Contents

Cover

Cassius – Extract

A Black Library Publication

eBook license

Chapter One

The engines screamed and the world called Kolovan screamed back, the howl of a toxic storm that roared and scraped at the lower hull of the drop pod. Cassius knew the violent sensations of a drop pod assault intimately: the chill wail of the thin upper atmosphere, the hammering of the retro jets firing up, the hiss and buffet as the pod punched down through cloud cover and the rising bellow of the jets fighting against the thickening air.

As the pod screeched into its final descent attitude, these sensations were as familiar as taking a breath. Leaning into the pod’s lurches was like taking a step or speaking a word.

‘Clear your minds, brethren,’ said Cassius, trusting in the amplified vox-channel to carry his voice above the storm of the descent. ‘Seize upon only that symbol that shall lead you to victory. The sacrifice of Lord Guilliman. A passage from the Codex. The sight of blessed Macragge from space. An emblem of all we fight for. Take it and focus on it, and your soul shall be ready for the fight. Be pure and steel-hearted! Be all that is fury and righteousness!’

He was making his descent to the surface alongside a Tactical squad from the Third Company. Sergeant Verigar led them, a grey-haired veteran whose temple and left cheek glinted with the dull sheen of bionics. For now his stern visage was hidden beneath the pitiless iron mask of his red Mark VII helmet, and he sat with the easy calm of a warrior who had been through dozens, hundreds, of landings like this. Cassius had not fought beside Verigar before, but Captain Fabian spoke highly of him. He knew the names and faces of the others, but had not yet ascribed particular value to any of them. He would see them fight, and then he would know them.

The grav-restraints tightened and forced Cassius back into the plasteel frame holding his armoured body in place. A moment later the drop pod slammed into the ground. The retro engines and shock absorbers did not completely cancel out the teeth-rattling impact, and Cassius’ head snapped back and forth with the force.

The restraint around Cassius’ right arm snapped free. The Chaplain drew his crozius arcanum from its compartment at his side.

He was armed. He was ready to kill.

The explosive bolts in the drop pod’s upper hull fired like a series of gunshots. Light blared in as the hull split into four sections and fell away, exposing the Space Marines inside to the sun of Kolovan for the first time.

The star that hovered overhead and shone between clouds of filthy brown toxins was a painful, acid yellow. It fell on a broken plain, as if the surface had been baked hard by that sun and then shattered by a vast hammer. Deep fissures broke the land up into patches of scorched ground, and fingers of pale rock broke through, the bones of the planet, where the ground had been particularly tortured. A distant line of smouldering mountains spoke of the geological activity that had torn this place up over and over again.

More drop pods bearing the colours of the Third and Fifth Companies were thudding home, raising splintering showers of broken earth. As the crafts’ bolts fired, squads of Ultramarines leapt out, weapons raised and ready to kill, the blue of their armour discoloured by the sickly filter of Kolovan’s sun.

Cassius’ grav-restraints snapped open, and he jumped from the drop pod as his men disembarked alongside him. A thousand battles’ worth of experience flooded through him and he took a tally of the landscape around him in the space of a few seconds.

Broken ground, difficult to move over swiftly. Rises and breaks in the earth could serve as cover. The rest of the strike force was making landfall closely-grouped, for the crew of the ship Defence of Talassar had performed their task well in launching the drop pods from upper orbit.

The air was toxic. It would have dropped a normal man in a couple of minutes. A Space Marine’s constitution could survive it initially but it would build up over time, and so Cassius wore a rebreather unit over his mouth and nose. The toxins stung the skin that still remained on his blasted face, the wind that carried them sharp with the dirt whipped up by the drop pod’s impact.

‘We’re east of the drop zone!’ came a vox on the command channel from Captain Galenus of the Fifth Company. ‘The xenos are massing from the south.’

‘Sigillite’s teeth,’ swore Captain Fabian of the Third over the vox. ‘We expected no resistance here.’

