Septiams broke cover as gunfire and flashes of flame chased them out of their positions. Sarpedon snapped off shots at a couple of unwary targets. Luko"s guns chewed through several more. It was a counterattack - Sarpedon saw that some of the troopers vaulting over barricades and struggling with each other at close quarters were not Septiams, but soldiers from the Stratix XXIII that barely resem-bled Guardsmen at all.
"Tell Lygris to move it." called Luko over the vox, "We"re taking fire!"
"From the Septiams or the Stratix?"
"Neither." came the reply. "Adeptus Sororitas!"
Sister Aescarion ducked into the cover of a column as a spray of fire spattered against the front of the basilica. She paused for a second and charged out again, firing as she went, the boltguns of her Sisters covering her as she led the way to the next patch of shelter. The Stratix and the Septiams were locked in a mad, swirling melee behind her, two sets of sav-ages getting to grips with knives and rifle b.u.t.ts, and if she and her Sisters got dragged down into it they would never get out.
"Marine!" yelled Sister Mixu behind her. Aescarion glanced and saw a flash of deep purple as a s.p.a.ce Marine blasted at them with his boltgun, ducking back in time to avoid the return volley of bolts that shattered the marble around him.
It was the first living Soul Drinker that Aescarion had ever seen, the first glimpse of an enemy her faith required her to fight. More fire lanced from the shel-tered Marine squad and Aescarion heard a scream as one of her Seraphim died, drilled by a bolter round through the abdomen that found a weak spot in her armour and blew out her lower back.
Aspasia! Get the flamers to the fore and pin them down!" ordered Aescarion as her Sisters dived for cover, a whole s.p.a.ce Marine squad now blazing away at them. The dying Seraphim was dragged into shelter and Aescarion threw herself against the clos-est column, feeling bolter sh.e.l.ls impacting against the other side of the stone.She could see across the forum from where she sheltered, and she quickly scanned the expanse of broken marble for more Marines. She spotted some battling amongst the ruins of a shattered basilica, swarming over an autocannon artillery piece, cutting through the Septiams defending it. Another was in ma.s.sive hulking Terminator armour, something Aescarion had never seen before, and more were moving out of a sh.e.l.l hole by a statue plinth to find better cover as Septiams tried to push onto the forum away from the a.s.saulting Stratix.
Mutant. The glimpse she got of it was so fleeting she couldn"t believe it was real - but when the Soul Drinker dodged from cover again her suspicions were confirmed. The Marine"s legs were like those of a huge and monstrous spider, insectoid and tipped with long talons. The Soul Drinker"s armour was more ornate than that of his battle-brothers, and from the force staff he wielded Aescarion recognised a Librarian, keeper of the Chapter"s psychic lore and power.
The Sisters of Battle despised witches, and regarded even those in the employ of the Imperium with suspicion. Aescarion had never seen the psyker"s art result in anything other than corruption and Chaos.
The Librarian would be a target even if he wasn"t who Aescarion suspected: Sarpedon. Com-mander of the Soul Drinkers, leader of the rebellion, and the primary target of Strikeforce Thaddeus.
"Rufilla, Aspasia, give us cover!" yelled Aescarion over the din of gunfire and the whistle of bullets. Sister Mixu dived down to Aescarion"s side.
"That him?" she gasped.
"Do not pause to rescue me if I should fall. He will not fail to kill me and we need lose no more Sisters here than we have to."
"Can you take him?"
"Probably not. Keep the other Marines away, the only chance is for me to catch him alone."
Aescarion charged, firing at Sarpedon with her pistol in her left hand, her power axe in her right. Sister Mixu and the three remaining Seraphim charged out behind her, twin pistols blazing at anything that threatened their Sister Superior as flame from Squad Aspasia washed over the Marine squad in the ruins.
Rufilla"s Sisters sent sheets of rapid fire across the forum. On the other side of the battlefield, the autocannon mount was shattered by krak grenades and the Soul Drinkers a.s.sault squad fell back from the collapsing artillery piece as Aescarion sprinted the last few paces through the bullets to reach Commander Sarpedon.
