Oraculum

From Ashes We Rise : The Imperium Is Born

Ursh: The Charge

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Radiation had long stripped the tundral wasteland to the South East of the city of any lingering life, a long past disaster leeching any vitality remaining in the scorched rock. Even generations of twisted technobarbarian warlords had not bothered to attempt further building or settlement of the territory, a few haunted ruins all that spoke of a long dead metropolis.

The Emperor’s forces were better equipped against such lingering death, however. The power of technology providing defence against a problem of its own making. The grand firepower of the Emperor's armoured legions, vehicle and astartes both, could at least linger in the shadow of the clicking death, and so they rolled forth in number, preparing to bring the heaviest guns of the Imperium to bare on the citadel from a direction it would have been weakest.

Ursh did not care for the survival of its people, but mortal men would die before they could even be of use to their final purpose. So, as the Emperor's vehicles ground on, they found the earth beneath them bursting with activity. Forms made of flesh and metal, towering above even the largest of the Emperor's armour erupting from the rock, intent on carving open the metal shells before them, unaware that to breathe the air around them would mean a slow death to even their twisted forms. Would such things even care if they had the mind to know?

The armoured vanguard that raced to meet them had resolved to render any such question hollow, bearing a far swifter demise. A fleet of light vehicles, rapid and temperamental like wild steeds, had fanned out across the plain ahead of the heavier bulk behind. Rhinos and their manifold cousins from all across the hemisphere, a few wolflike Predators, even armoured and converted rigs of dubious origin made up this scything blade, their drab colours and wreaths of savage trophies marking them as the war-convoy of the Reviled. To cross forbidding wastelands and strike at the enemy’s weakest point was their way, as it had been that of their ancestors, and they would not be halted by either the rad-fields or their monstrous guardians.

Beneath the strung bodies and studded chains, the vehicles had been readied for their greatest battle yet. Their guns were primed and charged. Improvised weapons had been affixed to their prows, giant spikes, boring lances and threshing blades to aid in the slaying of the foe. Most striking however were the shapes that crouched on top of the armoured hulls, uncaring of the radioactive phages that soaked the air. These were Astartes of the Ninth in the final throes of their curse; those afflicted by swollen flesh, plagued by piercing bone or the many consumed by decay until they were almost more machines than men. Their faces were daubed in ash, running with blood as the exposed skin blistered and cracked in the foul air. They knew this would be their final charge, for they had vowed to die for Unity that day rather than slowly rot away.

Engines clashed with mutated muscle, and battle was joined. The guns of the Reviled spat steel and flame, prow-blades impaling monstrous gargantuans even as they flipped transports to the side and cracked open their hulls. Those Astartes within who were not crushed outright spilled out to join their ash-painted brothers, bones broken and skin torn, but their warlike spirits undimmed. From the top of their vehicles, the overgrown bloat-giants fired weapons as heavy as the Rhinos’ own, autocannons and beam carronades bellowing in concert. The plagued and the crippled vaulted onto the colossal bodies of Mosvoroth’s beasts, clambering over them like murderous beetles as their blades sought openings for a mortal strike. They cut, they fell and they died, harsh warcries on their corroded lips.

The beasts of Mosvoroth, their minds of singular searing purpose, seemed to revel in the bloodshed. Bloated warmachines, taller than a Rhino and consisting of crab-like appendages and ballooned, fleshy bodies, hulked weapons meant only to be fired until their short ammunition supplies were drained. They let loose great barking reports from cannons fused to the centers of their bulbous bodies, rending armored vehicles to smoldering hulks with every muzzle flash.

Smaller, more agile monstrosities skulked in their shadows. While their larger allies wrought death en masse, these creatures leaped and bound with a berserker's grace. They wielded wicked swords of barbs, twice their own height, and employed them with brutal efficiency.

The monsters left from the shadows of the artillery walkers, descending upon passing transports of the Ninth in pairs and threes. Rending swipes of their swords took the Reviled closest to them from atop the Imperial machines, and the beasts, skin as red as hot embers, bellowed in excitement as the Astartes of the Ninth turned to face them.

Each vehicle had soon become a tassel in the restless mosaic of battle. Red and brass was everywhere, washing over grey and drab green. The Astartes who clashed with the screaming assailants had found an enemy to their measure, one whose way of fighting unsettlingly mirrored theirs and whose ferocity was no lesser than their own. Fighting in small squads was for the Reviled as much of a necessity now as a well-accustomed tactic, and the narrow space of the transport roofs constrained them while the fiendish creatures bounded about with superhuman agility. Every struggle among dozens swiftly became its own contest of skill and strength. Space marine chainswords interlocked to block the slashes of incandescent blades before unfolding like roaring petals of predatory plants, the pointmen of each squad hacking at the snarling faces while their brothers kept their sides covered. It was a cruel game of attrition, a stricture the Ninth Legion was loath to be forced into. Yet for now the bestial warriors struggled to pierce the nigh-instinctual coordination of each band’s sworn brothers, and a concerted dance of strikes and parries tipped the balance time and again between the evenly matched numbers of each clash.

A struggle no less dire was being fought under their feet by the Legion fleet’s drivers. Harried by the crimson skirmishers and now pummeled by the fire of the crablike monsters, they were at the same time given very little space to manoeuver. The vanguard of the Imperial armoured advance depended on them. The Charge could not afford to lose momentum, or, bogged down in a chaotic battle, its ponderous engines would be easily picked apart by the enemy.

The Legion vox network, until that point tensely silent, came alive with rapid, clipped coordination chatter. In the heat of the moment, communicators barked into their sets louder and louder to overwhelm the strange and grating interference that mounted the closer they came to the walls of Mosvoroth.

“Zathrin cohort command to third, fourth, shift to unakna!”

“Turning by fifty, clear the path!”

“Voithir, firing on tungal center-two!”

“Ruptured, advancing till graachal! Glory!”

“Sikigal cohort, clear fire path!”

Embattled as they were, the Astartes pilots worked wonders with their scarred machines. Here two Rhinos swerved abruptly from their formation, crushing a pack of snarling assailants under their treads, and at the same moment a salvo from their fellows tore through the air where they had been and blasted a segmented leg from under one of the crawling monstrosities in a shower of bilious fluid. Here another, its ramming spikes still stuck in the fallen carcass of a colossus from the first wave, was joined by four more, who together pushed the great corpse forth like a macabre bludgeon that swept foes from its path and slammed a crab-beast to the ground. There a command Predator burst through the burning ruins of a Rhino, smearing the remains of fallen brothers over the irradiated earth in its unmerciful advance, and wreathed in smoke it struck a crawler from its blind side, felling it with a ferocious burst of autocannon fire.

Yet for all their formidable efforts, they were losing more than blood and men - more grievously yet, they were losing speed. Even the smoothest turn into a firing position shaved precious instants from the counter, and that was the purpose and victory of Kalagann’s defenses. Delay was impardonable. The Reviled could welcome death, but they would not accept failure.

“Legion command to breacher force!” Legion-Master Skorr’s voice called out over vox-waves issuing from the Ninth’s command vehicle. It was a trophy from the whisper-shrouded Mallaund Sen campaign, a relic machine of strange and unique form: alike in size to a Mastodon, but vertically towering and bristling with turrets where it lacked a landing ramp. Festooned with chained and impaled bodies of felled foes, it was an inviting target for the crimson-skinned marauders, but none had thus far breached past its autoguns and the defensive circle of lesser transports that surrounded it.

“Forward elements, match our fire!” the Master spoke with a hurried yet precise hardness that brooked no disobedience. Wary though many in the Exercitus Imperialis may have been of the aptly-surnamed Reviled and their uncomely features, a far more hideous enemy lay ahead now, and in the field the authority of Astartes was not to be contested. “Strike at Legion-marked targets as given!”

“Understood, Legion command. Executing.” The reply had come with some slight delay, no doubt to organise the input of multiple channels into a singular communication, yet faster than such an operation ought normally to have been possible. The reason became evident when elongated plumes of radioactive dust from the southeast heralded the approach of an armoured division that was detaching itself from the rumbling Imperial column and nearing the crux of the combat. The cold teal markings on their battle tanks and their unit heraldry, a circle asymmetrically ringed by four lesser ones, marked them as Timaini Cragrunners, dwellers of the cratered lands far east of Arkhangelsk. Word had it that they had often traded with the Terrawatt Clans, and that machinery dug deeply into their bodies as well as their traditions. Their cybernetic coordination, however, had left them no less eager to visit their homeland’s vengeance against Ursh.

The forward tanks began to fire long before optical contact. As imposing as the monstrous crab-beasts were, the Timaini’s cannons could not possibly strike them past the chaos of battle unless their gunners minutely tracked the Reviled’s signals by the instant. But once again augmented bodies and unity of purpose worked miracles. The first Cragrunner salvo gouged the earth close to their targets; the second, guided by cybernetic eyes and wire-strung brains, cut down two of the crawling brutes, shreds of muscle and warpborn armour rattling like shrapnel from the nearest Legion transports.

Again and again came the directed fire, more intense by the volley. Rhinos and Predators swerved and scattered ahead of it, Astartes and hell-warriors both clinging grimly to their shells even as they indefatigably traded blows. The rad-field had become a chaos of fire, wreckage and mangled bodies, but the charge was not about to be stopped.

The sudden arrival of the Cragrunners began to tip the scales back into Imperial favor. Artillery beasts, battered and bleeding, lost legs to the incoming fire and toppled over with ponderous speed. Other beasts burst into viscera and flames as the Cragrunner’s shells found ammunition stores and esoteric energy reactors buried within the masses of flesh and metal that strode the battlefield as gods mere moments before. The Cragrunners ran up their tally with machine precision.

The reinforcing mortals were solidly engaged with the line of hell-beasts, trading fire and lives even as their most forward vehicles were still several kilometers out from joining the XI Legion’s advance. Then, new nightmares arrived.

Auspex warnings screamed inside the Cragrunners’ vehicles. Two new contacts closing fast, ghosting in and out of detection, were advancing from behind. Tank commanders, torn between trading fire with the beasts ahead and facing an unknown advance from behind, divided their attention. The inhuman speed of coordination between the mortals saw the reaction measured out in heartbeats rather than confused minutes. A platoon of tanks split from the main advance, five tanks, their cannons still smoking and targeting auspexes growling in anticipation turned to face the new threats.

Five tanks versus two new vehicle contacts. The Cragrunners, cold logic, and experience their guide, had by all accounts overcommitted to the new auspex blips. The lead tank fired, the shot seemingly random through the dust and smoke of the armored battle raging around them. The shell screamed into the dark, disappearing long before the telltale flash of a detonation heralded the end of its brief flight to a target the tanks could not see. Auspex, unreliable against the backdrop of burning vehicles and the titan claps of battlecannons, screamed a warning to the platoon.

++PROXIMITY ALARM++

The contacts emerged from the smoke as nightmares given steel flesh and unholy purpose. Pistons slammed home as four legs carried each beast too fast and too far for their size. Furnace heat vented from maws of steel teeth and between red-hot ribs. Balefire, cold and white, thrashed against steel as if attempting to escape.

The first tank was batted aside without a thought. Tracks screamed as the fifty-five tons of armor and steel slid at speed across the radwastes. A tread bit deep, and the tank levered over, ejecting its turret and pulping the crew as it slammed into the mud. The rest of the platoon fired.

The beast took three rounds to the chest, not so much as losing an ounce of momentum as it charged with a gleeful machine smile toward the next nearest tank. Auspex warbled and failed to lock as the first beast closed. The second beast leapt into the air, landing atop a tank with ease as it sank its bladed claws through armor meant to stop tank shells. To observers, it appeared to flex its hands, almost testing the strength of the steel it clung to before it ripped the tank in half as a rusted can opener might similarly open a canned ration.

The Cragrunners began to take the threat seriously. More tanks peeled off the main thrust to assist the IX Legion. Targeting solutions returned null errors, auspex wailed in horror as instruments tried and failed to lock and track the pair of beasts, and gunners vomited in their rebreathers as they attempted to sight the nightmares manually.

An iridescent beam of energy lanced out from the reinforcing tanks, a single Destroyer Tank Hunter finding its mark as it came to a stop and let the true tanks continue headlong against the pair of mechanical horrors. Armor dripped away in molten slag, and the nightmare screamed not in pain, but in anger. The second nightmare shifted its focus from the tank in its grasp, the turret whining in steel pain as it attempted to traverse against the creature's grip, and simply crushed the tank between two clawed arms before taking off at a sprint to end the Destroyer. The new counterattack began to meet the same fate as the original five tanks to advance on the pair of nightmare engines as clawed limbs and balefire dissected Imperial armor and laughed at incoming fire.

Waves of unnatural disorder spilled from the bodily carnage into the ether. The fevered vox-chatter of the Imperial fleet suffered no less from the metal monsters’ mere presence than its hulls did at their hands. Unearthly wails and shrieks of white noise cut through the chatter in operators’ ears, deafening and wounding as surely as blades. Invisible tendrils of chaos slithered through the communication networks, threatening to spill into the backlines.

More than one vehicle screeched to a halt or spun wildly off-course before even reaching in sight of the beast, and the Cragrunners, bound as they were to their machinery, suffered all the more grievously. Yet the Astartes were made of sterner stuff. Severed from one another by the failing comms, their crews fell almost by reflex into the order of scattered battle, where every unit was its own force.

Three of the Rhinos closest to where one of the metallic terrors had broken past the vanguard swivelled about in roaring turns, brushing hairs past each other as their pilots forcefully drove their stocky machines into feats of agility. Their topside complements had been decimated in the skirmishing against the daemonic boarders, only a few legionnaires hunkering stubbornly on the bloodstained decks. Badly wounded and doomed to a swiftly approaching end by rad-exposure, they did not flinch as the transports under them swerved and careened into a broad semicircle, nor when they were brought to face with the blasphemous hulk itself. Beneath the hulls, drivers and gunners ground their teeth, biting into their cheeks and tongues as their eyes began to dim and throb from the baleful power of the monster’s very sight.

Pain. Blood. Real as the ground under a warrior’s feet. Too real, perhaps, in this cauldron of madness - hands clenched violently around their levers, eyes grew wide and bloodshot, the already misshapen features of the Reviled appeared to change with dreamlike ease, growing longer, feral, less human. But they were set on their courses.

The Rhinos’ fire thundered against the monster’s metallic hide. It looked up from its latest prey with an eerily lifelike movement, almost visibly amused by the harmless rattle of heavy shells. In a sickeningly fluid lunge, it swung an arm out to strike one of the transports, gargantuan talons tearing into it too fast to evade. No sooner had the vehicle crumpled under its force, however, than the other two abruptly accelerated, the full vigour of their engines withheld until the last dearly bought moment. Their prows slammed into the beast’s forelegs, folding under their own momentum. The survivors topside, seized by some bloodthirsty madness, threw the weight of their bodies into the tangle of metal and leaking fuel. As the monster struggled to free its limbs from the ruinous mass, one of them braced his flamer and wildly sprayed forth.

The conflagration shook the ground and hurled up clouds of tainted ash atop a pillar of flame. The beast’s grotesque frame listed forward as its front pair of legs were blasted from under it. It swiftly drew itself up on its arms, ape-like, venting balefire from its jaws in a strange imitation of animal fury. Its head snapped from side to side, as if seeking upon what best to vent its rage, but what caught its eye first was not prey.