‘Do I detect dismay, brother-captain?’ said Cassius. ‘This is but a drop in the ocean compared to what will come. Let the men test their fury. It will do them good.’

Cassius turned to the battle-brothers emerging from the drop pod. ‘The tyranids were not so distant as we feared,’ he said. ‘They mass and respond from the south. We take the southern ridge, and we hold it until our main force makes landfall.’

His squad nodded gravely. Gauntleted fingers rested on weapon studs. Blades were checked and stowed. They were ready.

‘We hold the ridge,’ Cassius repeated through the vox. ‘Fabian, you are with me. Captain Galenus, take position to the east and be wary of flanking attacks. Let them come in their thousands, and let them feel the wrath of Guilliman’s sons. We are the wall against which the enemy will break.’

‘Move out,’ growled Sergeant Verigar, wisely leaving the oratory to his Chaplain.

‘Let us send the foul xenos shrieking into the abyss,’ roared Brother Ortius, doing the opposite.

Cassius let it pass. He knew what strength the expression of battle-joy gave them, and he knew what it covered up. Like everything else, it was there to be used by leaders like Cassius, turned into another weapon in the arsenal of the Ultramarines.

Other squads from Third Company joined with his own, while the landing forces of the Fifth secured the eastern edge of the ridge – Tactical squads, standing tall and proud in their burnished warplate, ready to face the enemy with a torrent of bolter fire; Assault Marines, chainswords already roaring with eager fury; and Devastator squads wielding pristine plasma cannons, missile launchers and heavy flamers. The latter would be key, Cassius knew; disciplined bolter drill and skilful bladework had their place in any battle, but against the swirling, writhing horror of a tyranid swarm, a swathe of cleansing flame or a sanctified warhead engraved with holy rites and packed with refined explosives were often the more effective countermeasures.

Cassius ran up the ridge of broken earth to the south of the drop pod site. As he crested it he saw the land reached down into a shallow depression where once an ancient river had fed a lake now long-drained by the land’s upheaval. Into that bowl flowed not water but a mass of chittering, scrabbling flesh, a thousand limbs, the acidic sun gleaming on glossy carapaces and glinting on rows of sharp teeth.

Tyranid battle-organisms, numbering in the hundreds. They were termagants and hormagaunts, creatures evolved to serve as the foot soldiers of the hive mind, to swarm in massive numbers and flood the battlefield with gnashing teeth. Towering over them were a dozen warrior-forms that stalked on their two hind legs and lashed at the smaller creatures with whips of living flesh. The tyranids of each hive fleet had their own appearance and colouration, and these specimens had a particularly ill look to them – maggot-pale skin and plates of ivory exoskeletal armour, with eyes as black as night and maws full of glinting white teeth.

There were two options. The first was to wait at the ridge for the tyranids to reach the Ultramarines, withering their numbers with bolter fire. The second was to advance to meet them and fight them face to face, driving a wedge of power-armoured fury into the heart of the aliens.

Cassius’ role as a Chaplain, as a custodian of his brothers’ souls and an example of the Space Marines’ fury in battle, screamed to opt for the latter approach. His hatred was a physical ache as he looked upon the foe, and every fibre of his being was dragging him down off that ridge and into their roiling midst.

No. There would be time enough for that later. For now, the landing zone must be secured. The Codex, the word of Guilliman, willed it, and so he waited. He waited until the foul creatures skittered heedlessly into the effective range of the Ultramarines’ bolters.

‘Volley fire,’ yelled Cassius, brandishing his crozius arcanum above his head. ‘Burn this filth to cinders. For Macragge! For Mankind! For the Emperor!’

The Third Company Ultramarines opened fire, and a wave of mass-reactive death rolled over the front of the advancing horde. The hissing shriek of the advancing bio-organisms was drowned in an explosion of sacred ammunition that burst carapaces, split leering skulls and sent up a cloud of ichor so thick that it obscured the back of the swarm. It did not matter. From their elevated position, and with such a wealth of targets, the Ultramarines simply could not miss. Heavy bolters bellowed as they tore great rents in the enemy line, and smoking contrails marked the passage of missiles that impacted in the thickest patches of tyranids, erupting in great gouts of orange flame and sending clouds of gore and chitin whipping through the air.

