Koyne had the gun but the twitching of the muscles and the flesh-pocket would not let it go; pain from the impact injury robbed the Callidus of the usual concentration and control needed at a moment like this.
The Son of Horus changed his grip on the knife, holding it by the blade, ready to throw it; in the next second a crash of bolter fire echoed and impact points appeared in a line of silver blooms across the chest plate and left shoulder pauldron of the Astartes.
Through blurry vision, Koyne saw a man-shape moving faster than anything human should have; and a face, a mask, a fanged skull made of discoloured gunmetal.
Scrambling backwards, the assassin watched as the Garantine sprinted around the Astartes in a tight arc, rolling over fallen counters and leaping from pillar to wall. As he moved, his Executor pistol was snarling, spitting out low-gauge bolt shells that clattered and sparked off the towering warrior’s armour.
The Astartes let the combat blade drop and brought up his bolter; the weapon was of a far larger calibre than the Executor. A single direct hit at the ranges these close quarters forced upon the combatants would mean death for the Eversor; but to kill him, first the Astartes had to hit him.
Koyne moaned in pain as the gun slowly eased out of the stress-tensed flesh pocket, watching as the two combatants tried to end each other. In the confined space of the destroyed store the bray of bolt shells was deafening, and the air filled with the stench of cordite and the heavy, choking dust from atomised flakboard. A support pillar exploded, raining plaster and wood from the broken flooring above. The Callidus could hear the animalistic panting of the Eversor as he moved like lightning back and forth across the Space Marine’s line of sight, goading the Astartes into firing after him. Stimm-glands chugged and injectors hissed as the Garantine’s bloodstream was flooded with bio-chemicals and cocktails of drugs that pushed him beyond the speed of even an Astartes’s enhanced reflexes.
Koyne’s gun, slick with mucus and fluids, finally vomited itself out of the assassin’s stomach and on to the floor. The Callidus clutched at it and released a shot in the direction of the grey-armoured hulk. The neural shredder projected a spreading plume of sickly energetic discharge around the Son of Horus and the warrior staggered with the hit, one hand coming up to clutch at his helmet.
The Garantine roared past, sprinting over Koyne where the Callidus lay propped up against a wall. ‘My kill!’ he was shouting, the words repeating and coming so fast they became a single stream of noise. ‘My killmykillmykillmykill–’
He was a blur of claws and gun, too fast for the eye to process the images. Sparks flew as the Eversor assassin collided bodily with the Astartes and knocked him down, the Garantine firing his Executor into the impact holes in the warrior’s chest at point-blank range, clawing wildly at his helmet with the spiked talon of his neuro-gauntlet. Koyne could hear the Astartes snarling, angrily fighting back, but the Eversor was like mercury, slipping through his clumsy armoured fingers.
Then dark, arterial blood spurted as the armour was cracked and the Garantine dug into the meat he found inside. His bolter dry, the Astartes punched and bludgeoned the Eversor, but if any pain impulses reached the Garantine’s mind, the brew of rage-enhancers and sense-inhibitors swimming through his bloodstream deadened them to nothing.
With a croaking, wet rattle, the Astartes sank back and collapsed. Chattering with coarse laughter, the Garantine swept up the fallen combat blade and pressed all his weight behind it. The weapon sank through sparking power cables and myomer muscles until it pierced flesh and cut bone.
After a minute or so, the Eversor dropped to the floor, still shaking with the aftershock of his chemical frenzy. ‘Ss-so…’ he began, struggling to speak clearly, forcing himself to slow down with each panting gulp of breath. ‘Th-this is how it feels to k-kill one of them…’ He grinned widely behind the fanged mask. ‘I like it.’
The Callidus stood up. ‘We need to move, before more of his brethren arrive.’
‘Aren’t you… aren’t you going to th-thank me for saving your life, s-shape-changer?’
Without warning, the Astartes suddenly lurched forwards, gauntlets snapping open, savage anger fuelling a final surge of killing fury. Koyne’s neural shredder was at hand and the assassin fired a full-power discharge into the skull of the Son of Horus; the blast disintegrated tissue in an instant wave of brain-death.
The warrior lurched and fell again. Koyne gave the Garantine a sideways look. ‘Thank you.’
SIXTEEN
Collision / The Choice / Forgiveness
A bombardment had begun, and the people of Dagonet’s capital feared it was the end of the world.
They knew so little of the reality of things, however. High above in orbit, it was only the warship Thanato that fired on the city, and even then it was not with the vessel’s most powerful cannons. The people did not know that a fleet of craft were poised in silence around their sister ship, watchful and waiting. Had all the vessels of the Warmaster’s flotilla unleashed their killpower, then indeed those fears would have come true; the planet’s crust cracked, the continents sliced open. Perhaps those things would happen, soon enough – but for now it was sufficient for the Thanato to hurl inert kinetic kill-rods down through the atmosphere, the sky-splitting shriek of their passage climaxed by a lowing thunder as the warshots obliterated power stations, military compounds and the vast mansion-houses of the noble clans. From the ground it seemed like wanton destruction; from orbit, it was a shrewd and surgical pattern of attack.
Koyne and the Garantine stayed off the main avenues and boulevards, avoiding the roadways where processions of frightened citizens streamed towards the city limits. Hours had passed now since the killing in the plaza, and the people had lost the will to run, numbed by their own terror. Now they stumbled, silently for the most part, some pushing carts piled high with whatever they could loot or carry, others clinging to overloaded ground vehicles. When people did speak, they did so in whispers, as if they were afraid the Adeptus Astartes would hear the sound of a voice at normal pitch from across the city.
Listening from the shadows of an alleyway across from a shuttered monorail halt, the Callidus heard people talking about the Sons of Horus. Some said they had set up a staging point in Liberation Plaza, that there were hordes of Stormbirds parked there disgorging more Astartes with each passing moment. Others mentioned seeing armoured vehicles in the streets, even Battle Titans and monstrous war creatures.
The only truth Koyne could determine from what he gleaned was that the Sons of Horus were intent on fulfilling the orders of Devram Korda to the fullest; Dagonet City would be little more than a smouldering funeral pyre by nightfall.
The assassin looked up to where a massive streetscreen hung at a canted angle from the front of the station building. The display was cracked and fizzing with patchy static; text declaring that the metropolitan rail network was temporarily suspended was still visible, the pixels frozen in place. Koyne eyed the device warily. The public screens all had arrays of vid-picters arranged around them, connected to the municipal monitoring network. The Callidus had a spy’s healthy disdain for being caught on camera.
As if it had sensed the shade’s train of thought, Koyne saw very clearly as one of the picters jerked on its gimbal, stuttering around to face the line of refugees. The assassin retreated back into the shadows, unsure if the monitor had caught sight.