Hammer and Bolter 11 Page 10

  ‘Cyrion,’ he voxed.

  ‘Aye. Talos?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Forgive me. I thought it would be Uzas with another rant. I hear your decks are crawling with Angels. Epic glories to be earned in slaughtering their infants, eh?’

  Talos didn’t quite sigh. ‘Are you almost done?’

  ‘This hulk is as hollow as Uzas’s head, brother. Negative on anything of worth. Not even a servitor to steal. I’m returning to the boarding pod now. Unless you need help shooting the Angels’ children?’

  Talos killed the vox-link as he stalked through the black corridor. This was fruitless. Time to leave – empty-handed and still desperately short on supplies. This… this piracy offended him now, as it always did, and as it always had since they’d been cut off from the Legion decades ago. A plague upon the long-dead Warmaster and his failures which still echoed today. A curse upon the night the VIII Legion was shattered and scattered across the stars.

  Diminished. Reduced. Surviving as disparate warbands – broken echoes of the unity within loyalist Astartes Chapters.

  Sins of the father.

  This curious ambush by the Angels who had tracked them here was nothing more than a minor diversion. Talos was about to vox a general withdrawal after the last initiates were hunted down and slain, when his vox went live again.

  ‘Brother,’ said Xarl. ‘I’ve found the Angels.’

  ‘As have Uzas and I. Kill them quickly and let’s get back to the Covenant.’

  ‘No, Talos.’ Xarl’s voice was edged with anger. ‘Not initiates. The real Angels.’

  The Night Lords of First Claw, Tenth Company, came together like wolves in the wild. Stalking through the darkened chambers of the ship, the four Astartes met in the shadows, speaking over their vox-link, crouching with their weapons at the ready.

  In Talos’s hands, the relic blade Aurum caught what little light remained, glinting as he moved.

  ‘Five of them,’ Xarl spoke low, his voice edged with his suppressed eagerness. ‘We can take five. They stand bright and proud in a control chamber not far from our boarding pod.’ He racked his bolter. ‘We can take five,’ he repeated.

  ‘They’re just waiting?’ Cyrion said. ‘They must be expecting an honest fight.’

  Uzas snorted at that.

  ‘This is your fault, you know,’ Cyrion said with a chuckle, nodding at Talos. ‘You and that damn sword.’

  ‘It keeps things interesting,’ Talos replied. ‘And I cherish every curse that their Chapter screams at me.’

  He stopped speaking, narrowing his eyes for a moment. Cyrion’s skulled helm blurred before him. As did Xarl’s. The sound of distant bolter fire echoed in his ears, not distorted by the faint crackle of helm-filtered noise. Not a true sound. Not a real memory. Something akin to both.

  ‘I… have a…’ Talos blinked to clear his fading vision. Shadows of vast things darkened his sight. ‘…have a plan…’

  ‘Brother?’ Cyrion asked.

  Talos shivered once, his servo-joints snarling at the shaking movement.

  Magnetically clasped to his thigh, his bolter didn’t fall to the decking, but the golden blade did. It clattered to the steel floor with a clang.

  ‘Talos?’ Xarl asked.

  ‘No,’ Uzas growled, ‘not now.’

  Talos’s head jerked once, as if his armour had sent an electrical pulse through his spine, and he crashed to the ground in a clash of war plate on metal.

  ‘The god-machines of Crythe…’ he murmured. ‘They have killed the sun.’

  A moment later, he started screaming.

  The others had to cut Talos out of the squad’s internal vox-link. His screams drowned out all other speech.

  ‘We can take five of them,’ Xarl said. ‘Three of us remain. We can take five Angels.’

  ‘Almost certainly,’ Cyrion agreed. ‘And if they summon squads of their initiates?’

  ‘Then we slaughter five of them and their initiates.’

  Uzas cut in. ‘We were slaying our way across the stars ten thousand years before they were even born.’

  ‘Yes, while that’s a wonderful parable, I don’t need rousing rhetoric,’ Cyrion said. ‘I need a plan.’

  ‘We hunt,’ Uzas and Xarl said at once.

  ‘We kill them,’ Xarl added.

  ‘We feast on their gene-seed,’ Uzas finished.