As the destructive crash unfolded, the ponderous Legion command tank had been slowly rotating its turrets, angling them so as to expose the fewest possible of its crew to its target’s corrosive presence. Now was its moment, and as the monster stood mired in the wreckage of the Rhinos, the superheavy unleashed at once a salvo of its ordnance. Cannon shells and heavy missiles arced through the poisonous air and struck the metallic amalgam like the Emperor’s own fist. Sickly fire and shrapnel burst from among the black smoke as the crippled monstrosity was pummeled into scrap, the otherworldly force animating it bleeding out from its fractured shell.

Yet the barrage had marked the Reviled’s relic vehicle as a threat. The Cragrunners’ reinforcing waves had only briefly distracted the second beast, and now its snarl turned to the large and inviting target. In a few ground-quaking bounds, it was among the command tank’s encircling force, flipping a Rhino on its side as a gutted carcass with a single swipe. The other armed transports froze or gave disorderly jolts, their drivers momentarily stunned by the psychically disruptive enemy suddenly in their midst, as the superheavy began to sluggishly crawl backwards.

This hesitation only lasted seconds, however, as almost at once the Astartes operators found the presence of mind for a simple command. The landing hatches of a score of Rhinos rattled open, like so many mouths recklessly gasping for irradiated air, and out rushed the warriors of the Ninth. They were more remote from death than their hull-riding brothers had been, not bound by oath to precipitate their end on the contaminated field, but each of them was just as ready to meet it, eager to perish in glory rather than be gnawed to nothing by their flaw. Their cries rose above the roar of engines, and for a moment even the turbid pall over the vox seemed to part before their voices.

“Raptor Imperialis!”

“Graachal!”

“The Oath of Death!”

“Qasechik!”

“Reviled by flesh!”

“Death walks with us!”

“Unity!”

Even the abominable construct appeared, for the merest of moments, incredulous before this madly single-minded charge. It swatted away contemptuously at these minuscule rushing figures, crushing them like insects, but more of them came from every side. They climbed its jagged shell, heedless of the disorienting throbs of bile in their throats, of the infernal incandescence heating their own armour to the point it burned the skin beneath, of their struggling organs failing one by one. One after another clung to spurs and edges of metal and set alight the grenades in their hands, the suicidal blasts cascading along the bandoliers strapped around their chests. Each detonation was less than the sting of a gnat to the colossus, but beast-like it snapped and struck fruitlessly at the tiny pests that dared to needle it.

In these moments of bloody diversion, the Legion’s drivers had regained their bearings, and their guns now stood aligned at the same target. The command vehicle vomited fire once more, and this time it was joined by the chorus of its escort. The last of the rushing Astartes were caught in the roaring blasts along with their foe, blood and scrap and pale flames crushed into a hellish display of inorganic mutilation. When the cannons and missile pods quieted at last, the monster’s unnatural fire was extinguished, its remains a mountain of blades thrust skyward.

Behind, the rumbling of the Imperial armoured force approached, its fury soon to rain upon Kalagann’s walls.

The Envenomed: Military Science Fiction Deniable Operations

Ilshar Ard’sabekh

Although the sterile openness of exposed space might have seemed more welcoming to the voidhangers, it was not so for Ilshar, accustomed to humid and overgrown environments more than bare expanses. Though long since surpassed by augmentations, the naturally limited senses of a tarrhaidim were put on edge by open spaces, and his close skirting of the trenches was as much of a psychological reassurance from closely available cover as it was reconnaissance. Harvest’s mention of large pirate forces on the move did not help ease his mood - in the warrens and corridors, the enemy’s numerical advantage would have been much reduced, but if any forayed out here, the Envenomed would be an inviting target.

Finding the terminus point of the etheric trail he had picked up was a welcome distraction from those thoughts. He stopped next to Kleo at the trench’s lip, hunching forward slightly for a better look at the anomalous carcass below.

“Confirmed, there’s what looks like an emitter struck through a dead Chasm-spawn.” It certainly felt dead enough to his every sense. “And it doesn’t read like oneiric-attuned technology. It’s suspicious. Chasmborn matter doesn’t usually stay coherent for long after death, certainly not on an unstable place like this.”

Inorganic technology that interfaced with the ether was uncommon and often of scielto make, which this spike clearly was not. If it was stabilizing the corpse, it was in some way Ilshar had never seen before.

Tentatively, he reached out with his senses, not towards the spike, which eluded his firmly biologically-rooted understanding, but to the remains of the oneiric beast. If the device was channeling any sort of energy through its unearthly nerves, it could perhaps be traced, at the very least enough to determine if it was being drawn from the mass into the metal or the other way around - a difference crucial for understanding the transmitter’s less obvious purposes.

The Envenomed: Military Science Fiction Deniable Operations

Ilshar Ard’sabekh

With the shredded remains of the last corpse-puppet fallen to the ground, everything was suddenly much quieter. Embedded lattices of synth-osseous matter - emergency scaffolding that was forming around damaged areas - gave a barely audible creak as Ilshar pushed himself back to his feet. The internal autocasts were going to be a pain to extract once back at a base of operations, but they would keep him walking through the rest of the mission despite the knots of crumpled muscle where he had been struck. At least the rest of the squad seemed to be doing all right besides one of the ‘hangers, and even she was clearly not critical.

“We’d best be wary of engaging going ahead,” still stepping rigidly at first, he carefully kept his distance from Echo’s disinfestation fumes, jaws involuntarily contracting at the antiseptic smell within King’s bubble, “Another one of those could send us to the final coil.”

He gestured at the sealed door behind which the ether-mind was hopefully still preoccupied with the scavenger worms. Truthfully the gunship worried him almost as much as the threat of more hostile nests. Even beyond his own squad, the comms chatter was a reminder of what sort of eccentrics the Intransigence tended to employ, and an incautious missile hit on a motley carcass like Sargasso could be disastrous for someone close to the impact. If the Nexus was generous, there would be no need for its support, but the station was full enough of ill omens.

---

The way over the hull turned out to be as foreboding as Ilshar had suspected. The silence around the Envenomed was more than that of footsteps in the vacuum - it was the absence of the subtle work of decomposition. Sargasso was a graveyard, and it had maggots to its measure, but not here. The only signs of scrambling life had gone cold long ago.

“A corpse is not truly dead,” the tarrhaidim commented over the squad comms as he half-jumped over a nasty-looking spar of gouged metal protruding in his way. The weakness of the almost makeshift mag-clamps in his boots was a boon here. “It’s always crawling with renewed life, even when you can’t see it.”

He looked over the edge of the trench the group was passing by, noting how starlight glimmered across the more prominent pieces of debris. Almost like a mollusk’s residue. His etheric senses pulsed quietly.

“There’s ether-trails all over there,” he pointed at a particularly cluttered pit in the scratched fissure, “It’s like something marking its territory. I say we avoid these pits.”

The Envenomed: Military Science Fiction Deniable Operations

Ilshar Ard’sabekh

Following a trail demanded a measure of caution to make sure that one was not sprung upon by whatever lay at the end of it, and nowhere was this as true as in the ether. Between Ilshar’s damaged body and the combat still raging around him, that sort of light mental touch was hard to keep in the moment. Fortunately, precautions turned out to be unnecessary, as the ether-mind responsible for the cadavers appeared to have problems of its own. One less thing to worry about, though as his senses fully returned to his body and he took in the situation, it suddenly seemed like a small blessing indeed.

His eyes sprouted as widely as his helmet’s visor would allow, taking in the broadest angle he could manage. Not good. The corpses had closed in for a brawl, one of the ‘hangers looked to have taken a bad hit, and their partner squad sounded too far to be of immediate help. At least none of the creatures was aiming for him, and as long as their controller was kept busy no more would be coming.

“As long as that fight is going, we’ll have no more hostiles,” Ilshar grit out into the comms, both in reply to Flux and as reassurance for the rest of the squad. He had neither time nor energy to go into more detail - as he spoke, he leaned back from the support of his ulvath and laboriously raised the machine gun while shifting his weight to his still numb legs. It was not the most comfortable firing position, but it would have to do.

There was a wealth of targets, but not as many practical ones. The ulvath was not a precise weapon at the best of times, even less so now. Ilshar took aim for one of the less mobile enemies - the intact but staggered puppet that was threatening the human - and fired a burst in its direction. A compartmentalized anatomy meant his hands were steady enough, despite the recoil shuddering through his torso.

The Envenomed: Military Science Fiction Deniable Operations

Ilshar Ard’sabekh

Some people around the galaxy thought that tarrhaidim did not feel pain. At this moment, like a few times before in his life, Ilshar found himself wishing that this urban legend were true. The terrible hit from the walking corpse-pile had dented his armour inwards, crushing some neural nodes and cutting into the webs of others, to say nothing of the damage from the hit itself. It spoke to his conditioning that he did collapse when the shock wore off and the full sensation of the wound came flooding in, even as the seraph worm spooled back into its lair of non-space, reluctant after its first taste of live prey.

While a tarrhaidim could ache as much as any cerebrate organic, though, there was no reason for an Intransigence agent to do so while a fight was not over yet. Signalling for implanted glands to release sense-deadening agents into his damaged lower back, Ilshar propped himself up with the stock of his gun, quickly surveying the room with multiple eyes at once while he drew himself to one knee. With the amalgam destroyed, the ether-mind presence seemed to be losing its grip on its dwindling thralls. This was not necessarily good. If the entity slipped away before it could at least be identified, it or its ilk could return for another attack later. In a place like Sargass, one should never be comfortable after an apparent victory.

“I’ll trail it through the ether,” he nodded to Alice, then pointed at the remaining husks, “The rest of you take out those dregs.”

Following the traces of the Chasm presence was harder now that its influence had receded, but luckily there was a clear focal point in the fading core of the fallen monstrosity. Ilshar directed his ether-senses upon it, latching on the imprint left by the worm’s teeth, and probed for a departing wake of the familiar mental force. If he was still favoured, perhaps it could be pinpointed to a physical location somewhere nearby - although that was itself far from certain.

From Ashes We Rise: The Galaxy At Large

“Twelve automata! Twelve!”

The warble of Kleial's voxcoder was taut with fury, the metal-tinged syllables spilling out in a violent flood and clashing against each other. The grotesque parody of emotion that stirred in the decaying scraps of humanity left within the Tech-Intendant, Myrline thought, were no less repellent than the immutable grin of his brazen rictus mask. The jibes of his customary arrogance were already aggravating enough, but the cacophony of his anger grated on her ears like a misaligned mechanism.

“An entire maniple lost in a single engagement!” The cyborg raged on, bitter-smelling colourless fluid spilling between his chromed teeth. “If not for the Authority's seal behind them, I would swear the Implementors’ actions are wilful sabotage!”

The foul combination of living emotion with mechanical tone was of course not the most irritating part of his tirade. Worse was that in his ravings there were dregs of truth.

They were convened around the planning table, she, Guicon and the Intendant. The aides had all been dismissed, and only Kleial's unspeaking automata bodyguards stood close by. The reason for this isolation lay on a corner that had been cleared of maps and diagrams, chosen for the poor resonance of sounds issuing from it upon the surrounding rock. A plain voxcaster unit was stood on the smooth surface, only slightly larger than those issued to unit leaders in the chamber below. Bare of rank insignas and not very sophisticated in appearance, it was nevertheless more imposing than the Intendant's mechanoids by mere virtue of the minimalistic symbol on its side - a pale circle and within it a black triangle, five short lines radiating from its base like a truncated asterisk.

This simple sigil would have sent menials fleeing as from the plague. The Spire Council did not distribute it lightly, and anything so marked was of direct importance to the ruling body of the hive. Unassuming as the transmitter was, the words that carried through it were certainly now echoing at the very pinnacle of Koytos, several klicks above their heads.

“You promised fire support for the vanguards, Tech-Intendant. If your machines couldn’t deliver they were worth scrapping,” Myrline drily cut in, pleased with being able to keep the steely edge in her voice. Even for someone as nominally irreplaceable as one of hive's two Implementors, the direct attention of the Council after a disaster like the latest engagement was a troubling matter. Perversely, she found some encouragement in Kleial's flaunted irreverence - so long as he remained a brazen thorn in the Council's side, it was not truly all-powerful.

That he was just as much of an annoyance to her remained an onerous price to pay.

“My assets performed beyond predictions despite your promised frontline collapsing on first engagement,” the Intendant leaned in, menacing, and she saw her distorted features reflected on his brazen death-mask. “Only they stopped the collapse of the entire network. If I had sole control of the access chamber, it would be cleansed in less than three day-cycles.”

“That is not currently a matter for advisement,” came a sudden reply from the vox-caster, and the entire table fell silent. The voice was a flat, artificially modulated one, no different from the automatic announcements that set the pace of work shifts and rest rotations, and like every time Myrline wondered if this was deliberate. By issuing even its direct proclamations in the voice of the spire, the Council reinforced the sense of its omnipresence and the flawless neutrality of its arbitration. With no observable identity and no face beyond a vox-grille, its power seemed all the more absolute, greater even perhaps than what it was. This quasi-mystical pantomime irked her almost as much as Kleial’s boasting, but it was a thought best left unvoiced.

“There will be no changes to the defense command disposition,” the voice of the Council continued, an implacable metronome, “Nor will any increase of conscription rates be ratified within the next four year-fractions. Production and maintenance capacity are at critical risk of being impacted beyond tolerated margins. You will restore the defensive network and staunch enemy gains with your current assets.”

Bile rose in Myrline’s throat, and she clenched her jaw to bite back an effusion of her disdain. The obtuseness of these faceless comptrollers was sickening. Did they not understand that unless all that could be done for the defense was done in full there would be no more production and maintenance - of some superfluous luxury like double-flavoured nutrient rations, no doubt - to tremble about? Or worse yet, was this just a means of making their displeasure at the latest defeat firmly known? Only her inveterate respect for the chain of command held her back from such a tremendous imputation of treasonous incompetence.

Quietly fuming, she leaned back from the table as Guicon spoke up. Her fellow Implementor was her elder in combat veterancy by little less than a decade, having seen no major battles until the mutants’ last and greatest massed attack had begun, but he had been dealing with the Council for far longer. His unprepossessing attitude was clearly a product of this as much as of a long and quiet command.

“Understood. If production suffers, so will the front.” Measured acquiescence. If the Council could at all be pleased, they would be seeing that the full extent of their point was taken. “But if manpower is critical, shouldn’t every unit be put to the most efficient use? The reserve Secutor detachments, for one…”

The vox remained quiet for a moment after his words tactically trailed off. It was not the first time Guicon had urged for the deployment of the Secutors, and every time it had been drily denied. A risk of cascading defensive collapse, however, changed the situation somewhat.

“It will be considered,” the Council finally answered, toneless, “Provided you can present a strategic plan that justifies it.”

The elder Implementor’s eyes shone between engorged folds of pale flesh.

“We consolidate the network,” he began, seemingly even and imperturbable, though Myrline could see the subtle signs of animation in his coursing pupils and lightly moving fingers, “With overwatch and area denial specialists joining the Guard, we can set up reinforced points centrally, here-”

He pulled closer a schematic map of the chamber and indicated one spot after another as he spoke. While it seemed absurd to offer a visual demonstration to a vox-caster, there was no doubt that the Council could see all that it wished in great detail.

