Dan Abnett - Know no fear. The Battle of Calth

The fight is chamber by chamber, companionway by companionway. Daemons lurk in every shadow and around every turn. They spilled into the flagship from loose folds of the warp when the main bridge was compromised, and flow through the vast vessel like a flash flood of ink, of pitch, of liquid tar.

Thiel, Empion and the rest of the ship’s defenders are learning how to daemon-fight under practical conditions. Fire and blades have greater efficacy than projectiles or energy weapons. It seems that the primordial entities suffer greater harm from simple, basic injuries: the primitive qualities of edge, and blunt force, and flame.

Thiel has a theoretical developing, a proposition that suggests a link between damage and ritual function. Fire and cutting or stabbing tools were essential elements of ancient magic-working. It seems more than coincidental that their symbolic provenance should be retained. It is as if the daemons, products of the primeval void before man’s birth, remember the sacred instruments that were used to summon them.

He doubts he will ever have the opportunity to write down or propose this theoretical. He believes that, if he ever should, he would be scorned as a superstitious fool.

Urgency is renewed. Bormarus leads the way. Flies buzz in the clefts of the hall, and gather in frenzies around the bulkhead lights. Mould has formed on ceilings and wall ribs, and slime is dribbling up through deck seams.

Beyond the next blast hatch, a broad prep chamber is littered with dead men. They are almost all flagship crew, most of them ratings, but Thiel spies at least four Ultramarines among the dead. All of the corpses look as though they have been crushed under the treads of a Baneblade convoy. The bodies form a broken, mangled carpet of flesh, bone and armour. The floor of the chamber is slick with blood. Flies buzz.

Thiel can hear dripping.

He looks up. The ceiling is covered, just like the deck. Bodies have been crushed into it, crushed and squashed into the ceiling like papier maché. Small pieces drop or splat down as gravity works its gradual influence.

‘What did this?’ Empion murmurs, marvelling at the sheer ingenuity of the horror.

There is a scraping sound. They turn, and find out the answer to his question.

‘Here they come!’ cries Arook Serotid.

The Word Bearers charge out of the fog, their huge red figures dwarfing their cultist troops. They drive the ragged brotherhood warriors ahead of them like packs of dogs into the onslaught of the palace guns. They use the cultists as shields.

‘Meet them! Deny them!’ Ventanus orders. At last, he fires his boltgun. Along the line of the walls and the gate, bolters open up, jagging, jumping and crackling with muzzle-flash. Heavier Legion weapons join in. Autocannons. Lascannons. The precious instruments they reserved for this moment.

The firepower slaps into the enemy charge, properly hurting it, slowing it, breaking it. Thousands of separate explosions and blasts tear men apart or throw them into the air. Tracer-bright streaks of las and plasma stitch across the enemy line. Black-robed humans are mown down. Ventanus smiles under his helm as he sees crimson-armoured figures shudder and fall amongst them.

But there is an inevitable balance. Because it is finally time to utilise the Legion-issue weapons, it is also time to suffer equivalent wrath. The assaulting Word Bearers open fire with bolters and heavy cannons, supplementing the light infantry weapons of the chanting brotherhoods. Mass-reactive shells punch into the walls, scattering large chunks of stone, and rip into the gate. The loyalist forces start taking much heavier casualties.

Loyalist, Ventanus thinks. How bitterly natural was it to arrive at that name?

Crimson shapes, fast as darts, loft out of the fogbank. Assault squads. Shock troops launching on jump packs. They come thundering in like missiles, clearing the broad ditch, plunging down onto the defences. Their attack leap-frogs the main assaulting host. They arrive killing, armed with bolters and chainblades, reaping the Army troops like ripe crops. Angry, whining chainswords rip screaming men apart, making red ribbons of flesh, hurling matted body parts into the air.

‘Drive them off the walls!’ Ventanus yells.

Arook opens fire, spearing one Word Bearers assaulter out of the air with a surgical intercept shot. The Word Bearer veers away on a twisting plume of black smoke.

Four of them land on their feet at the head of the bridge, in front of the gate. They hack and shoot their way into the dug-in Army fireteams. The chainblades score through sandbags, through cannon barrels, through shielding, through flesh, through bone. The strangled, oddly modulated shrieks of the Army troopers unable to defend themselves mark the savage progress of the Word Bearers.

Ventanus bounds forward, Greavus at his side. They reach the defensive line under the gate, where the ground flows with a preposterous, spreading quantity of blood. There’s a pulsing pressure to it, a flow driven by the scampering hearts of men who bleed out through unimaginable wounds. Streams spray and gurgle along the gutters of the bridge, gutters designed to handle rainfall. The torrents void into the ditch below like rusty water from iron pipework.

Ventanus reaches one of the Word Bearers while he is busy disarticulating an Army corporal. Ventanus catches the traitor under the chin of the helm with the thrusting wings of the standard. He drives him backwards, and then blasts him in the torso, point blank, with his boltgun. The shot augurs clean through the Word Bearer and his jump pack in a violent belch of flames and sparks.

The Assault Marine falls, but grabs the thrusting standard as he collapses, dragging it out of Ventanus’s grip. Ventanus doesn’t have time to recover it. Still firing with his right hand, he draws his power sword underhand with his left, and then rotates the freed blade in a semi-circle, catching it full grip.

Greavus has engaged the second of the jump infantry warriors, swinging his power fist to meet the Word Bearer’s moaning chainsword. The chainsword is kicking out exhaust fumes of blood and tissue fibre from its fresh kills. The augmented gauntlet, sizzling with force, shatters the grip and blade drivers of the chainsword, seizing its function.

The Traitor Marine discards his broken sword, and fires his bolt pistol. The round explodes against the side of Greavus’s helm, throwing him sideways into the gateway wall. The Marine steps forward to put a second shot into him.

Ventanus’s bolter roars, and the Word Bearer takes one hit in the throat and another in the chest. The twin impacts stagger him backwards, spalling slivers of armour off him in a cloud like ice chips. Blood pours through the ruptures. The Word Bearer sags against the gate wall, bubbles of blood aspirating through his mouthguard. He tries to raise his pistol again.

Ventanus’s clip is spent. He clamps the bolter, bringing the power sword home with both hands. He finishes the wounded, swaying Word Bearer with a brutal scything zigzag slash. The upper part of the cut goes sideways through the faceplate, the lower return through the abdomen, clean to the backbone. Clutching his almost bisected waist, the Word Bearer buckles.

Ventanus turns in time to meet a third. The Assault Marine rushes him. Ventanus notices there are grim figures etched and marked on the Word Bearer’s shoulder guards, and gibberish litanies inscribed down the length of his body plates. It is the heraldry of the insane.

Ventanus blocks the chainsword swing with his blade. More sparks dance. The chainblade, a two-handed monster, chatters as it bites against the energised edge of the power sword. They break. Ventanus parries the next stroke, blocks another, and then runs his blade, tip first, clean through his adversary’s gut. The stab misses the spine, but the end of the blade merges through the plating above the Word Bearer’s left hip.