Sarpedon saw the shimmering diamond of the power axe before he saw the Sister herself. He knew no Septiam, and precious few Guard officers, would ever have a power weapon - the charging figure was a Sister of Battle, a soldier of the Imperial Cult, fanatical and fuelled by pure faith.
If he was lucky, she would think he was a Chaos Marine, mutated by exposure to the magics of the Enemy.
If he was unlucky, she would be a part of the Inquisitorial taskforce that Sarpedon had known was following the Soul Drinkers since their a.s.sault on House Jena.s.sis.
He dug a talon into the ground and pivoted; his great weight - Marine, armour, altered legs - swiv-elling on a pin. One hand gripped the force staff and he let it swing out in a wide arc. The staff met the axe in a huge flash of sparks.
The Sister was a true veteran, with a lined, strongly-featured face and red-brown hair streaked with grey.
Her armour was glossy black with no order markings, free of ornamentation. She swung away from Sarpedon, reversing the swing of her axe and trying to bring the b.u.t.t of it into Sarpedon"s ribs. He raised a leg and deflected the blow but the leg"s joint folded under the impact and he lurched to one side, almost forced to put a hand down to the ground to steady himself. He rolled with the motion and lashed out with two legs, catching the Sister with a glancing blow, and knocked her back a pace. There was a pause, a fraction of a second, as the two sized one another up and tried to antic.i.p.ate the next move.
Traitor." hissed the Sister, hefting her axe from one hand to the other, her pistol holstered and forgot-ten.
"No traitor." said Sarpedon levelly "Just free."
The Sister struck first, an easy feint, striking at Sarpedon"s head in the hope that he would raise his guard and open himself up to a chop to the legs. He deflected the high blow with the head of the staff and the low blow with the other end, handling it like a quarterstaff. He struck back with a leg, stabbing at the Sister"s throat with a blow she dodged with enough speed to instil some respect in Sarpedon. She was a born fighter, this one, with her instincts honed across scores of battlefields until she had the faith to take on a warrior like Sarpedon.
Faith was power. Faith was the straitjacket that had held the Soul Drinkers prisoner since the days of their founding, and faith was the force that kept them fighting now even when so much of their world was gone.
Sarpedon had learned long ago to respect faith, and to treat it as the deadliest weapon there was.
There was a roar overhead and Sarpedon didn"t have to look up to know it was Lygris in the fighter craft.The Sister hacked down at him with a lack of finesse that was well beneath her, driving the shim-mering axe blade down at the Soul Drinker. She stamped down on Sarpedon"s front foreleg - the one that wasn"t bionic - with her foot and Sarpe-don felt the joint wrench, ligaments torn inside the chitinous exoskeleton.
Sarpedon parried her next blow and reached out with his free hand, grasping her armour at the collar. With strength even a nor-mal Marine didn"t have, he picked her up and swung her over his head, smashing her body into a huge chunk of fallen masonry.
The glistening, metallic fighter craft above sent incandescent lances of energy burning into the buildings along one side of the forum. It dipped low, openings forming in the side and a tongue of metal flowing from the hull to let Marines of Squad Luko scramble on board. Sarpedon spotted the a.s.sault Marines following Tellos from the wreckage of the autocannon mount as the fighter swooped low again, close enough to the ground for the Marines to run onto the lowered ramp. Small arms fire rattled along the hull of the fighter and bolter fire ripped back from inside the pa.s.senger compart-ment.
The Sister crashed to the ground, winded but not broken. Sarpedon swung the force staff round and drove it, head-first and double-handed, towards the woman"s midriff. She rolled aside and grabbed one of Sarpedon"s legs, using it as leverage to swing her-self up and ram an armoured elbow into the side of Sarpedon"s head.
Sarpedon reeled. For a moment he was open and vulnerable, and a quick blade would have taken his head off. But instinct took over and he jabbed for-ward and down with one of his powerful hind legs. The axe blade whistled past his face, blistering the skin of one cheek with its power field, as he fell backwards. One hand planted on the ground to support him as the talon of his hind leg sheared through the Sister"s armour and impaled her through the muscle of her thigh.