Only halfway following the sequence of painfully familiar coordinates, Myrline’s thoughts turned elsewhere. If the Secutors were deployed, as Guicon said, they would bring tactical aptitudes complementary to those of the Entrance Guard. Yet that was not all. It was easy to overlook when raw quantity of assets was the main question, but subtle factors of equipment could be just as crucial.

“Alternatively,” she began as soon as the other Implementor had finished, and drew a daringly forward wedge on the map with her index, “We make full use of the Secutors’ vox to expand our comms network. It’s already one of the areas where our advantage over the mutant scum is superior. Coordinate floodlight sweeps with simultaneous pushes, and we can start to retake ground.”

She let the emphasis of those final words hang in the air. Guicon looked up in contemplation for a moment, then nodded approvingly, and she thought she saw a proud smile pass between the creases of his lips. Kleial was clearly uninterested by the subject of Secutor reinforcements, but the glow of his lens-eyes had been reluctantly drawn back to the map.

“The proposal will be raised to plenary consideration,” the vox repeated, the inflexibility of the metallic voice moderated by a far more promising formula. “As soon as-”

The rest was lost in a crash and an instant of blinding pain.

Myrline struggled to push against the agonizing burst of sensations that had overwhelmed her world, the damp shearing torment along her side, the throbbing impact at the back of her head, the pulsing dark pall over her eyes. With an effort that threatened to burst the seams of her temples, she focused her pupils, forcing the bloody fog away from them.

She found herself face to face with a Pale One.

It was not the first time she had seen one of the creatures up close, but all the others had been dead. The unhuman brute on top of her now was full of life and hideous vigour. She saw the sickening detail of its chalk-white hairless face, the almost flat snout with large quivering nostrils, the slavering jaws with needle-like teeth, the sunken, squinting vitreous eyes. Its breath hit her face with a charnel waft.

The ceiling, she realised. It had climbed the ceiling.

The mutant had her pinned on her back with one long, simian arm across her chest. Its other hand rose high, light glinting from the blade of the crude dagger in its grip. Her close-quarters training kicked in and she struggled to stop its descent with a wrist, but the Pale One was far stronger and more expert in this primitive form of combat. It deftly avoided her faltering block and stabbed at her throat. With a desperate push she tipped her assailant’s weight slightly to the side for a moment, and the dagger plunged into her shoulder instead. There was a horrible choked sound, and she was surprised to realise it had come from her own blood-drenched mouth.

With a torturous wrench the dagger rose again, and despite the haze of pain and exsanguination Myrline knew there would be no avoiding the next fatal strike. Struggling against it would be futile. But perhaps-

She slid her right hand along the ground towards her hip. The mutant caught her movement and shifted its elbow, expecting to parry a low jab. It might have trained in hand-to-hand combat for the whole of its wretched life, but it was blind to anything beyond its debased subterranean world. A human would have known that factors of equipment were just as crucial.

She pulled the laspistol from her belt, twisted her wrist upward and fired.

The Pale One reared up with a shriek, smoke spilling from its scorched abdomen. Myrline pulled up her arm and fired again at the base of its jaw, and it collapsed to the side, dead.

She lay for a moment, recovering her breath despite the lancing pain in her side. Beyond the frantic pulse of blood in her temples, she could hear sounds from the surrounding space - grunting and snarling, the crackle of the vox. There was a loud thumping as the bodyguard automata opened fire with their heavy autoguns, and once it had passed she pulled herself to her feet, teeth clenched against the burning of her wounds.

The corner of the command ledge had become a miniature battlefield. Several more unhuman assassins cloaked in some ragged dark fibre had dropped down from above, though she saw most had already fallen. Three lay dismembered at the feet of the automata, their knives having only harmlessly scratched the paint on the machines’ shells. Kleial, though bleeding oily fluid from tears in his robes, battered aside two more with the force of his augmented limbs. One mutant still straddled Guicon, the man’s layers of fat and drooping skin having blunted the lethal thrust of its first slashes, and she killed it with a shot to the back of its head. She remained standing, leaning on the table, too weakened to prise away the corpse now pinning down her colleague.

“-Implementor Levran?” the Council’s voice rattled from the vox, sounding more distant by the moment, “Respond! What is happening?!”

“The enemy launched a decapitation strike,” she almost mechanically answered the gathering darkness, only vaguely aware of the medical staff rushing to her and something cool and slimy being laid over the gruesome gash in her side. Her breath caught for a moment as a stimm surge rushed through her veins, and her eyes cleared with startling suddenness. “Repelled without casualties.”

The Council was silent, and Myrline turned her attention to the Entrance Guard trooping onto the ledge from the adjoining passages. Near-uniform in their grey fatigues and face-masks, they could only be told apart by their rank and unit markers, which she was now lucid enough to recognise.

“Command One-Five, One-Seven, One-Eight,” she snapped, the chemicals in her blood sharpening her awareness to a point and suddenly bringing the realisation of the breach’s enormity to bear. She motioned for the beige-robed medical personnel who were trying to usher her to the lifter access to wait. “Who was responsible for the upward light sweeps?”

A section of the Guard officers stepped forward.

“Watch Eleven-One and Fifteen-Three,” one of them replied, voice muffled by her rebreather, “With respect, Implementor, they couldn’t have-”

“I’m not interested,” Myrline cut her off, “They will be reassigned to the vanguard. Watch Eleven-Two and Three are now assigned to their places. Their rotation will now include a regular vertical sweep.”

The officer made to withdraw with the new orders, but Myrline stopped her.

“Everyone that was on command duty today will also be transferred to the vanguard,” she sneered, “We’ll need veteran assets there very soon.”

---

The tunnel stank. It was not just the usual damp stale air that collected sometimes, nor the acrid smell of a dust-wing nest or the breath of a fungus bed. A throat-choking miasma of stale meat and unscrubbed bodies filled it, weighing down the air from top to bottom despite its ample breadth and monumental height. This was not just any tunnel, but one of the old thoroughfares from before the cleaving of the worlds. Something like this, large enough for a war party to stand shoulder to shoulder, was beyond the power of any but the greatest vault-lords to build now. Still, the stench clung to every inch of it. Even if a skilled climber could scramble up the unnaturally polished walls and brush the ceiling, it would already be up there waiting.

Like every other strong and unpleasant smell, the stench could easily be traced to its source, and that was something which already held everyone’s focus. It seeped through the gaps in the massive wall of rubble and hewn rock that completely filled the passage ahead, even the ones so narrow they were insensible to the touch. In the light of the glowmoss patches on the tunnel walls, the fissures and cracks between the heaped stones were deceptively multiplied. The barricade looked like a patchwork of loosely fitted pieces, much more fragile than it was in truth. Perhaps that was the reason everyone was so tense. That, and the smell.

The stench was not the reason Warleader Ogon hated being here. Foul as it was, he had encountered worse in his time. Far more rankling was the fact that he was standing in this tunnel at all instead of winning glory at the Kin-Breaker’s side. Once, being chosen to lead a warband into this territory would have been a rare honour, even for someone with his reputation, but now the battles truly worth fighting were in the surfacer vault. What had fallen to him was a latrine-cleaning task, as hard and filthy as it was thankless.

“Why’d they smell like this? Are they sick?” asked one of the nearby warriors - Ulush? Maybe Gnapkah? Everyone from the chasmward tribes sounded the same to him.

“They’re sick all right, in the head,” Ogon growled, “Shut your mouth and keep your spear up.”

He listened intently, wide ears straining to catch every sound beyond the wall of rock. Every time he had risen from sleep, they had been stronger, ever closer and with less of a barrier deadening them. Since the damned collapse that had seen him sent here, the sounds had been eating away at the block in the tunnel, and he felt in his bones that they were very close to breaking through.

Now they began again. He heard a wet thumping, a regular beat of something engorged and slimy against the barricade. It stopped, replaced by the grinding of rocks being pulled apart, then started anew, higher up. A collective heaving of bodies that were loathsome to imagine.

And, unceasing, the chanting.

“Glaath! Glaath!”

It was all that anyone ever heard out of those mongrels. Ogon believed in nothing divine, only his blade and the fates, but the invocations of the Glaathi unnerved him. There was a foul kind of strength in their faith, a blind courage only matched by some fungus-addled mad warriors, and the mere name of their monster-god struck an inexplicable fear into less hardened souls. Some of his warband were already flinching at the distant chorus, unconsciously backing away, and he called them to order with a barked command.

“Glaath! Glaath! Glaath!”

The chant grew closer, as if corroding away the stone. Hundreds of mucous throats were calling out the sacred name in gurgling, guttural voices, and Ogon imagined that it was not unlike the sound of the dark sea he had heard about. There was another sound like many half-empty waterskins striking the rocks at the top of the wall, and with a defeated groan the largest of them bucked outwards and rolled down the sloping barrier, coming to a rest just before the warband's spearline. An avalanche of smaller stones and pebbles fell in its wake, evening out the wall to a rough ramp.

A wide dark gap now stared down from the shattered barricade, and stench and sound poured out from it like a tainted stream.

“Glaath! Glaath!”

Suddenly the voices fell silent, and Ogon knew that this apparent respite heralded the worst to come.

“Ranks up!” he bellowed, “Catch them on your spears!”

Metal points glittered in the mosslight as they rose, the massed warband bristling with sharp iron. Moments later, dark shapes spilled out from the breach.

It did not take the breath of damp foul air that tumbled ahead of them for Ogon to know that these were not Pale Ones. Primitive as they were, the Glaathi were not incapable of thought. Rather than charge through the gap immediately, they had sent out a wave of tame sporehounds to weigh down his warriors’ blades. Long-bodied and knotted with muscle under their meaty, rugose hides, the creatures vaulted down at him on their sixfold stem-legs, rebounding after every jump with an elasticity beyond human muscle. Their oblong heads had no mouth, but spongy skin underneath their clumps of arachnoid eyes oozed trails of corrosive humour that smoked on the ground where it fell. No tribesman could abide these vile things, neither truly beast nor fungus, but the worshippers of filth bred them in packs for both stock and war.

“Strike!” roared Ogon. A living weapon would not be the match of his spear.

Hafts lunged up as the sporehounds leapt upon the front ranks. There were grunts and cries of pain as their lethal drool sprayed onto exposed limbs and heads, but not one of the beasts passed the forest of spears raised against them, and their bodies thrashed silently in the air before going limp, pierced and bleeding inky ichor from dozens of wounds.

But the Glaathi would have expected nothing less. Ogon knew there was no time to throw away the carcasses and free their spears before the next wave was on them.

“Hafts away! Blades out!” At his command, all but the rear ranks’ spears clattered to the ground, and the mosslight burned bright on the daggers and swords that came loose from their sheaths. Just in time.

“Glaath! Glaath! Glaath!”

A river of pale flesh spilled down the ruined wall, the breach foaming like the unstoppered mouth of a stream. Naked or bound in dirty rags, the Glaathi were one of the few things more revolting to see than to smell, and Ogon heard some of his younger warriors retch or gape in horror. Their foes were hideously swollen, trailing flabs of rancid fat like heavy cloaks, limbs poking out almost haphazardly from shapeless bodies and draped in squelching wraps of their own skin. Masks of cascading jowls and rotting teeth were their faces. Throats swelled like those of toads as they chanted with the inexhaustible breath of bloated lungs. Tiny eyes stared out from caverns of flesh, dull with fanatical stupor. Some were further disfigured with weeping inflamed sores and leprous scars, but seemed to feel nothing as they tumbled over stone and iron.

There was no more need for orders as the mass of the deformed crashed into the van of the warband. Every warrior was filled with the frenzied need to kill and destroy these monsters, riding the human instinct to hate that which was foul and deadly. Blades stabbed and sliced into the tide of flesh, the diseased blood of the enemy pooling and desecrating that which was bravely spilled by the children of the vaults. The Glaathi did not forge iron and fought with knives of bone and chipped flint, or scratched and grappled with their bare hands, but they were horribly strong, and they were many.

Ogon slashed the throat of the brute before him, the sturdy triangular blade of his weapon tearing through layers of fat and skin in a spray of dark blood. Impossibly tough, the savage still came at him, grasping with gnarled fingers, and he twisted the blade mid-stroke, driving the tip through the foe’s jaw and into the skull. Another already lunged at him, howling the name of its god, and he threw himself into blow, slamming his shoulder into the leering, sagging horror that passed for its face. The Glaathi’s body gave way, its bones unpleasantly soft like those of a boiled corpse. He spun and followed through with his sword-hand, chopping through the side of its head and smashing its eye. Still more came, and more behind them.

“Glaath! Glaath!”

The Warleader’s lungs burned, both from the unbearable stench and from exertion. Almost blind to his own wounds like the foe, he cut, tore, stabbed. His blade, short and pointed, was made for the close crush of tunnel fighting, and he could have wished for no better weapon, but it was like fighting a flood. He waded through the blood of the devotees of the monster-god, and yet they poured through the breach unending.

It had to end.

“Glory! For the Kin-Breaker!” he shouted, his throat tearing with the strain, and his faltering warriors answered, their still unspent rage drowning out the odious chant for a moment. Almost half of them had fallen, dragged down by the overwhelming mass of the enemy, but they were tempered in battle, and burned with vengeance for their friends so ignobly slain.

“To the breach!” Ogon grabbed the atrociously large head of a Glaathi and yanked it down, snapping its neck. Knowing his warband was behind him gave him renewed strength, and he climbed over the corpse and onto slick stones of the barricade. Three savages barred his way, arms outstretched to grab and rip him to pieces. He seized the nearest one’s meaty wrist and pulled, toppling its wobbling bulk onto the rocks and stomping on its head. Sliding over his macabre foothold, he slipped to the side, avoiding the reach of the others. The Glaathi’s massive weight gave them a powerful force when they charged down the slope, but they could not so easily turn to the side, and so the Warleader flanked the clumsy cascade of bodies, clambering up the spurs of displaced rock. The braves that followed him struck at the wallowing foes, killing without breaking their stride.

The gap was close. Ogon could feel the bare skin of fresh invaders brushing against its sides. He lifted a stone in his off-hand and thrust it from the side of the opening, caving in the head of a Glaathi as it emerged. His scimitar found the throat of the next one, and with all his strength he pushed the floundering body backwards. The flow was thinned for a moment. Two warriors threw themselves at the second file that crawled out from the wide breach, knocking back the sluggish brutes as they tried to turn and engage the suddenly close defenders. There was a dreadful moment of uncertainty as the exhausted Pale Ones fought with all their weight to hold the improvised barrier of corpses in places as more Glaathi pushed from behind, but the mad worshippers were struggling from lower down their own side of the wall, and the horrid shield stood.

“Stones, here!”

What remained of the warband was frightfully weary, but nothing was as invigorating as feeling that victory was near. Pale Ones hauled fallen rocks up the blood-drenched slope or dragged the very bodies of the enemy. They slipped on the ordure of battle, risking an ignominious death even now that the worst seemed over, but they came in speed, thrusting new blocks into the jagged maw of the breach.

Piece by ensanguined piece, the wound in the barricade was mended, the pushing and chanting of the Glaathi growing fainter with every new layer of stone. At last it was clogged with a new bulging shell, and Ogon let himself slump against it.

