there was eldar blood in her veins, and Honsou would be hard pressed to disagree. Her tall, slender frame and inhuman grace certainly suggested an affinity with that ancient race. Clad in brightly coloured fabrics that rippled in an unseen breeze and armoured with strips of lacquered leather, she cut a fearsome figure, and her lips eased apart in a smile that was at once repellent and alluring.