Two more legs stabbed into the ground to give him leverage and he flung the Sister across the forum, the talon ripping out of her leg as she flew through the air trailing an arc of blood.
"Sarpedon! Karraidin!" came Lygris"s urgent voice over the vox. "We"ve got Guardsmen coming your way, you need to get on board now!"
Sarpedon looked away from the Sister"s p.r.o.ne body and saw the troopers - Stratix XXIII, tattooed hive-sc.u.m to a man - pouring through the Septiam lines and over the ruined forum. There were hun-dreds of them, and in Sarpedon they saw a mutant who had just defeated one of their Sororitas allies.
Lasgun fire ripped towards Sarpedon and Kar-raidin, whose squad was taking cover in ruins a hundred metres away. Sarpedon vaulted over the closest statue plinth but fire was coming from every-where, scoring deep scars in his armour, several lasbursts burning through the chitin of his legs. One Stratix followed him into cover, combat knife clutched in his hand. Sarpedon punched him hard in the face - his head snapped back and he flopped brokenly to the ground. Sarpedon fired twice with his bolter, blowing the torso of one Guardsman apart, before impaling another on his force staff as he fell.
"d.a.m.n it, taking fire! Get us some support!" voxed Karraidin over the chatter of his storm bolter, but Lygris"s fighter was yawing upwards as Stratix anti-tank teams got into position and started sending lascannon blasts up into the gleaming hull.
Without warning there was a t.i.tanic flash and a searing wave of heat. Sarpedon saw charging Stratix reduced to ashen skeletons as his own autosenses forced his pupils almost shut against the glare. The blistering wave of energy washed over him, scalding the skin of his legs and peeling the paint from the edges of his armour.
He glanced behind him and a saw the source of the blast - a Leman Russ Executioner tank, huge plasma blastgun glowing from the sudden dis-charge of power, white smoke billowing from the energy coils.
For a moment there was silence as the glare on Sarpedon"s retinas died to reveal a huge hole blown in the Stratix attack, dozens of charred bodies filling a ma.s.sive scorch mark across the stone.
A huge Jouryan attack filled the vacuum, grey-fatigued troops rushing to blunt the Stratix charge.
Guardsmen or no, they had seen the Soul Drinkers as allies and the Stratix as the enemies of their friends.
Many of them could probably not tell the difference between a Septiam and a Stratix in the heat of battle anyway, and though some saw Sarpe-don"s deformities and faltered in their charge most hurtled into the fray.
A brutal close-quarters fight erupted in the forum, Stratix against Jouryan, looted knives against bayo-nets.
Heavy weapons teams opened up against the Executioner but other front-line tanks, Extermina-tors and Leman Russ battle tanks, rolled through the rabble to support the infantry.
Lygris saw his opening and the fighter lurched downwards again, hull opening up to let Karraidin drag his ma.s.sive armoured frame on board fol-lowed by his squad. The fighter turned and dipped low enough for Sarpedon to leap up on his power-ful legs. He grabbed the edge of the opening and pulled himself up into the pa.s.senger compartment. The fighter aimed its nose upwards and Sarpedon could see thehuge swirling melee filling the forum, Stratix and Jouryan Guardsmen killing each other, the surviving Septiams caught up in the butchery.
Something flared below the fighter and Sarpedon looked over the edge of the doorway to see the Sis-ter he had beaten, rocketing upwards on her Seraphim jump pack. She came up just short and grasped the edge with one hand, the other holding her power axe.
Sarpedon saw she was was streaked with grime and blood, her face set with faith and zeal.
He had to admire her determination.
"For the Emperor, Sister." he said, and with a flick of his powerful bionic foreleg he kicked her off the edge of the ship to fall helplessly into the heart of the battle.
"Get us out of her, Lygris." he voxed, and felt the fighter tip back as the metal flowed back over the opening. The last impression he had of Septiam Torus was the mingled cries of thousands of men as they fought, killed and died. Just as it had been for thousands of years the Imperium was destroying its own, although Sarpedon had rarely seen the idea so vividly come to life.