He took in the magnitude of the slaughter. The reek was beyond words, a tomb and a cesspit smashed together. Bodies lay in their hundreds, heaped, torn and broken. Blood and filth flowed down the vast tunnel like a new river.

His warband was a shadow of what it had been, but it did not matter. He allowed himself a snarling grin, knowing he had won against such an immense force. Even from here, his name would live on in fame, he would make sure of it.

“We'll burn all of this,” he nodded, “But not now.”

“Now what?” One of the surviving warriors asked. Even if Ogon could have told them apart, he did not have the strength left for it.

“Now we rest.”

---

Darkness was all around him. He drifted through it, gently, swaying in its cool embrace. All was silence. No scent troubled him nor taste, only a faint stinging on his tongue and down his throat. Nothing pressed against the interior of his skull. There was only inky quietitude, and him suspended at the heart of its infinity. This, he thought, was happiness.

It seemed to him that he was again in the embrace of night, cradled in its vast and shapeless arms. Only an accident, perhaps, had torn him from the umbral womb for a brief and confused moment, a blur of fright and pain. Now that mistake was corrected and his true mother held him close to her stygian breast, never again to lose him. Fitfully he reached out with inchoate hands, not to tear and maim but to give motion to the grievous bliss of his love for the quiet, all-embracing dark.

A cold weight was all that met his yearning, and a hideous crack of doubt ran through his joy. His eye opened wide and turned all about, his motions hampered as if he were wrapped in a tight shroud. Nowhere did the many pale eyes of his mother night catch his questing sight and return their glimmering reassurance. He despaired as he realised that he was not in the hollow void that had greeted his birth, but in some other substance altogether, just as dark but cold and constricting.

He felt now its full pressure upon his limbs, felt it pour into his chest with every breath and fill him with its rolling mass. Yet after the anguish of disappointment had passed, he found that it did not displease him. Some part of him rose with a love for this swaying black silence that was just as intense as how his hearts had ached for the many-eyed darkness he had issued from.

His hands, no longer blindly groping, tentatively swept through the umbral mass. Momentarily he was surprised to feel them whole and healthy. The shattering pain that had rattled through his every bone after his struggle against the great ravenous thing was nowhere to be found now. Perhaps the healing darkness had swept it away, and so he had been born a second time to it, made whole once more by the quiet force that carried him even now. His body twisted along it, agile and light, as if it had been made for nothing other than this. He swam, not knowing where, but revelling in the ease of his movements.

Something slipped by his mind, viscid and voiceless, and soon its flesh was passing close by like an echo. Through the now stirring blackness, he saw a mere part of something enormous, inconceivably vast sweep by him, buffeting him in its wake. It was nothing like that which he had fought in the tunnels, even that giant reduced to nothing next to this titanic vision. All he could glimpse was a part of a pale flank, a living wall, smooth save where shallow ridges ran along it. Despite struggling to even imagine the full size of this being, he felt no fear. He knew his course and that of the gigantic thing would not cross now.

On he swam then, driven by nothing more than the need for action, forwards and downwards. He felt how the motion of the water grew fainter and its weight grew ever more crushing, but a force within him reduced this to a mere curious observation. His hands found solid rock below and ahead, and then he crawled in a way he knew, pushing himself off the slippery surface in bounds.

After his rebirth, his strength seemed limitless. For unknown immensities he vaulted and crept, climbing primordial cliffs and springing over unsounded fissures. He passed scalding jets and their swaying worm-forests, shapeless cemeteries of sightless things and the decaying banquets of leviathans. He crossed spiny shapes that skittered on fleshless legs. For all these wonders he had no names, but their sediment gathered in abyssal corners of his nascent memory.

At length the press of water on his back lightened and then was at once broken in an instant of emergence. With the rush of air that came to replace the flow in his lungs he was suddenly aware of his weariness, and slumped down in a brackish pool, his breaths heavy yet silent.

The rocky shallows he had risen from curved upwards to meet the torpid fall of a small river, whose bed had been carved into the shape of a funnel by its stream. It met the silent sea where he lay, resting like him in a circular pool before the very final step of its journey. The only light fell from some distant pale stains on the natural walls further over the cliff, but it was enough for his eye to see all that it swept over.

Everything around, the walls, the river and the sea was overhung by a stone sky, enclosed in a colossal vault. Slimy growths carpeted the slope, clinging to cracks made humid by the breath of the waves, which now lay damply on their heavy leaves. Life stirred near him in the pool as well: pallid, serpentine creatures with long eyeless snouts slipped among undulant polyps, paddling with vestigial legs.

He was suddenly aware of a primal craving more imperious even than fatigue, his throat and stomach needled by cramps. Rapidly his hand darted out, seizing one of the amphibian beasts. It thrashed and slipped in his grip, and with an instinctual dexterity that astonished him he extinguished it with a finger pressed below the head. The facility of this death fascinated him, and he fished again and again, sating his wonder as much as his hunger.

This place was dense with life, he thought, and could sustain him if he stayed, but no sooner had he realised this that he knew he could not. An obscure desire drew him onward, a will to something he could not name. He rested and he fed, and then he rose anew and crept up the slope by the dim mosslight, and followed the river into tunnels beyond.

---

The changes began not long after.

He had been scraping lichen from a cavern wall, a dry and lean meal but nourishing enough in absence of anything better, when he noticed the pain below his shoulder. At first he feared it might have been reopening wounds from the struggle, not fully healed in his rebirth. Then with a chill he understood that he hoped it would be that. Within himself he dreaded, he knew, that it would be another flaw entirely that was coming to light, one far more profound and terrible. That which was rooted in the aberrant emptiness where his second eye should have been.

Despite his hopes that it would pass quickly, the pain soon grew and splintered around his body. He could almost feel jagged fragments of piercing torment burrowing through him like flesh-eating worms, as feel he did his muscles parting, wounded by spikes of inexplicable and abnormal sharpness, and reknitting themselves in stretched and contorted ways that made their least contraction a torture. His dread grew apace with the web of agony that threaded through him, but he had no other expression for it than to lie still for long times, sensing the intimate collapse of himself, until the unsustainable hunger grew worse than the inner torment.

His awareness of his own anatomy would have been incredible for anyone, but he found now that it fell short. He perceived his inmost workings just enough to keenly feel the spreading pain, his intuition conjuring horrific images of invisible mutilation, but he could not begin to guess its source, other than it had to do with his missing eye. This was a deep, deep corruption, and what he loathed most were the thoughts that it might in truth be him.

Between pain and hunger he lapsed in and out of consciousness, and with each awakening he found that the destruction - for destruction it was - had grown worse. His eye spasmed in horror once when he saw that the pale skin on his shoulder, where the unravelling had begun, had been breached from below by a pointed spur that was whiter still. Like a plagued foruncle this spike multiplied, a monstrous harvest of bone tearing through its natural confines, and yet the shredded muscles never stopped moving, every involuntary contraction a grievous cascade through their eviscerated whole. He watched in impotent delirium as sharp ridges cracked open his skin and flesh alike, and felt the net of his veins verminously slide around them.

He began to rot.

The living death of his own body was less crudely torturous than its disgregation, but the torment of it was still more deeply visceral. Had he even known words, they would have failed him then, for the experience of his creeping demise in the fine grain of all its senses was a horror beyond expression. He felt his fingers die, yet saw them move at his will. He tasted putrescence on his tongue. He reeked of charnel doom.

Repugnance at last overcame his pain, and he dragged himself to a buried lake to try and wash away the foulness that seeped from him. By the bleak mosslight, he made the mistake of looking at his reflection in the dead water.

The face he had once felt with such wonder had been torn from him like a mask. A malformed skull leered up at him, jaws and teeth bound by strips of putrid sinew and drooling black corruption. His eye was dreadful in its exalted solitude in the middle of his brow, bulging and flickering in its ring of knotted bone. Grotesquely long arms brushed the surface with knife-sharp fingers, stretched out inch by inch imperceptibly among the organic turmoil.

There was nothing human in the cries that ripped forth from his throat, and the most savage denizens of the underworld fled from his echoes.

Horror became desperate fury, and he raged against the monstrosity his body had become. He forced himself to skitter through the tunnels on his distended limbs, feeling his muscle tearing against his own bones with every step and revelling in the sickening pain he wrought upon himself. He clawed away at his infected sores, brutally excising the tainted flesh and gouging open his veins. He beat his damnably hard bones against the rock walls, never granted the perverse satisfaction of a crack, but gleefully mangling his exposed strands of nerve. In a mad paroxysm he bit out his tongue, choking on the blood that came gushing out.

Time and again he scourged himself until he fell insensate and blind with agony. Yet with every awakening he found that all he had wrought had been undone, the vile force that moulded his body brooking no competition in his undoing.

In the throes of nightmare it seemed to him at times that the rampant bones were receding, the rotten flesh sloughing away and fresh skin tentatively weaving itself around his joints. He had ceased to think, ceased to see, ceased to hope; and yet in a flash of lucidity that came over his inflamed mind he saw once that his fingers were no longer those of a tortured corpse.

Slow but stubborn, recovery came into its own, pushing the plague of execration back beneath the surface of skin. He stopped fearing at last that he was deceiving himself, and no joy was greater then than that of the lone, nameless being in the bowels of a dying world.

But there are cruelties in the universe before which fate itself seems kind. No sooner had he celebrated the surety of his restoration, less troubled now even by that missing eye which was the root of all evil, than the changes returned.

What had not yet been shattered in him by the first cycle was broken then and ground under the spinning wheel of life. He was for a time beyond reckoning suspended between the fiercest dread and the most desperate hope, fearing with every excruciated fiber of his being that every degeneration would be final and eternal, and wishing just as absolutely that every recovery would herald a definitive end to the evil. No mind could withstand such alternating passion in good and ill, not even one with his secret resources of strength, and so he erred, mad and afflicted, through the vaults and tunnels like a witless beast. Forgetting at times even the pain in the throes of his despair, he hunted with insensible animal instinct and devoured all that he crossed to sustain the struggle that ravaged his body.

Unperceived by his clouded mind, the tortured mass grew apace, as if its agony were too great to be contained and sought assuagement in pushing outwards its contours. The furrows he clawed into the rock with thrashing fingers became wider and deeper, and he rarely could walk upright even when he found the presence for it, for his stature was become giant beyond the breadth of most passages. More subtly yet, his spirit matured also, forged from its cracked fragments in the crucible of its trials, or propelled perhaps by an innate greatness that wearied of his brutish existence. More and more often he found in the pitches of his torment and the pits of his dejection a wish to endure and defy, to affirm at least his force over the pain that sought to master him. It came at first in fleeting glimpses through his death-driven frenzy that left him briefly ashamed of his frights before vanishing again, but ever more they gained intensity, until he in one moment realised with startling clarity that they came from none other than his own self.

He was crouched over the carcass of his latest prey. He had gleaned from the memories he had consumed along with their flesh that it was one of the things who thought of themselves as men - homo, anthropos - yet he knew also, intimately, that they were less men than even his tainted self. Nothing that was man could be so contorted, so glabrous and loathly to the senses, impurity rooted deep in its skin and blood.

The false-man had sought to ambush him with a point of glinting metal atop a haft - a weapon, the idea thrilled him - but he had been more ready than his opponent ever could imagine. The rushing smell of the air, the taste of unsettled dust, the pulse of the mind had told him all that could be known. The cold and sweet urge to kill spurred him, mixed with the bilious tonic of the hatred distilled by his pain. He had struck with incredible speed, crushing the ambusher’s throat against the tunnel wall in a stain of blood and pulverised bone. With semidelirious expertise he had unclothed and skinned the body, adding its outer layers to his own haphazard mantles, for once he had learned shame he wished that not even the darkness would witness his abhorrence.

Then he had eaten the dead. Most ravenously he reached for what was inside the skull, for the memories he stole could distract his mind from its own endless night. Yet this time they had been so fresh and intense that the inmost fog was dissipated, and he found himself thus, suddenly disgusted at the cowardice of his flight into madness. He had looked again at the false-man, fully taken in his debased lineaments, and contemptuously he had chewed his bones, mulling over the tapestry that his carnivorous brain had laboriously woven from its spoils and which had abruptly been illuminated by this last tribute.

The false-man, the Pale One, was one of great multitudes in the lower world. They often fought each other in great numbers, in war, and he thrilled at the thought, at last finding a name for the unformed desire that had first driven him to wander after his rebirth. The one he had slain and his kin, who lived in a vault they knew as “home”, shrank from this violence - an impulse he could not comprehend - but had much wisdom and riches from a time when the world was brighter. They were numerous, and when they did not fear they were happy.

He pushed away this superfluous thought and sought instead the path the dead one had taken from “home”. Soon he found it, and then own steps traced it, fighting the pain with the force of his newfound will and the still newer craving. He thought of what he would find there, and of how he would wield it. His fingers cut deep trenches into the stone, not in tormented fervour now but in anticipation.

He thought of how he was going to make war.

---

“But the surface, when did it go away?”

“It was a very, very long time ago, but it didn’t go away.” A pale hand stroked the small hairless scalp. “It’s just very far now, and it’s very dangerous to go there.”

“What’s up there? Did you see it?”

“No, I didn’t.” A soft laugh. “I’ve just heard this story many times. It’s beautiful there, like a whole cave full of glowmoss. Look, do you see these?”

Murmurs of assent.

“They’re called lhraka.” Stars. The pale eyes. “They’re very high, in the highest vault of the surface, but all the glow comes from them, bright like gems and they never go dark.”

The young audience held its breath, largely in the effort of imagining such an unbelievable sight. In part, however, their uncharacteristic quietness was born of unease. Something lay heavy on the chamber today, and absorbed as they were by the tale they kept nervously tensing their ears and sniffing the air.

Try as they might, they had no hope of detecting the huge dark presence that watched them from the shadows of a transversal tunnel.

He crouched in silence, his breathing easy but barely stirring the air. Sometimes he leaned to one side or another to better observe, and the slightest motion sent lacerating waves through his harrowed flesh. Nor was sitting still any better, for then the twisting spikes that grew out of his bones slowly tore the skin around themselves. Yet he had resolved to endure, and endure he did without lament.

The cavern at whose edge he skulked was not a large one, peripheral to the central vault inhabited by the tribe. Most often he had seen it used, as now, as a place of instruction for the young. Carved and painted figures lined the smoothed walls to aid in that. Many were simple but finely made, while a few reliefs held sparks of genuine artistry that even his eye, unsophisticated and disdainful of the abhuman as it was, could appreciate.

Presently the Pale One woman who spoke to her three children - he could smell the closeness of their blood from where he was - sat pointing at one of the larger carvings, a plain geometric piece schematic almost to the point of abstraction. Its concentric spheres represented, he had learned, the world they were in, or worlds rather, for the speaker had said that after some past calamity the surface had been cloven apart from the rest. He could make little sense of this, the notion seeming preposterous, but it had aided in giving a shape and a goal to the war he would make.

Many times he had sat by this cave already, and some more yet he would have to sit, in service of his war. Unknowingly, the mothers of the tribe had taught him as much as their offspring, and more still, for his eye and ears caught every word and gesture, weighing their use. The ragged membranes that replaced his lips when the evil boiled forth had mutely repeated every syllable, assimilating the speech of the Pale Ones, and he had found some wonder in the world of language that had opened to him.

