The Beast Arises

Brother Scuris came apart. He was a few metres to Thane’s left. As Thane tried to clear his eyes and head, he had a vague impression of lunging, skeletal shadows that seemed to have emerged from the air itself. They wielded blades and claws, and they cut through Scuris’ armour as if it too were a shadow. Scuris’ arms fell to the ground. Blood sprayed from his gorget. Up and down the line of the Fists Exemplar, vitae jetted in powerful fountains, the massive hearts of the Adeptus Astartes warrior pumping blood far into the air. It misted the atmosphere of the room.

Thane’s vision split, doubled, blurred. He made out a line of hostiles approaching from the far end of the room. There were flashes from gun muzzles and projectiles slammed into Thane’s chest-plate. They hit with the stopping power of heavy stubbers. And everywhere there were the rapid shadows of the enemy already upon the Fists Exemplar.

The vox was a ringing howl. Communication was impossible. Defence and retaliation were not. Thane fired, sweeping his bolter in a wide parabola before him. He stepped backwards. He could not trust his agonised senses. He could trust his brothers.

Through the static came the heavy pounding of bolters. Thane’s shoulders locked with his brothers’. The Fists Exemplar formed a circle, striking back with a devastating volley. Shells punched into the walls of the manufactorium, chewing through the shadows and the advancing foe. Rockets hit the line. The Space Marines struck back at stealth with overwhelming brute force.

The white noise began to break down as the beings generating it were annihilated. Thane’s vision cleared. He saw the broken line of the Sicarian infiltrators. With their hemispherical skulls atop bodies whose limbs were narrow articulations long since absent of flesh, they were scarabs of war. They still came forwards, firing stubcarbines, broadcasting neurostatic waves, but the cumulative strength of the neurostatic assault was no longer enough. The genhanced senses of the Adeptus Astartes magnified the damage of the wave. They also adapted faster.

The lethal shadows, too, now had shape. Ruststalkers. The skitarii assassins had the same slender build as the infiltrators. They moved like razors. At close quarters, their transonic blades sliced through ceramite as easily as flesh. Unlike the infiltrators, the hum they broadcast rode up and down the frequencies, finding the vibrations to slip through the molecules of armour and bone.

But they had to get close. The Fists Exemplar pushed the skitarii back with a mass-reactive storm. Enemy bodies burst into shrapnel. Mechanicus warriors disintegrated. Shapes fell to the ground: shapes that looked like warped, metallic ruin, and yet they bled.

‘Through them now!’ Thane yelled.

He jogged forwards again, still shoulder-to-shoulder with his brothers. The Fists Exemplar became their name incarnate: a massive ceramite fist rushing into the foe, shattering the advance. Infiltrator rounds cracked Thane’s breastplate. He was running through hammer blows, but his own blows were harder. His force was unstoppable.

Half-molten slag cracked and shifted and gave way beneath his heavy steps and his boots sank into viscous heat, but he kept his footing. He kept his momentum. The Exemplars were a single entity, a battering ram come to shatter the enemy line.

More infiltrators fell. The stiletto jab to Thane’s forehead and the subaural sapping of his spirit itself faded. The vox sputtered back to life with the roar of the Space Marines’ anger. The ruststalkers closed with them, needling in like filaments to a magnet. Some of them danced between the shells. Some of them struck home with their blades. Thane heard brothers’ snarls cut short. He also heard high-pitched bursts of squealing binharic as the assassins were taken apart by retaliatory fire.

Thane hurled a frag grenade. The skitarii had little flesh for the shrapnel to pierce, but the blast fountained metal over them, melting joints and incinerating circuits. A ruststalker leaped in front of him, slashing at his helmet with its chordclaw. He jerked his head back. The claws scraped across his grille. With his right arm, he swung his chainsword diagonally down through the assassin’s neck, cutting through cables. It severed a cybernetic spine. The ruststalker’s head flew off, and Thane trampled over the body.

The Fists Exemplar collided with the infiltrators. They attacked with fury and with sheer mass, turning the Sicarians into scrap metal. The remaining ruststalkers retreated, vanishing back into the shadows.

‘Are you still holding, Thamarius?’ Thane voxed.

‘Barely,’ the sergeant answered. He sounded winded. ‘Still not through the Gate.’

‘We are almost with you.’ There was a doorway ahead. Beyond it, a narrow corridor, and the Martian daylight. The end of the manufactorium and a short run to the rear of the Mechanicus lines and the Tharsis gate.

The huge fist kept moving.

‘Our losses—’ 7-Galliax began.