The Last Son of Dorn Read online

  The voidstorm cannon was a relic of the Fists Exemplar’s past, a legacy of Alcazar Astra’s ownership of the Rubicante Flux stars. It was a ship-killer, its wide bore one of the few access points large enough for a jump pack-equipped Space Marine. It was a squeeze even so and Tyris felt no shame in leaving the nimbler mortal to scout ahead.

  With excruciating stealth, he moved.

  He could feel the Sister’s eyes on him, assessing his abilities against hers, as he unwound a strip of guncloth from a kit pouch, wrapped it round the barrel of his stalker bolter and rested the weapon on the gangway’s iron handrail. He almost let out a relieved breath at the woman’s faint nod of approval.

  The Raven would have been proud.

  In the vast hangar below, greenskin mechanics and slave-workers crawled over bomber jets with massively oversized engines and bulbous weapons pods. There was room enough there to muster a Chapter of old, cradle-space for two-score of gunships. That space was mostly filled with tin-walled tool sheds, tent hovels in which squabbling gretchin seemed to live cheek by jowl. Rubbish was piled high. Food rotted where it lay. Promethium fuel dribbled from half-empty drums.

  A big ork moved amongst the aircraft, inspecting a fuselage here, booting a laggardly gretchin there. It was garbed in a cloak of tinkling chimes and wore torcs of polished bone clapped over its muscular forearms. A spectactularly horned skull enclosed its head. It danced a little as it walked, sprinkling Eidolican promethium sand over the parked engines from a rod-like aspergillum as if in blessing. The psyker. A mob of ten burly orks strapped up with shotguns and bludgeons and slabs of armour followed close behind. Every so often, one wandered off to administer a private kicking wherever their brutal code deemed it justified.

  Tyris slotted a rare-pattern tranquilliser round into his bolter, muffling the click of acceptance in his hand.

  ‘Stalker, positions?’

  The vox whispered back.

  ‘Vega, to your right.’

  ‘Iaros, second tier.’

  ‘Nubis and Antares,’ came the voice of the Fist Exemplar, ‘on secondary target.’

  Tyris took aim down his weapon scope, the back of the ork psyker’s ugly head blowing up to fill his crosshairs. His finger rested on the trigger. He emptied his lungs. ‘Quick and quiet. On my mark.’

  He fired.

  Plaeos – Hive Mundus

  Check 2, 00:59:13

  Seawater geysered from the breach in the flooring. The abhorrent gale that emanated from the maleficar’s throbbing head sprayed it far and wild, but to Kjarvik’s heightened perceptions the individual droplets fell slowly, like snow out of season. The Emperor’s gift to His Wolves was a hunter’s senses. He felt the sting of water on his face. He heard the floodwaters frothing up through the baffles in the floor plates. His boots were already under. He could taste salt in his mouth, on his skin even, the threat heightening his senses to that extraordinary degree. The cracks and flashes of ork weapons lit the rainstorm like subsurface explosions and carved it up with bullet trails.

  Baldarich was on the other side of the geyser, black armour drenched. He spread his arms to the enemy fire as though preparing himself for the penitent’s cross. Except that his gauntlets were not empty. One held his greatsword, dropping, the other a bolt pistol, freed from maglock and sweeping up.

  Kjarvik was more than human in many ways, and less, arguably, in others, but there were some things that even he could not do.

  He could not move faster than a bolt-round.

  ‘Kneel, witch.’

  Time accelerated, and the Black Templar’s pistol kicked out rounds as though it knew it was catching up. The propellant burn was intense, each rapid-fired successor brightening the last. The roar was tremendous.

  The ork merely cackled like a drunk entertained by a fool. Its eyes were tranced, black with maleficarum, dark veins sprouting from its head and pulsing. In no world could it have seen what was coming and yet it saw. It saw, and Kjarvik shuddered.

  He did not himself see exactly what happened, only that the maleficar appeared to pump its twanging stave once around its head, and the psychic winds were whipped into a shrieking whirlwind. The floodwaters were lifted up from the ground, drawn out of the spray, shaped by the witchstorm into a funnel that enveloped the witch and his monster like a liquid caul. Where bolt-rounds penetrated they were sprayed back, spanking off walls and walker armour and striking orks down with the random hand of a god.