New bitterness he had also learned in recognising the love that passed between child and parent, between brother and sister. The word family had been acrid in his throat. He did not envy the tenderness of those he watched, for it repelled his pain-etched spirit as much as their mutant visages did, but he wistfully listened to the stories of ancient warriors and heroes standing shoulder to shoulder against great odds. Where was his family? Where were those of his flesh, of his blood, indeed of his corruption, with whom he could stand against the evil that devoured him? What justice was it that such wretched and misshapen creatures had brave brothers and sons, while he lurked alone and banished?

These and other thoughts fed the noxious spring of his hatred, and the only balm came when he heard talk of the stars, far in the upper world. Then he was reminded that he was not wholly alone, that somewhere a mother he had left long ago waited for him. She was vast and dark, with many pale eyes, and empty and cold, but he knew that he was hers.

He would fight his war to see her again.

---

The stars were drowned in blood. It had sprayed, warm and vital, from the neck of a defender when a glaive had severed it, and the grooves of the carved globe with its dotted halo seemed to greedily drink it. It ran through the fabric of the layered worlds like a cosmic deluge.

The schooling chamber churned with battle. Nomad warriors painted with red clay surged into it from the outer tunnels, howling barbarously and brandishing weapons of brass and iron. They wore leather and lichen-fiber studded with light, forged plates, the fruit of a rudimentary science whose only goal was death. Fetishes and amulets of bone and teeth dangled at their hips and shoulders.

Against them, pressed to the mouth of the passage to the main vault, stood the tribe’s own combatants. The superiority of their arms was evident at a glance, for steel were their scales and cuirasses and steel were the blades they wielded, but even clearer was that they were far outclassed in skill and experience. Their armour sat askew, donned in haste, and their lunging strikes only rarely found their mark by virtue of their compact formation. Their foes danced out of their reach with practiced agility, stabbing swiftly, and pressed them back with the strength of their multitude.

From his hidden corner, he listened to the sounds of clashing flesh and metal, sensing the turns of the struggle without needing to see it. The wandering tribe had been easy to find and lure to the vault, hidden to them until now but suddenly alluring with its wealth. Neither side knew who was responsible for this twist of fortune, marvellous and baneful in turn, save that perhaps the nomads gave thanks to their macabre idols. So subtle had he been in laying feigned tracks, and so quiet his movements, that the reclusive keepers of knowledge had been caught wholly unawares by this sudden assault. Several of them were already dead.

He weighed the number. Not enough to weaken the side he had already elected to victory, but enough to impart on them the fear and urgency of doom. He had reflected for long on whether he should allow the nomads to slaughter the tribe and seize its riches, but though their ferocity was congenial to him, their prey had something more precious still. Fury and strength could always be found in abundance, but the wisdom of elder things would be of far greater use to his conquest.

Another blade spilled blood. Another body fell. It was time.

He leapt out from the shadows, immense and horrible, draped in bloodsoaked leather and flayed skin. He had waited for the pain to recede before setting his plan in motion and stood now unblemished, but the hard set of his lineaments was merciless like hewed stone, and his eye fulgurated dreadfully under his brow. Several on both sides dropped on their faces in terror at his mere sight, and then he stepped forth into the red-painted ranks and began to kill.

Long as the nomads’ history of warring had been, they had never faced such cruel strength concentrated in one body. His hands moved like a raging river as they snapped and crushed heads, spines, limbs, drinking in the agonised cries and stares of mute fright. Spears and glaives pierced him, but they were nothing before the echoes of the pain that lived in him even now, and only stirred the venom of his hate.

He drew his pain from within himself in rich handfuls and sowed it, delighting that even for a mere moment others would suffer as he did. His eye did not dim with boiling rage but shone ever brighter with this rancorous joy, until at last the nomads could no longer bear its glare and fled. They cast down their weapons and ran with great cries from this bloodsoaked fiend, and though the bile urged him to pursue, he held it in check and mastered it as he had his pain.

He turned instead to the ranks of the knowledge-keepers. They stood deathly still, hardly less terrified than their foes had been, sunken eyes wide and jaws slack at the monstrous carnage they had witnessed. Seeing the hellish giant turn towards them, their fright stirred them and they made to flee, but faster than they could move he held up a hand.

“Halt!” he said, softening the sharp command of his voice as much he could. Surprise that this monster spoke their tongue made the warriors hesitate, but it was the sheer force of his word that held them in place despite themselves. He avoided crossing their gaze with his, lest the depths of horror within break the spell.

“Do not fear! I am your friend,” he continued, wiping his hands on his cloak and holding them up in a sign of peace, “I am here to deliver you.”

These words did not have the same martial dominance of his first one, and he saw that they lacked its power. Many of the warriors stepped back, wary, and those in front held up their spears defensively. But they were not running, and that was enough.

“Who are you?” one of them, a leader from the bright trim on his armour, managed at last through a dry throat and numb lips.

Who was he? He thought of his incarnate pain, his silent journeys through the vaults and the sea, of the war he would make. He thought of the night and her many pale eyes.

“I am Nolrakh.” The one from the stars. His eye caught the bloodied stone atlas, and for the first time he smiled. “I have come to mend the worlds.”

The Envenomed: Military Science Fiction Deniable Operations

Ilshar Ard’sabekh

The wave of qillatu fallout from the animated corpses struck by King reached Ilshar at the worst possible moment - while his organs processed the internal bleed from his own brush with the ether. His armour and membrane were no barrier against the immaterial energy, and as his glands and diffusion organs had calibrated their effort from his conscious awareness of conjuring the pulse sequence, they found themselves momentarily overtaxed by the outside influx. He took a stumbling step backwards, partially blinded as many of his visual organs burned out and more frantically formed out of their absorbed remains.

When his senses found their focus again, it was too late to avoid the giant amalgam that he suddenly found looming over him. The carrion mass had been shredded by the squad’s fire, leaving open what seemed to be a central node in its nonsensical anatomy, but it still had more than enough bulk to be lethally dangerous. Its swinging limb came quickly, and Ilshar, too close to avoid it, could only throw himself down to the ground under its arc.

Not fast enough - the misshapen appendage glanced on his armoured back with an unpleasant squelching smash, and he was thrown down to his side, a patch of neural ganglia crushed under his dented armour. His legs dulled, all he could do was keep a hold of his machine gun while raising himself on his left hand.

“Not right away,” he replied to Alice in a strained grunt. The voidhanger had the right idea, the disruption wrought by the signal having probably saved him from a second hilling strike from the lumbering horror, but between his recovering qillatu diffusion and the close-quarters struggle he was in no condition to follow through against the hidden mind. “Take down this thing first!”

The puppeted corpses were more numerous, but weaker and incapacitated for the moment. The fused monster, however, was an immediate danger he had already paid for ignoring. If the glowing hive-sphere was indeed its core, a quick strike could be enough, and while the ulvath was not a precision weapon, it was not the only one he had.

With a quiet prayer for the Nexus’ spore-flow to guide his blow, Ilshar raised his right hand and unfolded the opening to the ether-burrow he had embedded in it. It only took the slightest effort to coax the Seraph-Worm from the gap where it lay coiled, and it burst into matter in a blur of teeth and luminescent flesh. For all his doubts about the symbiote’s creators, Ilshar could only admire the fluid lunge of its ringed body as it poured into being, the circle of its hook-fangs primed to bite into the amalgam’s exposed core.

The Envenomed: Military Science Fiction Deniable Operations

Ilshar Ard’sabekh

After the tense moments in the corner of the access room and the hurried rush through its door, what lay beyond struck Ilshar with an almost stupefying sense of eerie familiarity. If the chasmic scavengers fighting over their prize had been reminiscent of the sights of a sump-world, the corridor was like stepping back in time outright. The last traces of etheric-pull strain still lingering on the edges of his mind faded in the face of a moment’s genuine wonder. The damp, marshy ground underfoot, the putrid, drooping boughs, the foul undergrowth came together in a place whose kind he had had few occasions to visit for too many years now. Ghostly echoes of biosynaptic transmissions seemed as if designed to make him feel at home for once.

Two things broke the illusion - the starkly unnatural cyan colour that hung over everything, and the fact that nothing like this should have existed on a space station.

He did not need these reminders, however, to keep in mind a very basic truth - a swamp was a dangerous place. The shifting fog, disturbed by the movement of large bodies, had been a first warning, and Ilshar was already snapping up his weapon’s barrel when the hybrid monstrosity landed from above. King’s warning came before he could fire. In a moment, he swallowed his front-facing eyes into the outer layers of his flesh, a safer optical defense than anything his aged helmet’s visor could provide. Fully blinding himself like this was a risky move when hostels were nearby, but it was still safer than risking nerve damage from whatever esoteric flashbang that damned hologram was pulling out.

In those few sightless seconds, Ilshar’s other senses were free to focus on the ambient squirming of the ether field. If not for the absence of a physical nest-interface, he could almost have thought he was plugged into a data-station, though one that contained only gibberish scrap-code. The only patterns that emerged from it were directional, and they said nothing good. If the by now familiar pink vapour-trace meant anything, the giant amalgam - and the others he could now hear stirring around - were nothing but the appendages of the swamp’s real threat, like the battered corpse had been for the spheroid entity.

Sight returned. It had been short enough for repositioning to be unnecessary. Ilshar pressed the trigger, sending a semiautomatic burst into the fused corpse-mass, but left his finger uncoiled after it.

“A central chasm-mind must be controlling these things,” he voiced, taking a step back, “We’ll have better chances if we can disrupt it.”

Cyber-warfare had never been one of his specialties, but it did not take an expert to know commands that could sabotage a system from within. The Chasm presence’s similarity to a tarrhaidim data-sphere might make it vulnerable to an infotech attack if it was modulated through the ether. It was the sort of experimental technique it would have been foolhardy to try under fire, but the carcass-thralls’ attention was luckily elsewhere for now. Spanning short-lived neural bridges between his ether glands and the interface ports built into his limbs, Ilshar sent out quick, short pulses into the slithering mass of pseudodata all around, mimicking a disruptive code sequence. An engineer could perhaps have done more with an opportunity like this, but as the Nexus would have it, Ilshar would have to do.

From Ashes We Rise : The Imperium Is Born

The Plains of Sibir

“Captain Bombda,” An Astartes Seargent spoke as he hunched over the firepit in the center of the command tent, “It’s been three weeks since we have had contact with any friendly forces, and our supply trucks have been able to reach us. Commander Red has not been in contact with us since the others began their invasions, and that was several weeks ago.”

The old grizzled Captain looked over his shoulder at the more diminutive gene-made warrior, the metal on his shoulders creaking with his movements as he looked at the small encampment within some ruined ancient city that was only reoccupied by nature and now them. It had been their base of operations for some time; they had broken off, a unit of mostly the newer astartes, those deemed capable as trainers from the thunder warriors, and a good portion of their mortal contingent. They had been there for at least a year, possibly several years; they had lost count, or at least Bombda did; this place was going to be one of the more problematic areas to reunite, and thus, they were employed early to those next planned for invasion, but this was different, many wars were being started without them because of Ursh, but he had never thought about it. He was a tactical leader, unlike Theadon Red. Ursh was known for its odd ways, but living within the borders, he realized that chaos was the nature of this place. First, with some of their men turning, slaughtering their brothers, turning into monsters, there was something different about this land, and only the hardened could survive. Their mortal contingent had to be culled constantly, more recruited and then culled again. He realized within several months that while his legion was known for causing chaos, disruption, and using terror to sow the seeds of defeat, this place it was going to be impossible, for it ran on some pure formation of the word.

“Captain Bombda,” the Seargent spoke again, standing to face the blank face, “Should we retreat from the borders? If the armies heading south catch wind of us, we will be but dogs in a cage.”

“No, we have our jobs. This is the next logistical station, and since we don’t have the resources to do that, so we use it as a scouting point, we hide our heavier equipment and equipment that is out of prometheum, then we go on foot, we leave portions here, and travel in small groups. If we see an opportunity to hunt we shall, but until then, we endure here, gather information, and send it in whatever way we can, radio, or sending back someone on a bike with what remains of our fuel reserves.”

“Hide almost three thousand mortals, and eighty legionnaires, not to mention the heavy equipment will be near impossible.” replied the Seargent with some hesitancy, letting his body shift in his armor.

“We can do it, hiding ourselves from the world to cause chaos is what we are known to do, we know how to fight, but we know to use our skills to make sure we aren’t found. We know the legions can find us, but that is about it, our radio seems to either be too far away, or it is being jammed. Last we heard the rest of the war has caught up to us.” Bombda stood, and walked to the entry to the yurt, opening it up to look at a window of the ruined building the yurt was raised in. Moving to it, several mortal soldiers carrying crates of artillery shells waddled past before putting it besides on of their larger artillery pieces.

It was a crude thing the way they hid, but it was effective, wooden panels covered in the rubble were put over the holes that they fired out of, it limited their arch of fire, but it was successful in keeping them concealed from the enemy. If need be, they could remove the wooden walls entirely in short notice and even move to direct fire, although Bombda highly doubted that would be the case.

The locals had superstitions about this ruin they were in. Although there was a military post that had created some concern early in their invasion, the locals again considered that to be judgment, even though it had been them. Several wrong things had happened, when it was just the thunder warriors; several had become murderous killers, some of them changing into large beasts in their bloodlust, like Captain Grunbah, who had tried killing the Commander before he was sent to some war party in the south. He was the first, but he was not the last, of his brothers, he also noticed a change in most of the other original gene-modified warriors, they had all become volatile and angry, most of them had left for their own warbands to spread across Ursh, and when the Astartes came, it made the turmoil worse, at least eight of the original warriors of the eighteenth had turned. He also knew the locals had creatures, or turned themselves into creatures with their black magics, witches spread curses and lies, but it was something he knew of.

He listened for a moment, and someone came running out of the command yurt, a mortal he knew as Dacard, a fine young man, extremely smart, and could fix anything, he was an asset beyond belief for the regiment due to his mechanical skills. He was also their primary source for information, and trusted, recently in the past week, his men had been scavenging from the old fortifications, ruins, and even their own vehicles for parts to repair and possibly boost the range of their vox caster.

Dacard stopped with a note in his hand, holding it out, “We have imperial forces in the area, I don’t know the codes, but I picked up short-range vox transmissions. Likely a friendly convoy, or assault spear, it is not anyone from the eighteenth, but they are of a legion.”

Even from the hasty shorthand, it was clear that the intercepted communications were indeed Imperial in origin, although of a sort that Bombda was not familiar with. The common language spread among the forces of Unity was here interspersed with strange words from some distant part of the world, clusters of sharp and dry sounds that Dacard had done his best to transcribe. Despite this, one thing was obvious - the unit was moving deeper into Ursh.

Carrier Ulkhol to cohort command… Light engine failure, slowing by 3…
Straight path until 80 thal, burn fuel when ready…
Caster damaged from last storm, broaden frequency…
Low on inneq refill… Skimming one and null half of fuel…
Here cohort command, do not skim fuel… Restore on next raid…
Carrier Kwalor to cohort… Trail leading northwest by six-fourth, control…
Controlled, town or muster likely… One carrier suffices… Kwalor, you have the blade…
Return when whetted…
Return or continue graachal… Keeping vox open…

Whoever the unit might have been, the moment was a fortunate one - expecting to reunite with one of their parts, their communications should have been easily accessible even from the outpost.

