The Beast Arises

The gunmetal floor tiles glittered like a starfield, littered with flakes of glass that a moment ago had been dust. Opposite, a security desk sat behind a reinforced shatterglass screen, the window turned almost completely white with cracks. On various walls, the torn corner scraps of instructional posters fluttered as the vestibule breathed in, exchanging the oxygen that the melta bombs had consumed for smoke from outside.

He shot and killed an ork that pushed its way in through an interior door, then another, and another. Shot, kill; shot kill. Purity through utility.

More were coming, discernably different from the savage fighters he had encountered on Prax thus far. Another greenskin sub-type, perhaps. Another clan. Their alien features were encased in horned helms, obscene musculature clad in thick body armour decorated with an optically striking black-and-white checker pattern. There were too many, and the number of entrance corridors was too great, for even transhuman reflexes and Space Marine armament to hold them at bay.

Zerberyn swung his thunder hammer as he charged headlong into the pack. The timed-release detonation vaporised the first ork’s torso, pasted its legs in two long red streaks back the way it had come, and lifted the half-tonne brute behind it off its feet, sending it crashing through the shatterglass screen. Another, hard and green and slabbed in armour, came in across his swing. It roared, all aggression. He roared back, vox-amplified to a crippling pitch, as the ork slammed into his turned shoulder and bulldozed him into the wall.

Nalis and Borhune arrived in a storm of bolter fire that shredded the ork. Following in their wake came Jaskólska and her Scions, lighting up the room with full-auto bursts of hot-shot las. Powerful though the Scions’ hellguns were compared to the standard Guardsman’s lasrifle, each monstrous greenskin took several point-blank blasts to put down, and several more to finish off.

The last ork crunched onto the glass-strewn tiles, crisped like meat held too long against the heat.

Zerberyn disinterred himself from the dented wall and opened a channel.

‘Columba, Major.’ He masked the twitch of his lip and swallowed his distaste. ‘Kalkator. Entrance secured. See that the perimeter is held and join me in the control room.’

‘A pity our fathers were such adversaries,’ voxed Kalkator. ‘Together, their sons would have been unstoppable.’

‘In some other universe, perhaps,’ Zerberyn returned, and then, aware that Bryce was also on the channel, added a poisonous, ‘cousin.’

That was an explanation that he did not want to have to give. Not now. And not to Marshal Bohemond when they finally rejoined the muster at Phall.

He scowled.

First Captain Zerberyn of the Fists Exemplar did not answer to the Black Templars.

‘This facility’s data stores had better be worth it.’

‘This way, lord captain,’ said Jaskólska smartly, unaware that the warning had been intended for himself.

Glass ground under her feet as she eased open an interior door and stepped over the greenskin corpse that had been holding it ajar. Zerberyn followed, then Nalis, Borhune, Tosque and Galen. Tarsus remained behind to hold the vestibule, directing the remaining Scions into fire points behind upturned tables and security lockers.

A short corridor led to a metal staircase. It looked like something that would have been used by lower-grade servants and perhaps as an escape route during emergency drills. Access doors onto exterior walkways stood on each tier, bloody handprints on the emergency release bars. A pair of panicked-looking gretchin came clattering down the escape and straight into two precise blasts from Jaskólska’s hellgun. They rolled down, the sounds of bolter fire ringing back through the stairwell’s metal frame as Zerberyn and the major pushed through another door and into a control room.

The terminals were still active, continuing with their operators in absentia to plot the blips and curves of an intensely crowded near-orbital space. Empty, bloodstained chairs were set up along curving desks, blinking, chirping workstations facing an armourglass window. The view was of an endless beige plain of desertified pastureland. A railroad cut across it, trailed by a dust road. Both ran from the substation to Princus Praxa. Zerberyn manually operated his helm’s magnification selector. It was no substitute for a pair of magnoculars, but it bought him a blurry three- or four-fold zoom — enough to make out the mottled grey industrial stacks crowding the city’s outer walls. The chimneys pumped out a grimy, ochre smog that hazed almost everything else within it. Even the high adamantium-ceramite walls of the Crusade-era citadel that dominated the settlement’s heart were little more than a gothic, crimson shadow.

‘What is that smoke?’