There’s dust everywhere. It’s fine, yellowish, a by-product of ash and the up-cast of surface impacts. It films the air and coats upper surfaces. The micro-shocks are making it trickle and sift in places. It seeps through vents. It dribbles down gutters. It wafts like smoke where the breeze stirs it.
It sticks to blood.
It has adhered to the blood-soaked skin and armour of the fallen. It has clotted the pools of blood like sawdust. It covers dead faces like powder, so the corpses look painted and preserved, formally prepared by mortuary assistants.
Vil Teth, gene-named leader of a Kaul Mandori strike team, advances along one of the transit causeways, lasrifle trained. His brown leather boots scuff up the yellow dust. Eight men of his immediate brotherhood squad follow him, with another twelve holding back with the heavy support, an armoured speeder with an autocannon mount. Zorator, their watcher, is somewhere nearby.
The zone has to be cleared. The commanders have ordered this. By midnight, the entire port must be sectioned and secure. There are survivors hiding everywhere. Teth is cautious because he knows that some of these so called ‘survivors’ are XIII Legion warriors, gone to ground. His men are not equipped for that kind of opposition, no matter how broken or cornered it might be.
That’s why they have the heavy support and the watcher.
It’s not death that Teth fears. They’re Kaul Mandori. They are immortal. This is the promise that has been made to them, the vow they have accepted. This is the promise that lured him from his life in the Army and made him join the brotherhood. Immortality for service: it seemed, to Vil Teth, a fair exchange.
It’s not the death he fears. But he’s seen enough action in his career to know that he’d prefer to avoid the pain.
Zorator’s presence in the area is spooking the enemy from cover. Teth rises sharply as three men break into the open ahead, and begin to flee across the field of smouldering rubble. They are non-heterosic humans, which relieves him. They are wearing the livery uniforms of the cargo handling guild. They are unarmed.
Teth raises his rifle, takes aim, and shoots the first of them. A seventy-five metre shot at a moving target. Back of the legs, as he intended. Not bad. The man falls, wailing in pain. Alive. Alive is good. As well as clearing the zone, his strike team has been told to forage for food.
Around him, the Kaul Mandori raise their weapons and take aim. Two make shots that miss the fleeing pair, and skim the dusty rubble. Garel, Teth’s second, squeezes a las-bolt off and clips one of the targets. The man topples, headshot. Dead is good too.
Teth laughs. Garel laughs back, white teeth in a dust-caked face.
There’s another shot. It’s not a las. It’s a gut-deep boom. Bolter. Garel explodes. There’s meat and black blood everywhere in a splatter pattern, covering them all, dark gore and liquidised tissue coating the dust that’s coating them. Teth flinches as he is hit by a whizzing chunk of Garel’s spine. He blinks blood out of his eyes. He sees teeth on the ground, teeth embedded in a chunk of jaw, teeth that just that second were grinning at him.
Teth’s men are scattering. He yells an order.
‘Support! Support!’
There’s a fugging Ultramarine coming at them. Coming out of cover. Coming like a blue blur. The bastard’s huge.
They open fire. Five lasrifles find the giant, clip him with zagging neon las-bolts. The impacts chip his dusty blue armour. They check him, but they don’t stop him. He’s got a fugging sword in one hand, and a battered golden standard in the other.
He puts the sword through Forb, clean fugging through, and then carves Grocus. Grocus rotates as the sword catches him. He spins like a dancer pirouetting, twirling blood like an outflung cape, then falls.
The Ultramarine kills Sorc, then Teth’s world turns upside down as he gets knocked flat. The Ultramarine isn’t stopping. He’s going for the heavy support. He knows that’s the real threat.
Teth rolls over, spitting out blood, dust and the part of his tongue he bit off when the Ultramarine smashed into him.
‘Kill him! Kill him!’
The support unit’s coming up. The men are firing, some kneeling to steady their shots. The Ultramarine’s running right at them. He’s brandishing the fugging standard pole. Idiot. Autocannon’s going to fug him up.
The speeder spurs forward. Why the fug isn’t it firing?
Teth realises how clever the Ultramarine has been. That’s why he came through them, head on. He wants to take the speeder. If the speeder opens up at him, Teth and the others are in its field of fire.
You idiots, Teth thinks. You idiots. What the fug’s the universe going to look like with you ruling it? I don’t matter? I’m fugging immortal! Gene-named! Remember? We’re gene-kin! They’ve taken our blood. They’ll bring us back. That’s what the Word Bearers promised us if we served them. If we die for them, they bring us back. they can do that. They have gene-tech.
Forget me! Fugging shoot the bastard!
The speeder kicks forward to meet the bounding Ultramarine. The fugger’s so fast. Something that big and heavy ought not to be able to move that f–
Teth realises something.
Garel got ruined by a bolter, but the Ultramarine hasn’t got a bolter. He hasn’t got a bolter, so–
The second giant in cobalt blue shows himself. He has got a bolter.
He comes off the roof of a fab-shop twenty metres back. A running jump off a six-metre drop. Transhuman muscle puts some real distance on that. His feet stride out as he sails down. He was waiting until the speeder passed under him. He was waiting for it to come to meet his partner.
The newcomer bangs down on the lid of the speeder, both feet planted, denting the roof panel. The landing is as loud as a bolter round hitting. The speeder bounces on its grav-field, soaking the impact.
The newcomer, feet braced, bends over and fires his boltgun through the roof. Thud. Thud. Two shots. Two kills.
The first Ultramarine reaches him, running head-on into the support squad’s frantic small-arms fire. Teth sees point-blank las shot flecking clean off his armour. More sword work. Arterial blood hoses the side of the speeder. The Ultramarine swings the standard like a club, spading one of the Kaul clean out of his boots.
The second Ultramarine jumps off the speeder’s roof and joins the melee. He’s put the bolter up. Saving ammo. He’s laying in with his combat blade. Eight of the twelve are dead in fewer seconds.
Teth shouts. He shouts so hard he feels like he’s going to turn his lungs inside out.
Ventanus hears the yell. He turns. The battered golden standard in his hands is dripping blood.
‘What did you bring that for?’ Selaton growls, withdrawing his blade from his last kill.
Ventanus isn’t listening. Some of the enemy foot troops are still alive. The leader is yelling.
‘We should shut him up,’ says Selaton. He’s opened the side hatch of the speeder, and is dragging an exploded body out. The cabin interior is painted with blood. He needs to find the levers to adjust the seats.
The Word Bearer appears. Cataphractii. Terminator.
‘Zorator! My watcher! Kill them!’ Teth shrieks.
The Terminator is massive. The enhanced armour, cumbersome, is also as solid as a tank. The lorica segmentata of the huge shoulder plates rise up above the crested helm. The bulky gorget is part snarling mouth, part cage. Studded leather pteruges and mail skirts protect the weaker joints. He looks like a Titan engine: the vast shoulders and upper body, the stocky legs.
Lightning crackles around his left-hand claw. He starts to fire his giant combi-bolter.
Mass-reactive shells rip up the concourse. They explode and kill two of the Kaul Mandori that Ventanus had subdued but not slain. They knock Ventanus off his feet, driving armour splinters into his shin and thigh, and rip a considerable bite out of the speeder’s nose plating.