Hammer and Bolter - Issue 1 Page 13

  It dropped its long body low, coiling like a spring and readying itself to launch. Bhehan, thinking swiftly, took the opportunity to blast a psychic attack into the creature’s mind.

  It did not vanish.

  ‘That one!’ he shouted into the vox, gesticulating ferociously at the xenos and alerting his airborne brothers. ‘That one, brother-sergeant! It’s solid.’

  The sergeant nodded brusquely. He had no desire to understand the whys or hows of the situation. Bhehan’s words were little more than meaningless background noise to him at this moment. Only the solution was of importance at this stage. Only the battle mattered.

  In full synchronicity, Gileas and Tikaye both bore their full weights downwards to land on the xenos beneath them. Close-quarters combat was one thing. During such a pitched battle, a being could fight back and stand a chance of being a danger. Being crushed beneath the full might of two power-armour-wearing Space Marines was something else entirely and not something so easily eluded.

  The alien, anticipating its own demise, wailed in murderous rage for a few seconds before both Space Marines plummeted solidly onto it. Bones crunched and arterial blood spurted from puncture wounds caused by the creature’s exoskeleton shredding through its flesh. Crude brutality, perhaps, but effective nonetheless.

  Devoid of their source, two more of the psychic projections immediately melted into the ether. Gileas and Tikaye fired their jump packs again and blasted grimly towards the rest of the fray. Bhehan, witnessing the scene, paused momentarily as realisation bloomed.

  It was suddenly so clear to the Prognosticator. So very, very simple.

  ‘They are manipulating your minds! Brother-Sergeant Ur’ten, you must listen to me! They have extremely strong psychic capability. My mind should be awash with all these things, but it is not!’ The Prognosticator bit down on the excitement and forced his mind to focus. He knew he was making little sense and that was no use to anybody.

  He had removed two of the illusory aliens by passing his force axe through their psychically generated forms. With the death of one of the true alien forms, two more had dispersed.

  From the nine who had attacked, the Silver Skulls now faced four. If Bhehan’s theory proved correct, only two of them were real. Kill those, his theory suggested, and their intangible counterparts would vanish; eliminate the phantasms and only the real xenos would remain. It seemed that whatever trick they were playing with the squad’s minds meant that they were unable to tell them apart. For them, the two decoy enemies were each as solid and real as the two who were weaving the illusion. They seemed immune to all but extrasensory attack. Only he could do anything about it.

  His thought processes were lightning-fast and Bhehan began to gather his psychic might once more. The most decisive way he could think of to end this situation was to crush the opposing will of the xenos with a psychic flood of the Emperor’s righteous fury. Whilst the melee had been tight and kept largely confined due to the jungle’s enforced restrictions, it was still a reasonably large area. The desired result would be effective, but it would tax his constitution considerably.

  It did not matter. His gift might temporarily be exhausted, but he was a fully trained battle-brother. He would never be totally defenceless. With an exultant cry, he flung both hands out in front of him. His voice carrying into the jungle with strident fervour, Bhehan called forth the powers of the warp.

  With a fizzing crackle, a massive burst of energy lit his hood up in a flicker of blue sparks. The resultant shock wave not only targeted the xenos, but also caused the four battling Space Marines to pause briefly as their own minds were assailed from no longer one, but two directions. For them, a mental battle for supremacy took place as the will of the Prognosticator worked to force out the intruders.

  Bhehan was trained, disciplined and strong. The aliens were clever, certainly, but they fought on instinct and did not truly know how to counter such a devastating blow to their defences. For a heartbeat, Bhehan could feel his advantage slipping as the barb of the aliens’ mental hooks worked in deeper. The silent struggle continued and then abruptly, he felt the fingers of deception release their hold and fall away.

  Two of the attackers instantly disappeared. One screamed with fury and began to lope away into the undergrowth. Bhehan, staggering slightly from the sheer potency of his attack, automatically reached out for its mind. Instantly, he was filled with a sense of pain and, even better as far as he was concerned, of fear. It was injured, probably dying. It was unimportant. The final alien was also mortally wounded. It would be the work of but moments to end its foul existence.