  ‘Withdraw to my position!’ Kjarvik shouted. A weird alien thought-scream filled the vox. Their harsh insertion into the underhive had spread them too thinly. ‘Draw out the maleficar and capture. The Sisters are one level below with Phareous and Bohr.’

  Baldarich paused to reload.

  The growing whirlpool shook to the howl of the warp, and broke before a massive fist. It burst through the watery barrier, green, a shade that was darker still seeping between clenched fingers, knuckles dusted with boiled-off salt and trailing greenish ectoplasm and steam. It shot towards the Black Templar.

  ‘I walk with the spirit of Saint Magneric!’

  The ceramite-splitting impact pushed Baldarich through the geyser, diagonally across Kjarvik’s cover with the psychic manifestation crackling against his plastron, and shunted him through the stack of promethium drums that had been built up across the way. The stack came down on top of him, empty drums clangouring out over the walkspace floor.

  Kjarvik looked for Zarrael.

  The Flesh Tearer pushed into the wind, head down, the scowl on his face rippling in spite of the arm he held protectively out in front. Powered plates rattled and whined. The kill honours affixed to his left pauldron peeled off and tore away. He ground out another step, struggled to raise his eviscerator, dropped to one knee. Waterborne debris roiled outwards from the epicentre and swallowed him. He should have been flung back like scrap metal, and it was testament to the strength of his red fervour that he was not. An ork boss in cumbersome war-plate done out in jagged black and white stripes clumped through, unaffected, leaving the mighty Zarrael kneeling like a frostbitten hopeful before the statue of Russ.

  ‘To my position.’ Kjarvik dialled up the power of his battleplate vox for an orbital transmission. ‘Aelia,’ he said, addressing the shipmaster of the Dark Angels strike cruiser Herald of Night that was currently in low orbit above Hive Mundus. ‘Send in backup.’ He turned to Zarrael and growled, swinging up his bolt-pistol. ‘Wait for the Sisters.’

  He sprayed the witchstorm with fire, ensuring that none struck the weirdboy or his beast. He was unlucky, but he was not careless. Two bolts to the armoured boss’ left shoulder caused enough damage to disable the arm’s crude motors. It did not seem to feel it, and gave a gurgling roar as it formed a fist of its power claw.

  ‘Waaagh!’

  Eidolica – Alcazar Astra

  Check 7, 01:02:22

  The shot was perfection. A single tranquilliser round to the back of the head, and the ork psyker went down as though its muscles had been turned to jelly. The stalker bolter silenced the report and muffled the flash, and the psyker’s bodyguard were pointing their shotguns at shadows as Tyris ejected the one-shot magazine and slotted in a fresh sickle-mag of more conventional rounds.

  Vega and Iaros opened fire from their own positions in hiding. It took Tyris the second or third round to see where they were, hidden behind a ventilation grating and amongst an extractor assembly on the second tier respectively. Tyris had trained them well. They would return to their Chapters better warriors when their work together was done.

  By the time Tyris was ready to fire again there were only two orks left, running in opposite directions, which he coolly gunned down with barely a fraction of a second between aim and shot. The Sister beside him signed her approval with a hand gesture, powered her long blade, and rocketed from the gangway on her jump pack. She landed like a cat by the downed psyke
r, power blade purring as it made bloody mockeries of the gretchin that came running to the psyker’s aid. Two more rocket burns from opposite wings of the hangar, and Vega and Iaros broke cover to launch themselves into the open. The Doom Eagle emptied his bolter’s clip and slammed in another as he flew.

  Tyris decided to save the fuel and simply jumped the handrail.

  He landed with a mighty clang on the hardened metal deck, his silenced bolter gunning down ork mechanics and their gretchin slaves with calmness and grace. He, Vega and Iaros converged on the Sister at about the same time. They formed a ring and swung their weapons outwards.

  ‘On three,’ said Tyris.

  Orks were charging in, using the aircraft as cover. Ricochets sang from their armour.

  ‘Two.’