"Did you see the image we sent you from the aus-pex?" voxed Sarpedon as the engines kicked in and he strapped himself back into the grav-restraints. He looked around the pa.s.senger compartment and saw that the Marine force on Septiam Torus had lost over a quarter of its number, with almost all of Squad Hastis gone. Had it been worth it? Was any-thing?
"Received intact." replied Lygris from the c.o.c.kpit.
"Do you know what it is?"
"Looks like a cogitator circuit, something to recall information from a mem-bank. Probably the key for a security system."
The main engines took over and the sound of the atmosphere rippling on the hull dropped away as the fighter pa.s.sed out into s.p.a.ce.
It had been worth it, Sarpedon told himself. It had to have been. Otherwise, not one of them would survive Stratix Luminae.
TEN.
For Thaddeus, s.p.a.ce travel was the most frustrating part of his work. The time spent between the stars was time wasted, and even when the warp meant a century"s worth of travel took only days those were still days he wouldn"t get back. Patience was per-haps his greatest strength but s.p.a.ce travel, more than anything, made it wear thin.
He knew the Crescent Moon was fast, that was one of the reasons he used it. But he had no way of knowing how quickly the Soul Drinkers could move. Presumably the alien fighters Aescarion had reported were warp-capable, since they would be the perfect way to sneak past the warzone"s block-ades with the minimum of risk - perhaps they were already on Stratix Luminae, and Thaddeus was already too late. Perhaps they had to enact some other part of their plan before they could reach the planet.
Perhaps Stratix Luminae was already lost -Stratix, after all, was in the same solar system and Teturact could have decided to despoil and garrison the planets bordering his homeworld.
At least Thaddeus had some idea of what the place looked like. He had Captain Korvax"s pict-recording playing on a personal holo-servitor. The image was paused as Korvax looked across the defences towards the outpost - a simple, low plasti-crete building with ma.s.sive blast doors and fire points on the roof. It didn"t look like much but, for whatever reason, Sarpedon had risked his own life and the lives of his Chapter to get there.
Lord Inquisitor Kolgo had released Thaddeus without actually admitting he had ever been held prisoner, simply docking his ship for refuelling and maintenance and letting Thaddeus walk out. It was just the next stage in the game, a favour done to secure a favour in the future when Thaddeus might be worth something. However, Kolgo and Thaddeus would never be allies, because Thaddeus would destroy the Soul Drinkers or die trying. Neither option would endear him much to Kolgo.
Thaddeus had used the time he had spent wait-ing to meet up with the Crescent Moon researching Stratix Luminae, but there hadn"t been much to find out. It was an Adeptus Mechanicus Genetor facility, where biological experiments had been carried out by adepts seeking to delve further into the secrets of genetics and mutation. Such out-posts were usually isolated and Stratix Luminae was no exception, being a world of frozen tundra with no population aside from the outpost staff. Ten years ago eldar pirates, who had plagued the Stratix system intermittently, were fought off by a force of s.p.a.ce Marines who responded to the Adeptus Mechanicus"s distress call. There was, of course, no record of who the Chapter involved might have been, which led Thaddeus to conclude that it had been the Soul Drinkers well before their break with the Imperium.
What had Korvax found there that had interested Sarpedon so much? Thaddeus could only hope he gotthere in time to find out.
"Inquisitor?" came a polite voice from the door.
Thaddeus looked up to see Sister Aescarion in the doorway. Thaddeus"s quarters on the Crescent Moon weren"t spartan but were still towards the simpler side of what an inquisitor could become accus-tomed to - there was little more than a bed, his trunk, a couple of chests of clothes and belongings and his desk with its shelves of books above. The large viewport looking out onto s.p.a.ce was one of the few obvious luxuries - hidden in the room were also a poison-sniffer servitor, an anti-transmission field generator and a small void safe in which Thad-deus could transport sensitive or potentially tainted items.
Aescarion wore the simple white robes of the Sis-ters - without her armour she seemed half the size, little more than an ageing woman with an unusu-ally proud bearing. So puritanical was the aura she seemed to project that she made Thaddeus"s rooms seem positively decadent.
"Sister." said Thaddeus. "I hadn"t expected you to leave the infirmary so soon."