  Good work, Bhehan,’ said Gileas, his breathing heavy through the vox channel.

  The remaining creature slunk around the Assault squad, fluidity implicit in its every movement. Before any of them could open fire or attack, the xenos reared back, a crest-like protrusion standing up on top of its head, and emitted a screech that was staggeringly high-pitched. Had the auto-senses in the warriors’ helmets not instantly reacted, it would surely have ruptured eardrums. In the event, it achieved nothing.

  The xenos clamped its jaws tightly shut and stared with renewed malevolence at its enemy as it realised the futility of its last defences. Without hesitation Gileas roared the final order, his voice like the crack of doom.

  ‘Open fire! Suffer not the alien to live!’

  With resounding cries that echoed those sentiments most emphatically, bolter fire razored through the air and tore into the alien’s armour-hard exterior. Every last bolt was unloaded into it, spent shells rapidly littering the ground. Blood fountained out of the wounds in the xenos’s body, the sheer force of it suggesting they had successfully hit something vital, and Gileas found renewed vigour in the scent of its imminent demise. A sudden, desperate desire to eliminate this foul abomination once and for all took hold.

  With a roar of determination, he took out his bolt pistol and aimed it with deadly, pinpoint accuracy between the thing’s eyes. Reuben discarded his spent weapon, taking his own pistol from its holster. Falling in beside his sergeant, he stepped forwards with him as they fired together.

  Every bolt that burst against the alien’s skull caused its head to snap back and drew further eardrum-splitting screeches.

  Bhehan responded with a psychic blow, although due to his exhaustion, the effect was greatly diminished. Heedless of this fact, he focussed all of his fury, sense of retribution and hatred and flung it towards the xenos with a practiced heft of his mental acuity. He was drained, but it provided a useful diversion. The enemy hesitated, crouching low, ready to spring at Reuben. It moved with uncanny alacrity, propelling itself with deadly grace for something that should surely have been dead by now towards the Space Marine, bearing him to the ground. It reared up, blood and saliva flying from its jaws as it prepared to strike.

  ‘No!’

  Bhehan brandished his force axe. He urged a ripple of power across its surface and bounded the short distance to his fallen brother. With an easy, accurate swing, he buried the axe deep in the alien’s chest.

  It stumbled back, licks of warp-lightning crackling across its carapace. It writhed on the ground in agony for a few moments and then was still.

  A silence fell, disturbed only by the heavy breathing of everyone present.

  Gileas lowered his pistol and nodded in grim satisfaction. ‘It is done,’ he said. ‘Status report.’

  Apart from several light wounds and Jalonis’s fractured backplate, the squad had escaped almost completely unscathed from the encounter. Bhehan’s weariness showed in the Prognosticator’s posture and in his voice as he communicated via the vox, but he had expended a remarkable amount of energy in a very short space of time. The strength of will it must have taken for each of the xenos to maintain replicas had been quite the barrier for him to overcome. It gave him great satisfaction to acknowledge that not only had he overcome it but had also emerged triumphant.

  ‘Are you well, Bhehan?’ Gileas addressed the psyker
directly, his tone brusque and formal. ‘Do you require time to gather yourself?’

  ‘No, brother! I do not “require time”. I am tired, but I am not some weakling straight out of his chamber. I am fine.’ The indignation in the young Prognosticator’s voice put a smile on Gileas’s face beneath the helmet. He may be young, but Bhehan already had the true fire of a Silver Skull with many more years of service behind him. The Emperor willing, the youth would undoubtedly go far.

  ‘Puts you in mind of yourself, does he, brother?’

  At his side, Reuben murmured the words softly enough for only the sergeant to hear. The squad commander’s smile deepened.

  ‘Just a little, aye.’ Gileas leaned down slightly and wiped his bloodied chainsword on the ground. He stared up at the sky visible through the canopy. Daylight was beginning to give way to the navy-blue of what he had always known as the gloaming. The Thunderhawk would return just after dusk. For now, there was one thing only left to do.

  ‘Brother-Prognosticator,’ he said, turning to Bhehan. ‘Would you do us the great honour of claiming the squad’s trophy from this battle?’

