‘One!’
Orks piled in from every crawlway intersection and corridor. Tyris shot one between the eyes with a stalker round. Two. Three. Chewed out a chest cavity. Blew off an arm. The muffler was still on, the selector on single shot. One got in close enough to spray Vega with blood as the Doom Eagle gunned through its chest.
‘Now!’
The shout followed the same neural pathway that triggered his jump pack. Vega gave an answering roar. A big ork with a squealing chainaxe that had cut in behind Iaros and swung back its arm disappeared like tallow before a hydrogen torch as the four of them lifted off. Tyris felt a shuddering as he rose on a column of chemical burn. He threw out a hand to grab onto the Sister’s and Vega did the same. Between the three sets of jump packs they carried the drugged ork psyker up into the air and left the howls and gunfire behind. Tyris’ armour registered an impact as a startled gretchin got lucky with a snap shot, but he did not otherwise notice the damage.
The safety rail of one of several overlooking sub-decks passed beneath them.
His downward arc carried him over the fat body of an ork fighter sporting an immense set of underwing rocket pods. He hit the ground running to bleed off his momentum. Bullets fired from below rattled dully off the aircraft’s fuselage and the underside of the deck. Iaros was already down, and pushing for the searing wall of daylight that would once have been shielded by a coherence field but that was now just a burning hole in the fortress’ adamantium outer wall.
‘Antares,’ Tyris voxed, leaving Vega and the Sister to haul up the psyker and run for the exit. He checked his visor chrono. ‘We have five minutes before the Storm Eagle returns to my beacon. It will leave with us or without in six.’
‘Understood, brother-sergeant.’
A burst of gunfire exploded in volume as a set of access doors at the other end of the sub-hangar opened up. Antares backed through them, stalker bolter held one-handed to rake the opening with fire. The second Sister retreated with him, sword flickering out where a killing blow presented itself, but otherwise exploiting the Fist Exemplar’s armoured bulk as mobile cover. The secondary target was draped across his shoulders. It was the smaller of the two psykers, not much larger than the Sister of Silence. A juvenile perhaps. Whatever the complexities involved in the extraction of two psykers from Eidolica when Lord Thane had prepared them only for one, the double reward struck Tyris as worth the risk.
He had been left with no question as to the psykers’ value to the Imperium.
Antares clubbed the restive psyker into submission with a crack to the base of the skull with his bolter’s magazine, and the doors slid shut behind him. The Fist Exemplar lumped the ork off his shoulders. Bullets rang dully on the doors’ opposite side. He sealed them with a sharp burst from his bolter’s combi-melta.
‘Nubis?’ said Tyris.
‘He is not coming,’ Antares replied, voice inflected with emotion.
‘What do you mean, not coming?’
Tyris switched frequency, and was immediately overwhelmed by the squeal of bolter feedback. There was a crackling whoosh, the Salamander’s combi-flamer, followed by draconic howls.
‘Brother?’ Tyris voxed. The mass-reactive scream was his only answer. The periodic click-pause of auto-loaders provided an opening for the occasional legible word. Most of it was curses and vengeance.
But Tyris heard the name ‘Vulkan’ at least twice.
‘Move,’ said Antares. His voice was flat. Whatever he had felt before was dead now. Like his world. ‘There is nothing left for us here.’
Plaeos — Hive Mundus
Check 2, 01:02:59
Bullets sprayed from the power claw’s digital stubbers and made wobbling metallic crumps in the aluminium housing that Kjarvik sheltered behind. He rose to return fire, but found that he was barely capable of lifting his pistol against the witchstorm. By the stabbing throb in his skull and the ache in his jaw, he felt the maleficar’s attention shift from Zarrael to him. The wind ground him back first one step, then two, ankle-deep, the water still rising. The boss ork bore down, kicking out rounds, clanking plates as wide across as the back of a Rhino and glowing like an evil sun.
Kjarvik let the psyker-wind push.
The stubber, he could take. The power claw was something else entirely.
Two steps became three, and around that third step the entire universe seemed to realign.
His preternatural senses detected nothing untoward, but for all that the thunder of crashing water and the stink of fyceline surrounded him, it felt as though the bottom had fallen away from him and left those sensations hollow. It was without flavour or colour. Silenced. The orks continued to stamp and chant, but it was no longer the cacophonous force that it had been, and smaller for being the making of a horde rather than of a single overbearing power. The wind fell away. The water funnel slapped down as though something mighty had just died.
Those were the most unsubtle effects, but the least profound. The howl, not the wolf.
The expression on the maleficar’s alien face was the opposite of whatever spiritual perturbation Kjarvik felt.
Horror, even to that obscene degree, had been engineered out of the Space Marines’ fundamental makeup with the primarchs, but even had he been still human he doubted whether he could have experienced the psychic unravelling that the witch suffered now. It must have been like opening one’s eyes and finding that the illusion of a visible reality had been a dream, or awakening with no sense whatsoever of one’s physical body.
‘Get down, brother.’
Kjarvik dropped to one knee, and a ball of superheated plasma punched the mega-armoured boss ork through the chest. It dropped in a metallic clatter as Bohr moved up. Orks on the overlooking gangways belatedly opened fire, but a full-auto blizzard of bolter fire from the Iron Father’s servo-harness mowed them down. Kjarvik hardly needed to turn around to see Sommer and Rós moving up along the edges of the walkspace, in the partial shelter offered by the catwalks above them. Phareous advanced with less caution, drawing fire from both angles to where he walked up the middle.
‘Baldarich? Zarrael?’ The Iron Snake’s words were punctuated by the bang of solid rounds on his shield.
Kjarvik turned at the familiar liquidised scream of powered adamantium teeth at work on soft tissue. Freed of the psychic winds, the Flesh Tearer had closed on the maleficar’s orca-like mount and had his howling weapon buried in the monster’s flippered forelimb. Zarrael had his mouth wide open and basked in the spray.
With a wail of something more freeing than mere pain, the amphibeast reared up on its vestigial hindlimbs. It pawed with webbed claws at its collar, throwing the psyker from its back, and almost incidentally swatted the Flesh Tearer contemptuously from the walkspace and into the water.
Though no longer wreathed in lightning, the monster was still massive, more so now that everything around it had become inexplicably smaller, and it flattened an ork walker the way a cat would flatten a mouse. It carelessly shoved a heavier fighting machine off the walkway as it limped around, then snapped at another, snatched it up in its jaws and sent it smashing through the orks that had been mobbing in behind. They had been ready to break before the psyker had arrived to bolster their belligerent spirit, and they broke now, pounding through the ruined floodgates.
The amphibeast’s rampage back through its master’s escort had left the witch untended in the middle of the walkspace, spread amidst a floating mess of bent cogwheels and split plates like a scrap heap that someone had taken the trouble to build, but then abandoned to the floods.