"I have had worse wounds that this." replied Aescar-ion, limping slightiy as she walked over to take a seat at Thaddeus"s desk. That she chose to sit at all illus-trated her discomfort, but she refused to show it otherwise. The bone was broken but there was little muscle loss. And I have learned to heal quickly."
"I can imagine."
"I wanted to speak with you, inquisitor. Some-thing has been troubling me."
"About Sarpedon? He is a s.p.a.ce Marine Chapter Master and a powerful psyker. There is no point in chastising yourself for not defeating him."
"It is not that, inquisitor. I have lost in battle before, it is part of what makes us strong. It is just... he could have killed me, and he did not. The ways of the Enemy are many and strange and heretics might spare those who they think will suffer more from living than from a quick death - but he had no idea who I was. I was just another soldier in a city full of soldiers."
"Do you believe he knew you were part of my strike-force? That he let you live to send a message to me?"
"Perhaps. I just think that Sarpedon is no normal enemy. The Guardsmen genuinely believed that the Soul Drinkers were Imperial Marines and fought alongside them, even against their fellow Guards-men. I fought Brother Castus and Parmenides the Vile, inquisitor, I was at Saafir and the Scorpion Pa.s.s. I know many of the forms of the Enemy, but the Soul Drinkers are the subtlest yet. They are not just animals to be hunted.
This pursuit could cost us more than just our lives."
"Sister, you have done what I have not. You have seen the Soul Drinkers up close and you have fought with their leader. You must be at the fore-front on Stratix Luminae. As always, you may be required to give up your life and you will very prob-ably have to face Sarpedon again. Be honest with me, Sister - does this scare you?"
Aescarion smiled, a rare thing. "I am terrified, inquisitor. The Enemy has always terrified me. It is through faith that I live with this fear. If I was not afraid, then what would there be to believe in? I know the Emperor is with me because without Him I would be paralysed with fear. But with him, I can fight the Enemy in spite of it."
Very enlightened, Sister."
"It took me most of my life to understand, inquisi-tor. And it has not been a short life."
Thaddeus reached down and adjusted the holo-servitor"s controls. The image flickered and changed to an old Mechanicus file. Once he had known the name of Stratix Luminae he had been able to find some rudimentary information on the place, and the newest layouts dated from a few months after the Soul Drinkers had driven off the eldar there. The surface building was a simple one-storey entrance to the lower levels. Hastily-improved defences ringed the outpost entrance, consisting mostly of plasticrete blocks placed on the frozen, broken earth.
"The entrance is just one floor, probably no more than security station." said Thaddeus. "a.s.suming the installation is on Standard Template Construct lines there will be at least two levels below the surface.
Probably a laboratory level, maybe containment on the lowest floor where it"s easiest to isolate. Apart from that we know nothing, except that somewhere in there is an objective that Sarpedon considers important enough to risk the life of his whole Chapter." "Unless we get there first." said Aescarion. "We may not have that luxury. The Soul Drinkers have a head-start and they know what they are look-ing for."
"I and my Sisters are ready. I know that Colonel Vinn and the storm troopers would say the same. I have just one question, inquisitor." "Ask, Sister."
"Stratix Luminae is evidently deserted. Do you know why it was closed down?"
Thaddeus shrugged. "No, Sister, I don"t. Aside from these final schematics Stratix Luminae"will cease to exist as soon as the Soul Drinkers turn up. I have noticed they seem to have that effect."
Thad-deus picked up the decanter that stood on a side table. "I would offer you a gla.s.s of devilberry liqueur,Sister, but I would imagine you abstain."
The human form is the form of the Emperor and to poison it willingly is a sin." said Aescarion.
"We are all sinners, Sister." replied Thaddeus, pour-ing himself a measure.
Aescarion stood, smoothing out her simple robes. "There are some things that it is pointless to lecture on."
she said. "Many are the times I have extolled the virtues of abstinence to the laity. Few are the times I have been listened to. In this case it is enough that I follow my vows myself."
"I am glad I do not offend your sensibilities."
"You know as well as I do there are far graver sins you could sink to. Now, I should minister to my Sis-ters, I have not led their prayers for several days."
"Say a few words for me, Sister. We must all pre-pare as best we can."