Dacard looked at the vox unit, and slowly pushed it’s locator back and forth, it was a simple system he had designed with an old man in a previous war, but it did it’s job in finding the direction radio signals came from.

“To imperial forces entering Ursh, this is outpost Designation 18-14-36, head Northwest from your current location to invasion marker of the same number on current imperial maps, or on maps made dated two years ago as Siber Railway 36. This is Private Dacard of the 18th Legion’s mortal retinue, you may repair at this location, we have little to no fuel, but may be able to assist you.”

Dacard continued to dial in locator beacon on top, lowering and raising the amount of power that went into the vox unit, it was not a bright idea but it could at least hold power until some new source was found as it’s original powerpack, and charger were damaged, and broken respectively.

He found them on the map, and ranged them to almost five miles, they could easily be reachable. He looked up at Bombda who somewhat rolled his shoulders, “either way both parties will be out of fuel in a few days. Try to draw them towards us, if they interact with the horde heading west towards the main invasion point then we best hope that you can fix at least one vox unit before we all die.”

With that Dacard nodded, “to the legio in the area, head to Outpost 18-14-36, we have can resupply and rearm you, but heading north is ill advised due to the strength of enemy combatants, and storms in the area.”

With that the two hoped, but also prepared for a rather risky engagement, the mortal soldiers began to lower the upper structures hiding artillery pieces, the astartes began to place themselves in defensive positions, the few thunder warriors in the mix clung together like barbarians creating a mob ready to rush whatever was coming. Dacard looked outside of the window he was at, and continued to try listening in. It was already somewhat broken code, he heard mostly about fuel concerns, but also hoped that they were not rousing the sleeping bear north of them.

“I hope they are civil… not that we can’t handle uncivil.” Dacard said after making sure his hand was off the vox unit, still letting it play static, and whatever vox transmissions were to come. “Because learning that we have little to no fuel left in this outpost for… at least… whenever more comes will likely, regardless…”

“Regardless,” Bombda answered, waving his hand forward, “It’s another legion, the voice sounds familiar, yet I can’t place my finger on it, ach, my brothers will enjoy a good brawl, the astartes, likely would too. But, what is north is more a concern to me, hopefully they bring at least a hundred good men, because I believe there is close to a million in the horde north of us. Fodder most likely, but still a good amount to fend off with less than a hundred gene-bred warriors, and a few thousand mortals. We’d run ammo before a hundred thousand died. Let alone if they have any witches. Whatever friendlies are coming, I doubt that could stem the tide much unless if half of the legion was behind them.”

With that, Dacard continue trying to hail and guide those to the Southeast with his broken vox unit, believing that someone could possibly hear him because only static came the other way. The locator beacon fell off with only a cord hanging on tight keeping it attached, yet he still continued to broadcast even once he began hearing something to the Southeast.

The roar of engines rolled into the destroyed city from the grimy plains outside even before anything was clearly visible on the horizon. From afar, it sounded as a brewing storm in steel clouds, a ferocious discordant grinding of chains and gears in their thousands. The group that approached was a large one, perhaps a whole armoured column or mechanised regiment. This was confirmed when the murky shadows moving far out across the steppe solidified into a cloud of dust and soiled snow raised by a convoy of powerful vehicles. Their squat, boxy shapes soon came into sight, some fifty or sixty in all between various sizes. Many were compact things smaller than a battle tank, the sort of light armoured transport that had remained popular among the warlords of the Age of Strife and was now being embraced by the nascent Imperial legions - the Rhino and its thick-skinned kind. Several others were massive treaded beasts, surprisingly sparsely armed for their size, more like the mobile homes of wasteland nomads than true war machines.

It was the ornamentation of this fleet, however, that gave the sentries some pause. At first sight, the convoy could have been mistaken for an Urshite one. Every vehicle was festooned with chains that bound garlands of macabre trophies. Bodies of barbarians and mutants alike hung from the sides of the transports or lay stretched over their prows in various states of ruin - slashed by chainblades, scorched by flamers, dismembered by bolter-fire. Spikes and poles had been welded onto the largest hulls, on which the heavily armoured corpses of Kalagann’s warleaders hung impaled or roughly crucified in stead of banners. Only the emblem of the Raptor, broadly painted in azure and green on the few plates free of gruesome prizes, clearly confirmed the column’s allegiance. Massive figures swaddled in filthy cloaks, large enough to be Thunder Warriors, crouched near some of the hatches, evidently too bulky to fit inside with the rest of the crews. As the engines neared the outpost, the strange passengers began to wave with gauntleted hands.

The column ground to a halt near the periphery of the ruins, metal digging into ashen slush. Up close, the reek of the corpses was pungent. The hatch of the largest hulk rattled open, and a dozen figures clambered out - too small to be Thunder Warriors, too large to be humans. They looked like a perfect extension of their vehicles: their powered armour, a bleak grey-green with trimmings of a peculiar viridian shade, was covered in barbarous decorations and marks of battle, scarred and scored with kill-tallies. Most of them wore at their belts bundles of bleached skulls, each artfully pierced with a sword of knife of different make, while the others had ornamental spikes bonded onto their pauldrons, vambraces and shinguards. Over half of the newcomers had one or more limbs replaced with rugged cybernetic prosthetics, whether an arm, a leg or an augmentic eye shining through their helmet visor.

“The Ninth Legio Astartes salutes you,” one of the warriors, apparently the leader judging by the insignas on his shoulder and the number of trophies, spoke aloud stepping forward. Both his hands were mechanical claws, and his voice boomed through the destroyed buildings with a steely reverb - part of his chest’s insides had been replaced. “I am named Synor Chrol, captain of the Blade-Breakers cohort. The Harrowers are with us, and the Lords of Ash might rejoin us soon.” The glistening eye-slit of his helmet scanned the improvised fortifications. “You must have held here for a long time.”

Bombda stepped forward out of the ruins, a hood flapping behind him, as he raised a hand, made a salute and then lifted his legs over a wall before moving out into the open. “Captain Bombda of the Eighteenth Legion. It is an honor,” he looked back, “But for the legionnaires and myself, five weeks, most of it waiting for resupply. This is mostly the youth of the legion, and a portion of the mortal retinue here. To the north, is a horde that I think we would need at least two full legions to break apart.”

Behind the Captain in the buildings, more port holes opened up in the buildings revealing larger amounts of heavy guns pointing out to the various shades of North, “However we welcome you to what used to be known as Siber. While his legionarries, thunderwarrior or astartes, were rather bland to those in front of him, just dark and dusty armor, with cloth hanging from it creating almost the images of ghosts or moving shadows. The mortals, just looked like a rough and tumble group in fatigues, and roughly made flak armor, meanwhile their weapons all looked uniform to the best degree, autoguns and shotguns primarily, with the rare lasgun inbetween the higher ranking individuals, or those that seem more well adjusted to fighting along side the legionnaires.

The few thunderwarriors in the runes appeared almost out of thin air as the squad of men surrounded their captain in a line to his sides, all hitting their chests in rhythm for a moment before stepping forward. They looked just as barbaric, as the legion in front of them with their movements, but with a heavy sulking movement. Jitters came to a few of them, as it seemed they admired the carnage of the trophies in their own little ways each, twitching became common place between the soldiers, and some even mumbled.

Bombda followed towards the warrior who spoke, “Do not mind them, they are some of the old guard that have not gone on their own crusades. Last time they saw another legion was when the wars first started, and our legions tasks became secluded as the strike force before the speartip.”

Behind them and still in the ruins, the youngbloods appeared, the astartes, while they wore the same attire as their much older kin, they did look refined and regimented, they formed up into teams of five while gravitating behind the much older kind. Most didn’t have helmets, desiring hoods instead, and they all looked rather regal compared to the older versions of themselves, as if each could have been a prince to a warrior kingdom somewhere on the world.

“Seargent Vorphes, see what all can be done to resupply them with whatever they need, have Baylor and Chythen stick with Dacard to see if we can get an ETA on our fuel dump, or if any more of the eighteenth are in the area, broadband, if anything else comes this way, we should be able to hold just fine with what we have here.” Bombda, tossed what looked to be a datapad back to one of the Astartes, two others would fall back into the ruins.

Once again, he turned back to the warrior before him, “Come, Captain Chrol, if you made it this far I doubt you can go much farther, and while the enemy is to the North, this area is somewhat defensible if the numbers are large enough. Have your men pull your vehicles into zones four, five, and nine, anything we have on stock to resupply, take it now in case something finds us. Besides that, tell us of your campaigns; for most of the Astartes here, their only campaigns are going back and forth between outposts and a few skirmishes.”

Bombda’s arm went out as he finally got into arm grasping distance with the man, “it has also been some time since I’ve fought with another legion, so let's hope something comes south to meet us.”

“We may not need to wait for long,” Chrol’s metallic hand clasped his around the wrist, not quite closing around its massive width. It was like the grip of a dead man, cold and rigid. “Have you not heard? The Raptor’s talon is closing around Kalagann’s throat. We finally march on Ursh in force! Now that the fronts are shifting on all sides, I doubt any will begrudge you if you join us when we are ready to move again.”

Behind him, the fleet of grimly decorated transports continued to discharge their passengers. Astartes in drab green plate hauled themselves out from the hatches and vaulted down the sides of the vehicles. Their many individual trophies and marks of victory made them seem all alike, a brutish motley that belied the silent, swift discipline of their movements. Savage though they appeared, there was no coarseness in the coordination of their squads as they assembled in trickles and rapidly moved on to make themselves busy about the camp. Some directed the larger vehicles towards the indicated stations, curtly calling out to each other and the drivers within, while others briefly conferred with the outpost’s garrison. A few of the Blade-Breakers with scraps of armour and machinery bound among their pierced skulls probed the exterior of the hulls and treads for signs of wear that demanded immediate maintenance. Unlike their counterparts of the Eighteenth, the legionnaires of the Ninth uniformly kept their helmets, even as they emerged into the air after their long enclosed journey.

The massive cloaked shapes squatting atop the transports also stirred from their spots, climbing down to the ground with their ragged shrouds about them. Despite their size, it was soon clear that they could not have been Thunder Warriors. Their motions were too heavy and clumsy, as though their bodies were much heavier than what they should have been. It was almost as if these strange beings inhabited forms they were unused to, far larger and more ponderous than any man. Although they stood at the margin of the camp, well aside from anyone, abrupt gusts of wind sometimes stirred their cloaks, opening glimpses of something unwholesome beneath. Bloated folds of solid, pale flesh bulged out from between loose pieces of armour, skin cracking in place from the excess mass of muscle below. Vanishing facial features above wide mouths hanging open, unable to close over their hideously long, pointed teeth. The creatures firmly tugged the rough cloth about themselves in response.

“Much of our work until now has been that of the outrider, to raid and torch,” Chrol was saying, “After cutting out the entrails of Maulland Sen, we were left bloodied. Most of the battle-brothers we brought here were fresh, raised while we fought in the north. With so few of us on this edge of Sibir, the best we could do was warm our strength against lighter targets. Burn towns to starve the enemy, cut off their war parties to blunt their forays to the west. This way, our youngest could earn skill and glory while the enemy was pushed onto loose ground.”

He looked northward. “So far we have been favoured enough to avoid any forces too large to defeat, but what you say about this horde alarms me. Our third cohort went that way in pursuit of what we thought would be a small party. If our luck breaks, they might find the bulk of the foe instead.”

“It sounds more like we are brothers than cousins with those aspects, raiding, and terror is the eighteenth's strength. We started in the arctic and headed south, the first company went towards the Caucuses, but most are left scattered. There were a few main bulk forces, the one nearest to here is Hive Novosibirsk, next closest one is Omsk.”

He looked north as well, “most of the hive is emptying, heading there to meet our main host, civilian and enemy alike, there are hooded figures in the shadows there, and creatures of disbelief. We thought it was mostly unoccupied, and that was where we were planning to resupply our fuel from, but the defenses are strong with their magics. Brute force, overbearing numbers, and massed artillery is the way to deal with that. Question cousin, mostly astartes or are there old bloods in your contingent as well? My eyesight has been hindered recently.”

The Astartes of the eighteenth mostly went back to what they were doing beforehand, them and the mortals were about the only thing resembling a disciplined fighting force, or at least a non-barbaric one. One younger one stayed near his captain, and a detail could be seen: eyes that seemed to burn bright like there was fire in them. The burned, and he radiated heat almost off of him, clean-shaven, and with pale skin, he looked like a marble statue. Bombda turned to look at the large man, “This is…”

“Brother Esargon,” the Astartes spoke, although his helmet was on, there was no faceplate, like most of the others in their early Mark I plate. He was likely the largest figure on the field, well above the plumes on the old blood’s helmets. His gauntleted fist hit his chest, “Dacard reports, fuel inbound, but also other signals in the area. Another unknown one, likely legion, but one from the hive to the north, I shot the radio when Dacard started screaming. He is with Medicae now, but the creatures will be coming again.”

“Put the barricades back up again flyers, deploy spikes on building entrances.” Bombda replied, “Grab three of your young brothers, and rejoin us.”

Bombda’s head turned back and he looked down at his cousin, “If you say nothing, you will never get your desires Cousin.” he said with a bit of a laugh, “Melee and fire is the best way to deal with the creatures in these lands. If you have any flamers, give them as much prometheum as you have. Hopefully they get here before the rest, if not we will have a hell of a fight on our hands.”

“By fire and sword then,” Chrol assented, the grin audible in his words, “The Maulland Sen taught us this lesson well. Both flesh and the filth of sorcery fall before them alike.”

He turned to the nearest group of stationed transports, calling out in a sharp bark, “Vox-bearers! Any word from the Lords?”

“We have it, Synor,” a low, grinding voice responded from further across the camp. A marine of the Ninth was approaching, a long-bladed chainglaive in hand. His armour was studded with welded spikes over the shoulders, arms and shins, some large and recurve, others uneven and straight-pointed. Unlike the rest of his fellows, a heavy cloak was draped over his back, lined with the dark fur of some genewrought war-beast and ragged at the hem with the scars of many a blade. Once near, he struck the ground with the haft of his glaive by way of salute to Bombda and Esargon. “Ymorag, captain of the Harrowers. Our missing cohort found the flank of a great host out in the field. They extricated with light losses, but the enemy pursues them here, and must have alerted the hives.”

“We should hope they have enough of a lead. The Lords of Ash carry most of our flamers,” Chrol flexed the piston-fingers of his hands, a strangely lifelike gesture for the metallic limbs. “Holding ground is not our habit, but it will be a fine change for the day! With you and our legion-brothers, we may even survive to tell of it!”

Around the transports, the Ninth Legion was arraying itself for battle. Warriors rushed to the vehicles and came away again bristling with weaponry. The dull muzzles of bolters and tubular shapes of flamers lined next to chainblades of many shapes, from large-toothed recurve swords to menacing glaives. A passing legionary handed Chrol a massive two-handed axe, which he hefted familiarly. Even the hulking deformed warriors shambled over, still mantled in their shrouds, and were laboriously handed massive detached autocannons. The weapons were built to be mounted on light tanks, but the towering mutants carried them at the hip as though they had been heavy bolters, only slightly slowed in their already clumsy gait.