  In spite of the tranquilliser round and a dose of soporific that should have placated a bull grox, the psyker was still struggling. It flapped numbly against the Sister as she fixed it to her armour with clips. It must have been four times her weight. Those blows had to hurt, but the woman ignored them. She shot Tyris a look. Ready.

  ‘One!’

  Orks piled in from every crawlway intersection and corridor. Tyris shot one between the eyes with a stalker round. Two. Three. Chewed out a chest cavity. Blew off an arm. The muffler was still on, the selector on single shot. One got in close enough to spray Vega with blood as the Doom Eagle gunned through its chest.

  ‘Now!’

  The shout followed the same neural pathway that triggered his jump pack. Vega gave an answering roar. A big ork with a squealing chainaxe that had cut in behind Iaros and swung back its arm disappeared like tallow before a hydrogen torch as the four of them lifted off. Tyris felt a shuddering as he rose on a column of chemical burn. He threw out a hand to grab onto the Sister’s and Vega did the same. Between the three sets of jump packs they carried the drugged ork psyker up into the air and left the howls and gunfire behind. Tyris’ armour registered an impact as a startled gretchin got lucky with a snap shot, but he did not otherwise notice the damage.

  The safety rail of one of several overlooking sub-decks passed beneath them.

  His downward arc carried him over the fat body of an ork fighter sporting an immense set of underwing rocket pods. He hit the ground running to bleed off his momentum. Bullets fired from below rattled dully off the aircraft’s fuselage and the underside of the deck. Iaros was already down, and pushing for the searing wall of daylight that would once have been shielded by a coherence field but that was now just a burning hole in the fortress’ adamantium outer wall.

  ‘Antares,’ Tyris voxed, leaving Vega and the Sister to haul up the psyker and run for the exit. He checked his visor chrono. ‘We have five minutes before the Storm Eagle returns to my beacon. It will leave with us or without in six.’

  ‘Understood, brother-sergeant.’

  A burst of gunfire exploded in volume as a set of access doors at the other end of the sub-hangar opened up. Antares backed through them, stalker bolter held one-handed to rake the opening with fire. The second Sister retreated with him, sword flickering out where a killing blow presented itself, but otherwise exploiting the Fist Exemplar’s armoured bulk as mobile cover. The secondary target was draped across his shoulders. It was the smaller of the two psykers, not much larger than the Sister of Silence. A juvenile perhaps. Whatever the complexities involved in the extraction of two psykers from Eidolica when Lord Thane had prepared them only for one, the double reward struck Tyris as worth the risk.

  He had been left with no question as to the psykers’ value to the Imperium.

  Antares clubbed the restive psyker into submission with a crack to the base of the skull with his bolter’s magazine, and the doors slid shut behind him. The Fist Exemplar lumped the ork off his shoulders. Bullets rang dully on the doors’ opposite side. He sealed them with a sharp burst from his bolter’s combi-melta.

  ‘Nubis?’ said Tyris.

  ‘He is not coming,’ Antares replied, voice inflected with emotion.

  ‘What do you mean, not coming?’

  Tyris switched frequency, and was immediately overwhelmed by the squeal of bolter feedback. There was a crackling whoosh, the Salamander’s combi-flamer, followed by draconic howls.

  ‘Brother?’ Tyris voxed. The mass-reactive scream was his only answer. The periodic click-pause of auto-loaders provided an opening for the occasional legible word. Most of it was curses and vengeance.

  But Tyris heard the name ‘Vulkan’ at least twice.

  ‘Move,’ said Antares. His voice was flat. Whatever he had felt before was dead now. Like his world. ‘There is nothing left for us here.’

  Plaeos – Hive Mundus

  Check 2, 01:02:59

  Bullets sprayed from the power claw’s digital stubbers and made wobbling metallic crumps in the aluminium housing that Kjarvik sheltered behind. He rose to return fire, but found that he was barely capable of lifting his pistol against the witchstorm. By the stabbing throb in his skull and the ache in his jaw, he felt the maleficar’s attention shift from Zarrael to him. The wind ground him back first one step, then two, ankle-deep, the water still rising. The boss ork bore down, kicking out rounds, clanking plates as wide across as the back of a Rhino and glowing like an evil sun.