Still they came on. A storm of fire that would have broken the back of any regular force could not force the tyranids into retreat. These creatures were bred only to die and to kill, and fear was a mortal concept that simply could not be applied to whatever vile consciousness urged them forward. Each war-organism was perfectly adapted to its battlefield role, and while the hormagaunts were evolved to leap and slash with the huge claws on their forelegs, the more numerous termagants had forelimbs adapted to wield symbiotic organisms as missile weapons. Through the torrent of bolter rounds that bracketed the dustbowl, dozens of termagants scuttled forward with their fleshborers raised and a hail of biological rounds erupted from the firing orifices.

Cassius dropped a shoulder to take the incoming fire on his shoulder guard. Burrowing beetles thudded into his armour as he ran, the tiny creatures expending their short lifespans in chewing through their target. The ceramite of Cassius’ armour held and the beetles fell away as the bipedal warriors roared and the hormagaunts loped to the fore. Shrieking and hissing, they clawed their way up the rise and towards the Ultramarines.

Cassius brought his combi-bolter up and fired into the clutch of hormagaunts leaping towards him. They were so fast they could cover the ground from long bolter range to close combat more quickly than most soldiers could bring their weapons to bear. Cassius was ready for them and he felt the familiar kick of the combi-bolter in his hand as he sent the volley of shots into the tyranids. Two fell, tumbling beneath the hooves of the xenos behind them.

With a flick of his thumb Cassius switched firing modes. The next time he pulled the trigger, a gout of fire spurted from the underbarrel flamer nozzle. Another hormagaunt was wreathed in burning fuel and collapsed in a heap, shrieking and spasming as its muscles burned away.

Another group of tyranids had made the ridge, and were dismembering an Ultramarine with wicked swipes of their scythed boneblades. Cassius met them with a bellow of fury and a swing of his crozius. He aimed his holy weapon at a warrior-organism looking up from the dead Space Marine, gobbets of flesh and splatters of blood slathered across its vile maw. The xenos seemed to move in slow motion as the upward arc of Cassius’ crozius shattered its twin foreclaws. Screeching, the hormagaunt slammed into Cassius, but he threw it to the ground, putting a bolter round through its skull as it writhed in the dirt.

He risked a glance down the line. The Third were butchering the enemy with the same furious enthusiasm on every side. Sergeant Verigar rammed his chainblade into the throat of a creature that tried to slash at him, hauling it into the air and firing three rounds into its torso with his bolt pistol. Brother Estus laid down wicked bursts of covering fire while Brother Olian primed and rolled a frag grenade down the ridge. Cassius did not see what it hit, but he heard the wet thud of its detonation, and felt a rain of dry earth and rancid biological matter splatter across the side of his face. He almost smiled.

A group of termagants scuttled out of the pack to the squad’s right, trying to sweep around them and launch fleshborer volleys into them from behind. They were met by a storm of bolter fire from the battle-brothers of the Third Company. Captain Fabian directed his squads into position as they hammered volley after volley into the tyranids. His blade was slick with alien blood, and he raised it in salute to the Chaplain before spinning to unleash a torrent of energy from his plasma pistol, the white-hot bolts of flame enveloping a trio of warrior-organisms and burning them to nothing in an instant.

‘We deny them!’ yelled Cassius. ‘We wet the desert with their foul blood!’

Brother Morvion crashed into a hormagaunt a few steps from Cassius, bowling the creature onto its back legs with the weight of his armoured body.

Morvion snarled as he rammed his combat knife through the hormagaunt’s throat. ‘Die,’ he spat. ‘Die!’ He had lost his grip on his bolter, but was using his weight to pin the creature down as he punched and stamped on its skull, cracking its chitin plating and dousing himself in sickly pale fluid as he jerked his blade back and forth.