  Bhehan understood the largesse implicit in the gesture and was deeply flattered by the offer. He made the sign of the aquila and bowed his head in respect to the sergeant. He stepped up and raised his force axe above his head.

  ‘The honour would be mine, brother-sergeant. In the name of the Silver Skulls, for the glory of Chapter Master Argentius and for the memory of our fallen Brother Wulfric, I claim your head as my prize. Let those who walk the halls of our forefathers gaze upon your countenance and give thanks for your end.’ The axe flashed through the air and struck the neck of the dead xenos.

  The moment the head and the body parted, there was a hazy shimmering and the unknown alien’s body was replaced by something entirely more recognisable. Bhehan realised it first, but the others were not very far behind him.

  ‘An illusion,’ the Prognosticator breathed. ‘It’s woven a psychic disguise around itself!’

  ‘No. No, that’s impossible,’ countered Jalonis, perturbation in his voice. ‘That can’t be correct. Kroot don’t have psychic abilities.’

  Indeed, the headless body on the ground was most definitely that of a kroot. It had the same wiry, sinewy build and avian-like features that matched every image that had ever been pict-flashed at them through doctrination tapes and training sessions. Yet despite its instantly familiar form, there were subtle differences. It varied from what was presumably the norm in a number of ways, not least of which was the most obvious which Jalonis had just voiced.

  It was imbued with psychic powers. Unheard of, at least in the Silver Skulls’ experience. Reports and research had never once suggested that the kroot, the fierce, mercenary warrior troops regularly employed by tau armies, were psychic. Moreover, this kroot wore no harness, carried no weapon. It was far more primitive than what they expected of such beings. An evolutionary throwback maybe, but one in possession of something perhaps far more deadly than a rifle or any other kind of physical weapon.

  ‘A feral colony home world?’ Jalonis made the suggestion first. ‘A breed of kroot who have taken a different genetic path to their brethren?’

  Gileas frowned. ‘It is said that these things eat the flesh of their enemies, that they have the ability to assimilate their DNA. There have certainly been reports that this planet once sported animal life. It is surely not unreasonable to guess that the kroot have systematically destroyed whatever may have existed on this planet.’

  He considered the dead beasts. ‘These things, at least… the things that look like they did before we exposed the truth… are all we have encountered.’ A thought occurred to the sergeant. ‘When Reuben shot that other one in the head, it did not change its shape or form, did it?’

  ‘The cerebral connection remained intact,’ Bhehan commented absently. ‘Brother Reuben obliterated its brain, yes. However, he didn’t disconnect the spinal cord. Nerve impulses continued to flow after death. The mental disguise it wove remained stable until full brain death. We didn’t stay there long enough to witness it change back.’

  ‘Aye,’ said Reuben, remembering the unnatural need to ignore the alien. Bhehan would have been better equipped to avoid that psychic shielding.

  Something was niggling at the back of Bhehan’s mind, but he couldn’t quite put his finger on it. It danced tantalisingly outside his grasp and he reached out for it.

  ‘Psychic kroot… This is a vital discovery for us. They cannot be suffered to live. This planet must be cleansed.’ Tikaye offered up his opinion.

  Gileas glanced up at Bhehan and remembered the deep red stone that he had found. ‘Bhehan, you have a theory, I suspect. Tell me.’

  Bhehan nodded slowly. ‘There are, to the best of our knowledge, no psychic kroot. Not any that we’ve met before,’ he hypothesised. ‘However, what if it were to assimilate a psychic species? Say… the eldar?’ He held up the red stone so that all the battle-brothers could see it. ‘What would stop it from killing and eating one of the eldar? What would prevent it from the freedom to filter out the required genetic strands that would give it the most useful result?’

  ‘Surely it must take several generations for a kroot to assimilate such powers?’ The query came from Tikaye, and the others considered his words.

  ‘We don’t know what constitutes a kroot generation. We have no idea how old that ship is. We don’t even know if it is an eldar ship. Perhaps it is a kroot vessel. Maybe they arrived before the eldar, maybe after.’ Gileas’s voice was grim. His patience was already strained to breaking point. ‘It is without question, brothers, that both those xenos races have tainted this planet one way or the other. There are far too many unknown variables, and I have little interest in philosophical postulation about which came first.’