  Kjarvik let the psyker-wind push.

  The stubber, he could take. The power claw was something else entirely.

  Two steps became three, and around that third step the entire universe seemed to realign.

  His preternatural senses detected nothing untoward, but for all that the thunder of crashing water and the stink of fyceline surrounded him, it felt as though the bottom had fallen away from him and left those sensations hollow. It was without flavour or colour. Silenced. The orks continued to stamp and chant, but it was no longer the cacophonous force that it had been, and smaller for being the making of a horde rather than of a single overbearing power. The wind fell away. The water funnel slapped down as though something mighty had just died.

  Those were the most unsubtle effects, but the least profound. The howl, not the wolf.

  The expression on the maleficar’s alien face was the opposite of whatever spiritual perturbation Kjarvik felt.

  Horror, even to that obscene degree, had been engineered out of the Space Marines’ fundamental makeup with the primarchs, but even had he been still human he doubted whether he could have experienced the psychic unravelling that the witch suffered now. It must have been like opening one’s eyes and finding that the illusion of a visible reality had been a dream, or awakening with no sense whatsoever of one’s physical body.

  ‘Get down, brother.’

  Kjarvik dropped to one knee, and a ball of superheated plasma punched the mega-armoured boss ork through the chest. It dropped in a metallic clatter as Bohr moved up. Orks on the overlooking gangways belatedly opened fire, but a full-auto blizzard of bolter fire from the Iron Father’s servo-harness mowed them down. Kjarvik hardly needed to turn around to see Sommer and Rós moving up along the edges of the walkspace, in the partial shelter offered by the catwalks above them. Phareous advanced with less caution, drawing fire from both angles to where he walked up the middle.

  ‘Baldarich? Zarrael?’ The Iron Snake’s words were punctuated by the bang of solid rounds on his shield.

  Kjarvik turned at the familiar liquidised scream of powered adamantium teeth at work on soft tissue. Freed of the psychic winds, the Flesh Tearer had closed on the maleficar’s orca-like mount and had his howling weapon buried in the monster’s flippered forelimb. Zarrael had his mouth wide open and basked in the spray.

  With a wail of something more freeing than mere pain, the amphibeast reared up on its vestigial hindlimbs. It pawed with webbed claws at its collar, throwing the psyker from its back, and almost incidentally swatted the Flesh Tearer contemptuously from the walkspace and into the water.

  Thoug
h no longer wreathed in lightning, the monster was still massive, more so now that everything around it had become inexplicably smaller, and it flattened an ork walker the way a cat would flatten a mouse. It carelessly shoved a heavier fighting machine off the walkway as it limped around, then snapped at another, snatched it up in its jaws and sent it smashing through the orks that had been mobbing in behind. They had been ready to break before the psyker had arrived to bolster their belligerent spirit, and they broke now, pounding through the ruined floodgates.

  The amphibeast’s rampage back through its master’s escort had left the witch untended in the middle of the walkspace, spread amidst a floating mess of bent cogwheels and split plates like a scrap heap that someone had taken the trouble to build, but then abandoned to the floods.

  ‘He is yours, Iron Father.’ Kjarvik turned into the sporadic fire still raining down from above. ‘Phareous, remain with the Sisters and cover us.’

  ‘As ordered.’

  Kjarvik took position over the downed ork psyker. Despite its injuries it was very definitely conscious, but too occupied smashing its own forehead into the puddled flooring to notice him. Loose rounds from above spanked off his plate, but the fire was aimless and half-hearted.

  Bohr lowered himself with a hydraulic wheeze and examined the raging maleficar’s armoured frame. The ork’s head was bigger than the Iron Father’s torso. Its leather strapping could have encased him and Kjarvik both and left room to move. He rammed a piston-enhanced fist into the side of the ork’s head for good measure, then began spooling a length of heavy-duty chain from a hopper clamped to his hip. He bent to the task. A slug hit off a flicking mechadendrite and blew out an articulation segment. ‘We need to move it now or it will drown.’

  Kjarvik stood up and growled into his gorget vox. ‘Now.’