The Beast Arises

The sergeant was an iron-faced ascetic with ice water in his veins and heart of leaden grey. A narrow view of the Fists Exemplar creed of humility had led him to turn down the captaincy of the First more than once, and he had publically rebuked Koorland over the offer of a position in the reformed shield corps of Terra. Zerberyn liked him.

The narrow beam of his own helm light cut half a metre into the swirl, catching the whipped-up grit as if by surprise, stripping it from uniform night-black to white and grey and bloody brown. A crowd of gold runes representative of his squad slid around the periphery of his internal faceplate display, the gunship’s shaking, under the force of its own engines, unsettling the runes’ positions. The boarding ramp railroaded out into the dark. He could see neither the ground nor the end of the ramp.

‘We are Exemplars,’ he said into his helm vox. ‘No wall stands against us. No wall can stand beside us.’

‘You all know your objectives,’ Columba concluded.

Zerberyn led them into the vertical jetwash, running, a servo-powered leap plunging him into a rippling funnel of dust. For a moment a combination of his battleplate’s powered systems and the updraught of disturbed earth made him fly. Then he fell, five metres, half a tonne of ceramite slamming two-footed into dry earth. Suspensor grids dispersed the impact force throughout his armour, plates shifting, crunching to a crouch, then with a counter-whine of servos he came up, disengaged his pistol’s mag-holster and whipped the weapon up.

He could not see a thing. Dust devils gyrated between the ground and the gunship’s thundering exhausts, sieving the landing lights from above. Blinking runes in his helm display and the vibrations picked up by his boot sensors told of veteran-brothers thumping into the ground around him.

They fanned out from the drop zone, murky giants with boltguns raised and aimed.

Veteran-Brother Donbuss was triple-checking the belt feed to his heavy bolter and covering the advance from relative high ground. Antille dropped to one knee, hand to where his ear was underneath his helmet, the long antennae of a shoulder-mounted vox-booster whipping above him. Each Space Marine’s battleplate was independently vox-capable, but the volume of near-orbit communications noise and the signal diffraction of their own fleet’s place in hiding necessitated the booster should they need to raise their brothers around the eighth planet. Apothecary Reoch stood nearby holding his narthecium at arm’s length, sampling the wind for toxin traces or pathogens. It was almost impossible to kill a Space Marine by such means, but a reasonable excess of caution won more wars than abandon ever had. Veteran-Brother Karva was the twelfth and last down, pivoting on the spot as a promethium tank dropped through the darkness and catching it in the crook of his arms.

Zerberyn voxed up to the Thunderhawk that his squad was deployed, received two brittle clicks through his microbead in response, and then felt a slam of downwash.

With a tremendous roar of thrust, the gunship rose, re-angling its engines for horizontal flight, and pulled away. The dust storm began to settle, stones and larger debris falling to leave dried organic matter zipping about. It cleared the air enough for Zerberyn to see Penitence

turning for a fly-past of the planet’s principal city, Princus Praxa, and its Crusade fortress approximately two hundred kilometres east across the daylight meridian.

A second gunship circled in low. Its metallic bodywork was embellished with unorthodox modifications: battle honours, ablative hull plating and variant weapon loadouts — not all of it was of obvious human make. The star-backed iron skull of the Iron Warriors stared grimly from its tailfin and nose section. Keeping low, it banked left and began to steadily climb, mapping the terrain with a pair of sweeping spotlights and searching for an appropriate drop-zone of its own.

Zerberyn processed his surroundings without thinking about it.

Left, a diagonal line of wind power converters, bi-blades, chomping sombrely through the dark. A greasy metal water tank, empty, riddled with holes, fenced off with wire that had been cut and trampled. Brother Tarsus advanced, boltgun sweeping the row of quietly whumping turbines.