  He put his chainsword back into its scabbard and reloaded the chamber of his pistol.

  ‘Brother Bhehan,’ he said, without another glance, ‘collect the trophy. We will take Wulfric’s body to the predetermined extraction coordinates and we will leave. This must be reported to Captain Meyoran. I do not presume to second-guess his actions on hearing the news, but I would not want to be on this planet when he found out.’

  The Prognosticator tucked the eldar stone into the pouch with his runes and moved to the dead kroot. The very thought of such a being filled him with passionate hatred: a foul crossbreed of two xenos races with the most lethal features of both. It was an atrocity of the highest order, an abomination that had no right to exist. Yet here it was, albeit not for much longer once the Silver Skulls returned to the Silver Arrow.

  The sudden truth of what the murderer had wanted with Wulfric’s body hit the Prognosticator head-on. A kroot, with the psychic abilities and memories of an eldar, would have had some knowledge of Astartes physiology, even if only as a basic, barely recalled memory. Imagine, then, a kroot, with the psychic abilities and memories of an eldar… and the strength and resilience of a Space Marine…

  Bhehan straightened his shoulders and bent down to pick up the head of the kroot. Thanks to the Reckoners, such a thing would never come to pass.

  What heat remained in the day began to sap steadily as the suns continued their slow descent towards the horizon. The air was thick with heat stored by the trees and the rocks. This, coupled with residual moisture from the rainstorm, left the air feeling thick and greasy.

  The squad trampled through the trees for several more minutes, all senses on full alert. They had barely arrived at the extraction point when the general vox channel fizzed into life. The Thunderhawk would be in position in fifteen minutes.

  Nocturnal life began to flood the jungle with a discordant symphony over which the approaching whine of the Thunderhawk could swiftly be heard. Once in situ, there was a hiss of servos and hydraulics and the front boarding ramp of the vessel opened, the light from within spilling out and bathing the jungle.

  Gileas waited for the others to board before he joined the
m. He had always maintained that, as sergeant, it was his place to arrive first and leave last. He fired his jump pack, rose to the Thunderhawk and dropped to the floor with a clatter.

  ‘All on board, Correlan. Give us a few moments to ensure that our fallen battle-brother is secure.’

  ‘Understood. Good to have you back, sergeant.’

  Gileas removed his helmet and ran his fingers through his hair. Already the words for his report to Captain Meyoran were forming clearly in his mind. They had been sent down to this planet for one thing and yet had found something entirely different and unexpected.

  Bhehan remained standing at the edge of the landing ramp, staring down at the jungle. He reached into his pouch to draw a random rune and instead pulled out the eldar stone. Considering it thoughtfully, he indulged in a moment’s wild curiosity as to what sort of portent the Emperor was sending him.

  As his hand closed around it, he became aware of a strong push against the wards he had set in place, wards that had no doubt gone a long way towards allowing him to see through the kroot’s duplicitous scheming. This mental touch was no wild and instinctual thing, though. This press against his defences was nearly as disciplined and practiced as his own. A sudden flicker of movement caught his eye.

  At the jungle’s edge, barely visible in the dusk and what remained of the light cast by the Thunderhawk, Bhehan saw it. A solitary figure. Tall, seemingly all whipcord muscle and sinew, the huge kroot stood boldly in direct sight of the Thunderhawk. To all intents and purposes it was little different to its kin, but it was not difficult to surmise that it was a more powerful or at least a more evolved strain of these twisted xenos. A cloak of stitched animal hide was slung around its shoulders and in one hand it held a crudely fashioned staff, from which hung feathers and trinkets of decoration. A number of stones also dangled from the staff, stones that looked remarkably like the very one in the psyker’s hand.

  He felt its vicious touch against his mind again and clamped the wards down tighter. The lesser kroot had been disorganised and fierce. This though, was a calculated, scheming mind. This was a mind that would gladly extract the very soul of you and leave you to crumble to dust in its wake. It was barbed and brutal and uncannily self-aware.