A rumble of engines made itself heard from the north, soon followed by a dark smear on the plain. A new group of vehicles was drawing near, similar in appearance and iconography to the Ninth’s first column, but far smaller and less adorned with mangled corpses. Instead, streaks of black soot ran along their flanks in loose patterns, at intervals coalescing into battle-marks or even crude images of the Raptor Imperialis. The fleet rolled to the outpost in a loose assault formation, and indeed much as on a rapid deployment move only briefly stopped to disgorge a tide of stained green armour before continuing to circle around to a halt position. The Lords of Ash bore their name writ not in symbols but in the very substance that gave it, bearing not trophies like their brothers but irregular marks of cinder across their bodies.

“They are fast behind us, but loose!” One of them called out as the squads rapidly fell into battle-wedges. “Their vanguards broke away from the horde to pursue! Unless they have mind enough to regroup, they will hit us piecemeal.”

The confirmation of his words was not slow to follow. More moving shapes appeared from the north, but they were no great overwhelming mass just yet. What appeared to be scattered squads of outriders, bikes and leaping beast-packs converged on the outpost in a thin but intensifying trickle.

“Holding ground is not ours either, but we will do. Psykers are well-acquainted as well to fighting the beasts.” Bombda brought out his chainsword, and a bolt pistol, by the time Esargon and two other astartes arrive, all with traditional sword and bolt pistol in hand.

“Brother Esargon, Brother Velten, Brother Yulari,” the three would say all putting their swords in their chest before moving together back towards the main road, Bombda pushed one of the barrier walls that went just barely to his lower chest.

“No fliers, open the artillery channels, and open fire as soon as possible first sign of anything fliers, I want the channels closed. “ Bombda spoke to several of the mortal runners that were stationed near. He stared at the outriders, and he saw nothing flying, they weren’t that important to be harassed, but enough for retaliation, he hoped nothing larger came.

“To all, if you see a hole leading outside of the town, fill it, protect the artillery and supplies.” Bombda roared out, “when they are within four hundred meters open up with heavy weapons, within a hundred, unleash hell,and cut down anything left with your blades!”

Several of the makeshift walls that hid the artillery shifted out of place once again, the poor crews were getting their workout before the enemy was able to be directly fired upon by the larger ones. Mortars let loose with arching shells, and howitzers and cannons roared, artillery was something the legion loved using.

What was concerning was the mob of his thunder warriors were out in front of the town, they all looked like bloodthirsty statues, the only thing humming is chain blades, as most of them were duel-wielding chain weapons, or had massive two-handed chain swords. There were twelve in total, their cloaks fluttering as they all came off to reveal the armored hulks underneath.

Five hundred meters out, Bombda believed the enemy to be. “By fire and sword Cousin.” The heaviest of stubbers, and the lighter cannons began to stream hate towards the plains. Lines of tracers came from the stubbers, and the bikers were no match for the wall of concentrated fire. The fact they were driving themselves into tight groups was great, and thankful this was only the forefront of a spear rather than another wall of the horde.

It was two hundred meters, and the rest began to fire, the light stubbers, autoguns, lasguns, and bolters were loosed into the cacophony. It was a beautiful sight to the aging warrior. He knew out of his old bloods, there were likely less then a few hundred, maybe not even a hundred, the six or so in front of the barricade stood. He looked at the young three warriors with him, then the cousins he stood with. He smiled knowing he fought along side others once again, Bombda stared his bolt pistol raising. This was a moment, that he hoped he could carry for the remainder of his days, he knew he was not long. Like those out front, they all knew something was coming, they felt it in their blood, they feel their minds pulling them towards fighting, an almost need, a requirement to die. It was an odd sense, one that felt like destiny, that they needed to die in honor before they lost themselves.

One hundred and fifty, at this moment Bomda stared at those in front and took his leap over the barrier, chain sword spinning as the beasts before them snarled and charged. He would meet them at their own game.

Around him, war and carnage fell into their familiar rhythms. The first waves of the Urshites crashed into the Thunder Warriors like a suddenly rushing river into the rocks of its bed. For a moment, the pockets of emptiness behind each giant were clearly outlined, the techno-barbarians’ ragged front breaking against their countercharge in a spray of red and unclean black. Then the chaos of the struggle enveloped all, but the tune of the slaughter had already been determined in the heat of those few moments. Battered by the volley of artillery, the attackers had no chance of surpassing the Eighteenth’s own fury. Blow by blow, the molten shape of victory was being hammered out on a blood-drenched anvil.

Bodies and shadows moved in a frenzy further afield. In a strange sight, the forces of the Ninth Legion appeared to have scattered on the Urshites’ approach, dispersing at the sides of the barricades, crouched close to the ground. Only the flamers and monstrous autocannon bearers stood fast among the defensive line proper, filling the gaps where the mortal-manned guns and artillery were least reinforced by transhuman warriors. They as well, however, held their fire, even as the enemy came into range of the heavier weaponry. Indeed they seemed to huddle in place, bracing for the charge’s impact shoulder-first instead of raising their weapons. The beast packs and rider-gangs smelled weakness in their silence and eagerly converged where they thought they could strike past the force of the Eighteenth young and old. Conscripted infantry shuffled nervously as they watched the slavering jaws of man and beast draw close.

Until the flamers spoke. Moments before the clash of steel, a shrieking wall of flame sprang into being in the small space that remained between the battle-lines, and closed its teeth around the unwary vanguard. The Lords of Ash plied their craft expertly, sweeping and interlocking steams of fire as if they were indeed great teeth biting into the foe. Mounts and attack beasts reeled from the crackling death, engines crumpled into the flaming wrecks of their frontrunners as volleys of from afflicted cannoneers blasted them to fragments. The loosed javelin of the Urshite charge staggered and lost momentum, dissolving into confusion. Their hesitation turned to panic when the force of the Ninth finally rose from the flanks. Fiendish and grotesque in their panoply of skulls and jagged spines, the Reviled sliced into the open sides and vulnerable point of the staggered column. Cries of surprise, then terror were lost under the howl of chainblades and the roar of battle-calls.

“Graachal! Qasechik! Death walks with us!”

A red-armoured Astartes emerged from the crush of bodies near Bombda - or so it seemed. At a second glance, it was none but Chrol, blood-spattered beyond recognition after hewing his way to the Captain past the denser parts of the fighting.

“Save some of your men’s ammunition, cousin,” his augmented voice thundered over the din of his own great axe, “We may need it yet.”

Despite the breaks in the combat as loose groups of the vanguard were dispatched, the pressure from the enemy only seemed to be steadily growing. In the increasingly brief glimpses that could be caught, the tundra behind them was darkened with moving bodies as the main bulk of the attacking force was finally approaching. While the sky remained fortunately free of either machines or flying horrors, more than just a barbaric throng marched behind the piecemeal outrider groups - the rumble of scrap-tanks and the foul glimmer of warpfire were the thunder and lightning of the gathering cloud.

Thunder from behind, lightning ahead, the heaviest of guns began to fire, the shockwaves of each blast rising dust around the guns and from the ruined buildings, while an echoing applause came from explosions of fire and rubble further down. The squad of thunder warriors ahead had several missing comrades; three were missing, but their bodies were not lying in the growing mound of corpses. Fire had seemingly engulfed one and his armor but he fought on, almost in a bezerker rage, as the heat literally melted the skin off of his flesh. The last moments of this warrior were him stopping a tank in its tracks, the reverberations seen in the ground before both the tank and the warrior were ripped apart by an explosion.

The others held firm, hacking and slashing, the early envoys of heavier vehicles of the enemy were stopped in whatever way possible by the onslaught of fire, and the brute strength of the Warriors of the legions. The problem likely known to all there who had fought those with the wyrd, was the witches and sorcerors. Those that used the warp were hard to take down, and the monsters of Ursh, while so far being held at bay, were a tricky foe.

The human retinue of the eighteenth fought on, several being lost to stray rounds coming from the horde, several being brought down by arrows, several of the poor ammo carriers had been hit, they seemingly were most of the mortal casualties, along with the gunners.

Bombda stared at the warpfire, it was never a good sign, he was thankful for one that stood with him, “Brother Esargon while I disdain your abilities, they may be needed here soon.” Bombda looked over at Chrol and took a deep breath, moving beside him in a lull before the next larger wave of non-fodder infantry. “If you have any psykers in your ranks, now would be the time to use them. We only have Brother Esargon in the ranks of the Eighteenth Legion; he can protect us from some of the magics used. If we are separated and he is with you, he has several things to protect him, but make sure he is protected should a witch engage you as he cannot protect himself until it is dead.”

With that, his bolt pistol raised again, a fresh magazine of ammunition, and although the blades of his chainsword were beginning to dull, he knew it would not end, then looked back, “We have enough ammunition for several days, the problem is our barrels will melt before we use it all.” His sword cut through a man before he picked another up and tossed him and his freshly squeezed head into the horde.

Another one of the thunder warriors was slowly becoming buried underneath the corpses of those he killed, he even had a few stragglers that mortals with lighter stubbers were able to finish off on his back. Bombda was grateful there was warriors of another legion to fight beside yet again, he was grateful, but he knew that still they might not last, one of these gene-forged warriors could easily be worth a thousand men, but when there are likely millions, well he liked the odds still, he might have fun.

He continued to hold position, but the larger foes had began to enter the fray, he stepped forward in front of the gunlight with others of his legion to keep the gunlines protected. “Keep them away from the ruins brothers!” he yelled, “let the guns do the heavy lifting.”

The embattled perimeter around the outpost was indeed steadily receding, with only the superhuman efforts of the legions keeping it from a quick collapse. What had begun as disorderly waves crashing against the foremost defensive lines was now a flood of malformed bodies and ramshackle machines that pressed against the genewarriors. Urshite mutants and barbarian warriors came in a continuous onrush, dull-eyed with a frenzy that was not altogether natural to even their malformed minds. The craft of the sorcerers in their midst held more dangers yet than raw murderous force.

With the impetus of their assault spent, the Reviled found themselves caught in the midst of the mortal crush. It was not a sort of warfare they were altogether unfamiliar with - the veterans among them had faced the hordes of Maulland Sen head-on, both in the open field in their multitudes and in the perilous zones mortalis of subterranean warrens and passages. However, nor was it the form of combat they preferred. Without space to unfold their superior mobility to shatter and outflank the enemy, the squads of the Ninth were forced together into tight wedges, pressing shoulder to shoulder as stragglers were surrounded and overwhelmed by the ferocious mass of the assailants. The lumbering afflicted, too slow to shamble back to the refuge of the gunlines, dropped their cannons and swung at the Urshites with their swollen limbs, misshapen fists crashing like hammers through bone and metal alike. Yet their sluggishness made them easy targets for the foe, and many fell pierced with dozens of spears like the prey of some monstrous hunt.

“We avoid the wyrd,” Chrol now spoke in short utterances between the swings of his axe. The wide sweeps of the tremendous weapon, wielded with an ease that only the strength of his mechanical hands could allow, kept the Urshites at bay, allowing a group of his brothers to rally around him. “It is a wild force. Those who wield it are burned - as often as their foes.”

To the side, a cuneus of the Ninth suddenly fell apart as bolts of crimson lightning struck in its midst. The three Astartes who were directly touched by the fell energies crumpled in a moment, their bodies and the armour over them liquefying into a dark, tarlike roiling ooze. Some of their squadmates were mired in the spreading foulness, struck down as they struggled to move; others scattered from the blast and were encircled one by one. The cohort-captain snarled at the sight.

“But I see no choice now. Ymorag, keep Esargon! Bring Nuvor!” He snarled into his helmet’s vox-web.

Further away on the battlefield, the spined ranks of the Harrowers came into motion. Though equally embattled, the core of their formation had remained more compact, aided by the long hafts of the chainglaives wielded by many of them. Now the backbone of the cohort gathered closer together before making a vigorous concerted push. The Urshite onslaught was for a moment thrown off-balance by the sudden opposing force, earning the cohort precious moments to reposition. At the cost of several Harrowers being pinned down and slain in their rush, a core of them had managed to link up with the Eighteenth Astartes and their psyker. Adding to their cousins’ efforts, their glaives formed a nigh-impregnable circle, keeping the feral assailants at a distance.

One of the Reviled entered deeper into the formation, powering down his sword to address Esargon directly. Nuvor - it must have been him - had no particular marks setting him apart from his brothers, save that the visor of his helmet was darkened even now in the heat of battle.

“I have fought to shackle the claws in my mind until now, but we do what we must,” he rasped, “Tell me how I can join the strength of my curse to yours. Together we might push the witches’ filth away from our brothers.”

When the warp powers came closer, Esargon felt it, and was not fast enough to meet it, he while super-human, was still not trained well in his, abilities, they were rarely tested, and the only time he had to train, was recently when he was in the back lines and alone. He felt the lightning hit several retreating; he thought they were farther away, and he immediately regretted that falsehood mistake. The eighteenth held firm dropping rather than letting the large guns get overran, or at least giving the crews time to bolt up their shelters into kill boxes, which would give them the rest time to finish the job while they stayed somewhat protected. The fight was to the ruins, and everything that could still fire did to continue to drag down the number of attackers with single shells.

But Esargon, when he felt the lightning, there was something that happened, as more lightning reached out from across the horde, it was stopped by something, almost light it dissipated into fire, Esargon had reached out towards it, and those around him felt the air pressure drop, the rise, permafrost coated some shoulderpads, and the ground in a pathway to where the lightning had dispersed in the air.

When it was called out, that there was another who entered the defensive circle, the helmet turned towards the one entering, and immediately glowing red eyes, would be seen, a fire within them. There was a fraction of a section, he did not know this man, he wish he knew more about him, he wish he knew more of what he was doing as well.

“Find them, and overwhelm them, or separate their heads from their body. I can counter some of their witchcraft, but it is growing stronger, either we meet them, or we hold them here until they overpower us.” Even though, his hand was still in front of him, his other moved like a man who’s joints were slowly giving out, reaching and pulling the sword from his hip as he drew his weapon. It was robotic, and few would know the mental strength he had to hold up something simlar to like what he was doing, but if he was not in the backlines, and often times alone, then he likely wouldn’t have any idea what he was doing.

“We can push through, just us, or have a squad… I think we should go ourselves, we wont need to hold back.”

“It would be best,” Nuvor ground out in a thick voice. He began to raise his free hand to his helmet, but paused along the way, gesturing to the Astartes around them, “Clear our way!”

The circle was hesitant to part. The nearest Harrowers glanced back in confusion, still pushing outward with their glaives.

“The Thunder Warrior said to keep you two surrounded,” one of them objected between lunges, “Our cover from the wyrdminds depends on it.”

“We will clash with them,” the strain in the voice of the Ninth’s psyker seemed to be growing with every word, “You should not be between us when we do.”

Reluctantly, the defensive ring began to open. The foremost warriors swept their weapons wide before rapidly stepping out of the way, momentarily forcing the Urshite throng back. The respite was short-lived as the techno-barbarians saw a gap forming before their eyes and surged to take advantage of it. But by then Nuvor’s hand was already on his helmet, pressing against the metal dome as if trying to crumple it. The din of battle seemed to deaden to stifled echoes for a moment, and then the slavering vanguards about to push into the breached circle were suddenly scrambling back, their cries stilled within their throats, eyes dull and vitreous with terror. A wave of havoc rolled along the mass of the attackers, bodies trampling and crashing into each other as most of those directly before the psykers tried to rush aside in a moment of absolute unreasoning fear. The unnatural emotion imposed itself over battle-lust and sorcerous haze alike, greatly thinning for an instant the resistance in a straight path towards the horde’s backbone.