‘Morvion!’ roared Cassius. ‘Kill the damned thing and recover your weapon.’

The Chaplain marked the Space Marine’s name for censure. Ultramarines did not abandon their weapons and ignore a tactical advantage to brawl with the enemy like some hive ganger.

Cassius waded through the tyranids, batting aside one hormagaunt and letting Morvion fend off another. Above the sea of snapping teeth and claws loomed the shape of the closest warrior-form, twice the height of a Space Marine, wielding twin bone blades with one pair of forearms and a long-barrelled weapon of flesh and bone with the other.

The tyranid warrior saw Cassius approaching. Its deep-set black eyes, like flecks of obsidian set into its face, focused on him. Like its swarming cousins, the thing was an anaemic yellow-white streaked with veins of cancerous black. It raised its weapon and the end of the barrel snarled like a mouth, a spiny tongue slavering between its fleshy lips. The bulbous gland at the base of the barrel flared and the weapon belched a mass of thorny vine-like tendons that slammed into Cassius.

The thorns twined around him and constricted as he tried to move. Cassius ripped an arm free and let the crozius’ power field discharge. The power weapon shredded the vines and he was free, kicking his way out to close the distance with the warrior.

There was a symbolism to war that every Chaplain had etched on his memory. Just as a commander had to know the tactical lore of the Codex Astartes and the lessons of the Chapter’s combat histories, a Chaplain had to know the images and sensations that would drive his battle-brothers on to greater fury, steadfastness or pride. A Chaplain had to become such an image himself; when Cassius stood at the pulpit and spoke the words of the Codex or of the great deeds of Lord Guilliman and heroes of the Chapter, he became like a stained-glass window or a statue, an illustration of the Ultramarines’ ideals. When he delivered admonishment to brothers who had been lax in their duties, he became the face of the primarch himself, his face hidden by the skull mask of his rank or Cassius’ own mask of scar tissue and bone.

And in the thick of battle, when the Ultramarines needed a symbol of fury and relentlessness, Cassius became that symbol. His battle-brothers saw him as he leapt at the tyranid warrior, within the arc of its strangler cannon and into the sweep of its twin boneswords.

Cassius’ combi-flamer, Infernus, blasted a sheet of liquid flame up into the warrior as it loomed down over him. The alien screeched as fire billowed up around it and muscle blackened and shrivelled away. Cassius followed up with a low blow at the creature’s hindleg and, with a satisfying crunch, the head of the weapon smashed through the chitin of the warrior’s exoskeleton and through into the pulp of muscle and tissue.

The tyranid warrior dropped to one knee. It lost none of its speed and Cassius barely parried the bonesword that lashed at his head. The second strike caught him a glancing blow on his left shoulder spinning him around and forcing him to throw the crozius into a desperate guard as the first blade came down at him again. Suddenly the creature rocked to the side, and the weapon-limb aimed at his head instead cracked into the ground as the alien fought for balance.

Eight Ultramarines stood their ground, pouring a vicious hail of fire into the towering creature. Cassius’ heart surged with pride as he saw the newcomers. Each wore the symbol of a skewered tyranid skull on his right shoulder-plate, and the armour of each was littered with honour scrolls which fluttered in the toxic wind. Their helms were painted the white of combat veterans, and the accuracy of their onslaught proved the truth of this accolade – these men had been tempered in the hellish nightmare of the Tyrannic Wars, and they knew their business well. The warrior-organism howled. Its bony armour plating was not simply blasted and scarred by the assault – smoke rose from ruptured flesh, as the specialised bio-acid embedded in each bolter round began to devour the creature’s innards.

Wracked with agony, the xenos turned to face this new threat, forgetting Cassius for just a moment to bring its strangler cannon around.