  ‘If this was an award ceremony for fervency and zeal, once again, you’d both be collapsing under the weight of medals. But you want to launch an assault on their position while we drag Talos with us? I think the scraping of his armour over the floor will rather kill the element of stealth, brothers.’

  ‘Guard him, Cyrion,’ Xarl said. ‘Uzas and I will take the Angels.’

  ‘Two against five.’ Cyrion’s red eye lenses didn’t quite fix upon his brother’s. ‘Those are poor odds, Xarl.’

  ‘Then we will finally be rid of each other,’ Xarl grunted. ‘Besides, we’ve had worse.’

  That was true, at least.

  ‘Ave Dominus Nox,’ Cyrion said. ‘Hunt well and hunt fast.’

  ‘Ave Dominus Nox,’ the other two replied.

  Cyrion listened for a while to his brother’s screams. It was difficult to make any sense from the stream of shouted words.

  This came as no surprise. Cyrion had heard Talos suffering in the grip of this affliction many times before. As gene-gifts went, it was barely a blessing.

  Sins of the father, he thought, watching Talos’s inert armour, listening to the cries of death to come. How they are reflected within the son.

  According to Cyrion’s retinal chrono display, one hour and sixteen minutes had passed when he heard the explosion.

  The decking shuddered under his boots.

  ‘Xarl? Uzas?’

  Static was the only answer.

  Great.

  When Uzas’s voice finally broke over the vox after two hours, it was weak and coloured by his characteristic bitterness.

  ‘Hnngh. Cyrion. It’s done. Drag the prophet.’

  ‘You sound like you got shot,’ Cyrion resisted the urge to smile in case they heard it in his words.

  ‘He did,’ Xarl said. ‘We’re on our way back.’

  ‘What was that detonation?’

  ‘Plasma cannon.’

  ‘You’re… you’re joking.’

  ‘Not even for a second. I have no idea why they brought one of those to a fight in a ship’s innards, but the coolant feeds made for a ripe target.’

  Cyrion blink-clicked a rune by Xarl’s identification symbol. It opened a private channel between the two of them.

  ‘Who hit Uzas?’

  ‘An initiate. From behind, with a sniper rifle.’

  Cyrion immediately closed the link so no one would hear him laughing.

  The Covenant of Blood was a blade of cobalt darkness, bronze-edged and scarred by centuries of battle. It drifted through the void, sailing close to its prey like a shark gliding through black waters.

  The Encarmine Soul was a Gladius-class frigate with a long and proud history of victories in the name of the Blood Angels Chapter – and before it, the IX Legion. It opened fire on the Covenant of Blood with an admirable array of weapons batteries.

  Briefly, beautifully, the void shields around the Night Lords strike cruiser shimmered in a display reminiscent of oil on water.

  The Covenant of Blood returned fire. Within a minute, the blade-like ship was sailing through void debris, its lances cooling from their momentary fury. The Encarmine Soul, what little chunks were left of it, clanked and sparked off the larger cruiser’s void shields as it passed through the expanding cloud of wreckage.

  Another ship, this one stricken and dead in space, soon fell under the Covenant’s shadow. The strike cruiser obscured the sun, pulling in close, ready to receive its boarding pod once again.

  First Claw had been away for seven hours investigating the hulk. Their mothership had come hunting for them.

  Bulk
head seals hissed as the reinforced doors opened on loud, grinding hinges.

  Xarl and Cyrion carried Talos into the Covenant’s deployment bay. Uzas walked behind them, a staggering limp marring his gait. His spine was on fire from the sniper’s solid slug that still lodged there. Worse, his genhanced healing had sealed and clotted the wound. He’d need surgery – or more likely a knife and a mirror – to tear the damn thing out.

  One of the Atramentar, elite guard of the Exalted, stood in its hulking Terminator war plate. His skull-painted, tusked helm stared impassively. Trophy racks adorned his back, each one impaled with several helms from a number of loyalist Astartes Chapters: a history of bloodshed and betrayal, proudly displayed for his brothers to see.

  It nodded to Talos’s prone form.

  ‘The Soul Hunter is wounded?’ the Terminator asked, its voice a deep, rumbling growl.

  ‘No,’ Cyrion said. ‘Inform the Exalted at once. His prophet is suffering another vision.’

  A BLACK LIBRARY PUBLICATION

  Published in 2011 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd., Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK

  Cover illustration by Cheoljoo Lee

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