Nuvor stumbled on yielding legs, an incongruously human display of weakness unsettling in such a massive warrior. His mental presence was now almost as intensely perceptible as Esargon’s, though unstably pulsing like a swollen vein.

“We move,” he spoke through a throat clogged with fluid, glancing at his fellow psyker before regaining his footing with obvious effort and brandishing his sword.

Esargon nodded as the wall broke in front of them, and his sword caught fire as he strode forward. He caught a blast of lightning at it’s tip and fire erupted in front of it. His mind was calm, but he was told to stay calm, although his legion or at least the previous variant of them had been reckless, he was unnaturally calm. His veins pulsed in rhythms, and could be seen in his neck, and head, his wrists looked like they were going to bulge out of his gauntlets.

It was wild, each movement he took forward looked as if he was straining under some immense weight, but like he had a force guiding him outside of himself, or at least as if some wild animal had awaken inside him with some rudimentary knowledge of what to do at this time. Fire spit from the tips of his fingers, of his weapon and armor in small bursts, but with each hack and swing, fire erupted from his sword in swaths that cut and burned through flesh and armor alike. It was unnatural, and disgust came from a thunder warrior that had thrown an axe that had struck some mutant trying to get upon their flank before it was ripped apart by the gunline, along with many others on their flanks.

The moment of effort his cousin gave was all he needed to move twelve steps forward into the fray, and let fire erupt, they were still some distance from where they needed to be, but at that moment he knew it would work, that the two could complete their mission even if it was to be their likely end.

He kept moving, and another streak of lightning came from a distance towards them, arching out in many directions, and Esargon froze almost, his sword still alight but he planted it in the ground, the metal flaking off in bits as it was not meant to be used in conjunction with the energies of the warp, but it still stood proud in its usage. He began to whisper once again, as the light field had returned in a wall form.

Gunfire erupted harder as the first push by Esargon ended, shells impacting upon the flesh down range, as the thunder warrior line in front seemed to disappear into the horde as well, but their battle still raged on as their war could be heard in screams, shouts, and roars amongst the growing amounts of walls being erected from fallen corpses and ruined vehicles.

“We stand together cousin, one step at a time. We must control our emotions, we must control ourselves, for that is how we control our power. Repeat my words, and we will succeed.” Esargon said, thought a lot about what to say, he was not formally trained but he knew he must find a way to help his cousin, so he thought of the words that were spoken between the remaining thunderwarriors under his forebearers command.

“Our emotions are our strength, but we must control them, our body is our weapon, and we must control it, our mind is our strength for without it we would fail. We must have all three to be whole, but they must be balanced.”

“Yes - control, angalast...” Nuvor began to recite in a still dulled voice as he followed in the footsteps of his fellow psyker, first yet sluggishly, but gaining in firmness as he went. Now and again his speech lapsed into a wild muttering in some coarse language. “We are the sword and the hand that holds the sword, angalast, angalast...”

Behind Esargon, he strode into the breach cleared by the fiery bursts. The throngs that had been about to surge back against the force barrier stopped, trampling the ashes of the fallen where they stood. Warrior and mutant alike shrank back, their already grotesque features involuntarily contorting into masks of fright. Blood, red or sickly black, trickled from the ears and clenched mouths of some. It was only a momentary obstacle - once the Reviled psyker had passed, the mobs quickly stirred, all the more furious at their moment of impotence. By then, however, the glaives of the Harrower circle were already descending on them. The melee was thinning in the wake of the two psykers, both Astartes and Thunder Warriors finding precious new opportunities to strike.

The tip of the shifting wave was approaching its target. Fire and fear cut through the mass of battle-eager bodies, step by laborious step, a small luminous circle drifting through the dark bulk of the horde. Fell lightning and black gales of pestilential wind lashed at the two armoured figures more and more often, but each was turned aside - either by the shield of force, or by a wyrd’s hand flinching at the last moment in a spasm of fleeting terror. The rear line of the Urshite vehicles was already in sight, the foremost looming large over a mob of witch-marked warriors. On top of that squat, toadlike carrier was laid a crude platform, hung with talismans, where a circle of volkhvs clad in fur and bones writhed like men possessed as they spun their incantations. The closer the Astartes psykers drew, the more frantically the sorcerers lashed and clawed at the air, gathering ever more of their unstable forces around them.

Further behind, most of the Imperial line, or what frayed links of it remained, could not see the supernatural struggle, but one thing it did feel keenly. As the warlocks brought their maledictions to bear against Esargon and Nuvor, fewer of the baneful spells struck the front of the battle. It was small relief among the unremitting onslaught, but a relief nevertheless. Without the noxious hand of sorcery, the struggle became purer. The rage of the barbarian was measured against that of the Thunder Warrior, the strength of the mutant against the Astartes, and where the multitudes of the enemy did not weigh too gravely, the superhumans overcame. However bloodied and diminished, they were not so readily worn down. Bodies were hurler through the air by the force of augmented blows, and the throngs seemed to grow thinner.

Esargon looked forward, and it was there, the sorcerers were before them, a short distance even against those retreating, their pace was remarkable. He held his sword up, as his final barrier faded, and his sword reached out with the fire of a father he never knew, and while his sword bubbled in the warpfire, dripping molten slag, one of the sorcerers was cut in two, cauterized just above the hip at an angle.

What was left of the artillery began to fire when the lightning storms were cut in half, and airburst rained down past them in the horde that was everso dwindling against the on slaught, he saw those flanking him and his newfound brother ripped to shreds as what was left of the thunder warriors raged behind them with whatever remained of their ammunition, and likely some of their sanities. However, one of the three sorcerers that plagued them was cut down by one of these warriors in a berserk suicidal charge that saw both him and the thunderwarrior vaporized with some sort of explosive.

Then it was just one sorcerer, the horde was thinning, one was nothing but a mist, and the other was scrabbling in his own deahthrows upon the ground, slowly burning in the warpfire that was beginning to consume him. The last one was throwing warp lightning in anyway towards the those bearing down upon him.

Among the crackling discharges, Nuvor’s murmurs had turned to a feverish guttural chant without discernible words, broken by a sickly wet hacking. Still he closed the last distance to the transport, its defenders freezing in horror before him. With a rasp, he hauled himself over the edge of the vehicle, only flinching when a sorcerous bolt grazed his pauldron and left a trail of molten metal. The last volkhv looked down at the figure climbing his platform, met the gaze of its visor - and then the warlock’s already mad eyes became hollow with fright. He waved his arms wildly, snapping at invisible enemies all around and blindly raining death among his own force. Then with a strangled cry he clenched his bone-thin fingers around his own head and collapsed as his skull erupted in a conflagration of venomous light.

In the first moments after the last warlock’s death, very few took any notice amid the clamour of the battle. For every combatant, there was only the blood and steel before his eyes, the clashing and screaming in his ears deafening him to all that was around. Even in the many fragments of carnage that the struggle had devolved into, however, the shifting of the tide soon made itself seen as ever fewer foes crowded under the fell hands of the superhumans. Without the distraction of raining death, more often did their blows strike true, and the Urshites were growing hesitant as the cries and jostling that pushed them into frenzied assault became more tenuous.

The backlines were the first to see that the volkhvs had all been slain. Some of the Urshite vehicles that had not wholly disgorged their crews backed away, hastening to turn about and speed into the tundra. Others were abandoned as their occupants leaped out and took to flight on their feet. The rearguard followed, their impatience to wade into combat replaced with the frantic hope to survive what was quickly turning to a defeat. Unlike their foes, for many of the techno-barbarians courage only carried as long as the enemy bled, their fellows were at their back and their gods by their side. Bereft of its sorcerer-priests and faced with giants that time and again furiously refused to die, what remained of the horde was quickly peeling away like a leper’s skin. Within minutes, most had scattered in flight, backs chased by parting rounds of gunfire.

If this was to mark the end of the skirmish, however, it was a signal that many of the Imperials did not heed. Most of those Reviled who could still run with ease were already in pursuit, gleefully hacking down the retreating enemy. The others busied themselves with the fallen, finishing the wounded who still breathed upon the ground or sifting among the dead to renew their trophies.

Esargon stared out, his armor slowly sluffing off in flakes, revealing deeper into the layers of his armor. They had one, the tide was broken, while artillery fire could still be heard, he heard cheering of mortal men. It was something he did enjoy, but there was something else he enjoyed. There were several stragglers by them, but that was nothing to worry about, they were being picked off either by sporadic fire when they unentrenched themselves to run, or one of the barbaric warriors would find and cut the foe in twain. Esargon had other plans, he had found someone he related with, someone who had, something close to what he had, and while it was something rare within the legion to him, he knew now there were others throughout the legions.

Towards the warrior that had pushed far beside him, he extended a hand with a broken gauntlet barely hanging on with burnt leather, and slag being the last remains of some form of whole peace. A small smile kept across his face, “Nuvor, it is good to see that there are others like us within the legions, and I am glad to have met you, and once we have departed from each other in this field, we will meet again.”

The psyker of the Ninth had slid down from the abandoned Urshite carrier, the damage of his own battle-scarred armour clearly reflecting a similar patchwork of wounds beneath. He staggered as his feet struck the ground, a human-like sign of exhaustion that looked unsettling on his giant figure, but found the strength to approach his counterpart with shambling steps and firmly clasp the proffered hand.

“We are bound by fire now, not only our curse. That is almost as strong as blood.” Despite his battered, unstable appearance, his voice was lighter than it had ever been before. The exhilaration of combat and unexpected fellowship seemed to have lifted the invisible weight from his brow. It only lasted a few brief moments, however. Nuvor’s hands contracted, and with a raucous groan he clutched them to his head. He tore off his helmet in a spasm and flung it away, baring a wild-eyed face with lips that frothed with bloody foam.
`
Before they could open to scream, a shadow had appeared over his shoulder as if springing up from the earth. Ymorag, the cohort-captain, had evidently been approaching and now closed the distance in a sprint. With a sharp motion he stabbed a needle-tipped vial of translucent liquid to Nuvor’s shuddering neck, and with a final hacking rasp the psyker crumpled to his knees, a gauntleted hand steadying his unconscious body.

“The gifts of the wyrd have a poisoned grip,” the captain looked at Esargon, his words grave. A heavy blow had dented the face of his helmet, and its left lens was cracked. The ragged eye-slit was dark as if blinded. “No one man’s strength is enough. You only live as long as the brothers behind you are ready to do what they must.”

Esargon had hefted up one of the fallen psykers shoulders, and placed it over his panting, he would then look to the captain, and stand tall as he looked the man up and down, his lips pursed together just barely, “We stand beside you Captain, not behind.” he said moving his free hand up to his chest in a half crested sign to the man. “The wyrd is strong in him, but if he had training, or at least assistance. While… not being one that is well trained, I have practiced, if given permission, I would either like to accompany your legion, or have Brother Nuvor accompany mine.”

“You may follow if you wish,” Ymorag nodded, as a group of Harrowers drew near, clearly accustomed to retrieving insensible bodies, “Our ways are not light to bear, but one such as you could abide them.”

The Astartes Pyromancer stood tall holding his new found companion limp in his arm, his other proudly raised as he stood to attention the best he could as others from his own legion had caught up and pushed out a small perimeter. The gun barrels raised once more above the ruined city, while losses for the mortals was light, mostly those on the outer layer of the city, the equipment was in dire need of maintenance after the constant firing, likely new barrels would have to be affixed before any more sustained firing.

The legion in front however, and the mortals supporting the front lines had been thoroughly chewed threw, but for each lost likely handfuls of the enemy had been taken down.

Bombda strolled through some of the outlying wreckage, the other captain had charged forward maybe a half minute ago, but the old Thunder Warrior lumbered behind the men, he felt sluggish, he had been, but this more than usual. He had been hit several times, but nothing too serious. He looked out, and smiled at the Young Esargon and Nuvor, and turned before he saw anything else as he started appraising medicae to their roles, and for triage. This ruin was likely going to become a triage station before long, so why not begin it now.

“A battle like this is a small thing for Unity, yet for the likes of us it will be the stuff of song,” a metallic voice came from the Sergeant’s side. Synor Chrol was there, dragging his great axe on the ground with a single hand. His right arm was missing below the shoulder, the mechanical stump leaking an oily fluid, and the weapon’s chain was clogged with splintered bone and hair. Behind him, two of the afflicted carried heaps of weaponry in their huge arms - bloodstained cuirasses and gauntlets, dented helmets, discarded bolters, retrieved from the many who would not need them anymore.

The cohort-captain motioned with his visored head, and a group of the Ninth Legion, the medicare helix sigiled on their pauldrons, approached to join their counterparts at the improvised triage points. Their freshly sharpened saws and drills spoke to practice as much as their brisk, efficient motions.

Bombda had turned, and eventually made his way to the group formed around the two young psykers, he stood there looking down at the others. “Captain.” the elder sain in a low tone, with smile looking at the other individual of rank. At that moment, Esargon took his place, and faced the elder of the legions.

“May I be given permission to join their legion, and join theirs as an advisor, to both learn and teach Brother Nuvor?” the Pyromancer requested, while he looked shattered, and beaten, there was still that bit of admiration there in his face.

“Esargon, treat our legion with pride, their legion is much like the older stories of our own, you will fit in well with them, at one point, all looked down upon the banner we wear, but when we find allies, make sure they know who stands besides them.” Bombda exclaimed, a sigil going out, before looking over at the fellow commander, “If you give your permission, Esargon may join you, I will be back at the camp making sure it is settled, I and the other Thunder Warriors will be heading out soon, Captain Regritsov will be in command after that. It was good meeting you, and may you all fair well on your journeys.” With that, Captain Bombda, turned, and strode quickly, waving at the other ancients in his legion to collect them as he departed.

The Envenomed: Military Science Fiction Deniable Operations

Ilshar Ard’sabekh

The scene that was playing out before the squad’s eyes would not have been out of place in the Enthuuran mangroves of Ilshar’s youth. In the evenings, especially during the planetary summer, it was not difficult to see bloated lampreys and spindly carciniforms fighting over some half-rotted carcass from upstream that had remained stuck among the roots. Some theologians of the Spiral thought that all material life had, like the tarrhaidim, been seeded from the Chasm, and in moments like this it was not difficult to believe them. Then again, what was alive and what was dead was sometimes difficult to tell in the ether - the wraithlike spherical entity could have been either for all he could say - which was all the better reason to start moving.

Shrugging away the fortunately harmless shrapnel that had pelted him when the Chasm-dwellers clashed, Ilshar grunted something inarticulate but affirmative and stepped to the side, putting King’s barrier between the struggling beasts and most of himself. The hard-light metamorph unnerved him more than the creatures, uncanny mechanical amoeboid that it was, but so long as they were on the same side its vicinity was preferable to being exposed to the ether scavengers. He hunched low to fit through the door, nodding to Echo’s endoform as he stepped past.

The light on the other side was fainter now that the spheroid entity had gone through. Ilshar held his machine gun at the ready now, warily pointed at the floor but ready to snap up at a moment’s notice.

“If those were any sign, the dwellers here will pick up ether-waves much faster than gunfire,” he motioned to the door they had just left behind, “If we do meet anything, I suggest we shoot instead of cloaking.”