James Swallow - The Flight of the Eisenstein

Decius sprinted back a few hundred metres to where the Death Guard was massing in good order. He saw Tollen Sendek at his heels, a sapper-command signum unit in his grip. 'Ready!' snapped Sendek.

Garro's helmet bobbed. 'Do it.'

Sendek stabbed at a glowing key and Decius heard a sharp, fizzing report from the stone fortification. Then, in the next second, tortured air molecules

screamed aloud and a great length of the stone wall became rubble and powder.

Take the dome!' Garro drew his power sword and cut the air with it. 'For Terra and Mortarion!'

Decius ran at the battle-captain's flank and plunged into the roiling clouds of rock dust, his helmet optics automatically rendering the terrain before him in grainy wire-frames over the standard visual spectrum display. Sendek had, in defiance of conventional bat­tlefield doctrine, used powerful hull-cutter charges designed for starship boarding actions instead of standard krak munitions. The resultant overpressure from detonation in an atmosphere – even one as thin as that of Isstvan Extremis – had blown down a large part of the west wall and gone on to cut a bite from the central dome beyond it. Decius didn't need to look up to remember the form of the target facility. He had committed it to memory on the journey from the Endurance, fixing in his subconscious the shape of the oblate hemisphere and its forest of odd, pipe-like towers.

His boots crunched on the bodies of dead men pulped by the breaching charges. Lines of twisted metal rebar crowded in around the Astartes, with bits of dangling ferrocrete strung along them like dusty pearls. Garro drew back his sword arm to cut through them, but Decius stepped in before him. 'No, lord, allow me.' Decius struck out with the power fist and hammered it four times against the stone, the final blow clearing the last of the block­age before them. He grinned to himself. It wasn't every battle where a man would find himself punching a building.

The Death Guard spilled through the breach and into the dome proper, figures in off-white armour

filling up the space inside. Decius saw hooded fig­ures in black swarming like maddened ants through the smoke and dust, and beyond them… He blinked, drinking in the sight of the peculiar structure that dominated the dome. The briefing had told the Astartes to expect a standard Imperial sensor platform, perhaps with some recent modifi­cations, but nothing more. Decius imagined they would penetrate the dome and find banks of cogi-tators, wave-monitors and the like. He could not have been more wrong.

Every tier of the dome's inner levels had been removed, making the entire space wide open. In the middle of the smoke-wreathed chamber there was a construct that seemed to be made of stone, but not the local variety of grey rock shot with mica. It was a rough-sided ziggurat hewn from dif­ferent slabs of minerals in a panoply of colours. The stones could only have come from other worlds, that was obvious, but why? What possible reason could there have been for something like this, in a place this remote, where no one but a few hundred traitors would ever see it?

On the inside face of the dome there were pat­terns of lines and discs that seemed to go on forever, baffling the eye with illusions of depth and movement where there was none. Then there was the light and the sound, the same discordant noise he had heard on the headset. It was coming from the apex of the construction, rolling down the steep sides of the pyramid in slow, punishing waves. There was a figure up there, floating-Red lasers stitched the air around Decius's head, tearing his attention away from the ziggurat and back to the battle at hand. The Death Guard force

was large, but they had underestimated the number of turncoats clustering inside the main dome. He heard Rahl's voice on the vox, furious with tension. 'Encountering heavy resistance at objective!'

Decius slammed an enemy trooper to death, the blow sending the dead man into a ring of his com­rades and in turn taking them off their feet. Captain Garro sliced through the Isstvanian lines with Libertas shining with gore, the bolter in his other hand banging with each kill-shot it released. Solun kept pace with his commander, gathering Rahl and Sendek to him. Hakur and his squad had the flanks as they pushed in towards the foot of the arcane construction. Decius laughed, the rush of the battle coursing through him, making a dozen more close-range kills with his bolter, blood flick­ing off his wargear. They were at the base of the ziggurat when a dull concussion rumbled through the dome and a set of blast doors caved in with an agonised creak. Muscled giants in purple and gold punched through the entrance and laid into the black hoods.

'Fulgrim's boys have decided to grace us with their presence/ said Garro, baring his teeth. 'Let's not let Eidolon say he made the peak before the Death Guard!' The moment of confusion in the defenders caused by the new arrivals was enough to give the men of the Seventh the opening they needed, and swiftly the battle-captain led the squad up the rough-hewn face of the pyramid.

Decius's gaze ranged up the steep, peculiar little mountain and found the apex again. Yes, he saw it clearly now. A woman was up there, and by some means she hovered, suspended in a cowl of glitter. Light popped and writhed around her shimmering

form, each tiny sun-bright flash accompanied by more sound, more shrieking, lethal noise that pounded into his eardrums.

'Blood's oath!' he shouted, barely loud enough for his words to carry over the horrific dissonance. 'What in the name of Terra is she?'

Garro threw a look over his shoulder and spat out a name. 'Warsinger.'

SIX

To the Brink

Triad of Skulls

New Orders

Garro stole a glance down the sheer slope of the zig-gurat and saw the wild play of the battle spread out beneath him. All around the interior of the dome there was a churning sea of men engaged in the busi­ness of killing one another. Figures in black hoods swarmed at the white and purple shapes of the Astartes, laser fire flashing in chains of red lightning among the flares of yellow flame from bolter muz­zles. Emperor's Children were scaling the pyramid beneath them, following the path his men were forg­ing with every heavy boot step. Dust and stone fragments crackled with each footfall, the peculiar patchwork construct resonating with each tortured stanza of the Warsinger's song.

Garro pressed on, using the thick fingers of his gauntlets to dig handholds from the stonework and haul himself upward. He saw red granite, crumbly limestone and strange chunks of bifurcated statuary

as he climbed. The mess of bricks seemed to have no regularity in its design or purpose. They were close to the woman now, and the Astartes could vaguely sense voices on his vox, but the deafening operatic screams of the enemy champion flattened them under an indecipherable roar. The Warsinger was steady and unmoving, and strange etches of colour and light drifted around her, just as the lazy snowflakes had drifted out on the plains. She had her hands to her chest, her head back, throwing a keening dirge to the roof. The song was endless, without pause for breath or meter, each note locking to the next, cutting through Garro's attempts to think clearly. It was unearthly. No human throat should have been able to voice it, no human lungs able to give it breath. Some force about the razored melody was ripping and pick­ing at the very air, cutting into the flesh of the real. The top of the dome rippled like water, warping.

Indolently, as if it were something done out of boredom rather than directed cruelty, the woman flicked her wrist and sent coils of shimmering aural force humming away down the lines of the pyramid. The waveforms caught around Pyr Rahl and hoisted him off the stone, flipping him over in mid-air. Ash came off him in wreaths, his armour puckering and bending in the wrong places. He released a strangled cry that ended in a crackle of bone as he imploded. The Death Guard's crushed remnants bounced away into the melee below. Garro snarled in anger at the casual manner of his battle-brother's death, charging upward.