Cassius leapt up, firing two shots into the underside of its skull as he brought the crozius around in an overhand strike. Its power field had recharged, and it erupted now. The armour covering the warrior’s sternum split and Cassius buried the head of the weapon deep in its chest. The warrior spasmed as Cassius held it there for a moment, anchored in place by the crozius’ ornate eagle wings hooked into its flesh. The arms carrying its boneswords flailed aimlessly and fell limp. The weapon came loose and the warrior pitched over, showering gore from its ruptured chest.

‘So will it be for all your wretched kind,’ muttered Cassius. He raised his crozius again, and brought it down on the tyranid’s skull, which burst into wet fragments of bone.

The Tyrannic War veterans nodded at Cassius in appreciation of the kill, before reloading their hellfire-round magazines and turning away to seek new targets. One remained, marked out by the black of his armour, which matched the Chaplain’s own. Upon his shoulder he wore not the inverted omega symbol of the Ultramarines, but a pair of crossed scythes, painted in the same acid yellow of Kolovan’s sun.

‘Chaplain,’ he said, his voice a dour growl.

‘Sergeant Remas,’ Cassius replied. The sergeant gave an almost imperceptible nod, and strode off after his men.

The Ordo Xenos of the Inquisition, the magos biologis and the strategoes of the Astra Militarum had all collected reams of data on the tyranids. It was an endless task, for the tyranids evolved to counter every tactic used against them and new variants on the hive fleets’ base organisms turned up every time the Imperium clashed with the aliens. But some constants remained. The lesser organisms, the variants on the termagant form, possessed only the capacity to act on crude animal instincts. To act in concert, as an army, they needed a directing force, which for the tyranids came in the form of leader organisms that transmitted the directions of the hive mind.

The warrior-form Cassius had just killed was one such organism, and without it the tyranids nearby lost their focus. They snapped and charged at random instead of surging in waves. Some fled or tried to burrow into the broken ground instead of fighting. The Third Company opened up a great, bloody rift in the tyranid mass in Cassius’ wake, hammering the lesser organisms back with bolter fire and isolating and butchering them in ones and twos. Brother Covellos vaporised panicking knots of termagants with space-warping blasts of his grav-cannon. Warrior organisms writhed on the ground as they fell over one another to flee or counter-charge, and were despatched on the ground.

Cassius jumped up onto the command-beast’s ruined corpse, giving him another metre of vantage point so he could see all the way back to the battle-brothers of the Fifth Company in their firing lines to the east. They had reaped a toll no less catastrophic on the enemy’s left flank. Wretched, torn corpses littered the ground in front of their position like a sea of crushed maggots. Cassius held up his blessed crozius, still splattered with gore from the dead creature’s skull. He stood triumphant on the corpse of his enemy, and roared his victory to the tortured sky. His exultation echoed through the vox and into the ear of every Ultramarine on the field.

‘Victory! We have victory! For Macragge! For the Golden Throne!’

All eyes went to him. He was a symbol of triumph, of destruction, of how the greatest of the tyranids were just fodder beneath the Ultramarines’ assault – a symbol of the victory demanded by the legacy of Roboute Guilliman.

Cassius understood the power of such symbols like few others. Creating and nurturing them was his purpose as a Chaplain. It was with such an image in their hearts that the Ultramarines would scour the tyranids from Kolovan.

Click here to buy Cassius.

A Black Library Publication

First published in Great Britain in 2016
This eBook edition published in 2016 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd,
Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

Produced by Games Workshop in Nottingham.
Cover illustration by Mac Smith.

Cassius © Copyright Games Workshop Limited 2016. Cassius, GW, Games Workshop, Black Library, The Horus Heresy, The Horus Heresy Eye logo, Space Marine, 40K, Warhammer, Warhammer 40,000, the ‘Aquila’ Double-headed Eagle logo, and all associated logos, illustrations, images, names, creatures, races, vehicles, locations, weapons, characters, and the distinctive likenesses thereof, are either ® or TM, and/or © Games Workshop Limited, variably registered around the world.
All Rights Reserved.

A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN: 978-1-78572-459-6

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

See Black Library on the internet at
blacklibrary.com

Find out more about Games Workshop’s world of Warhammer and the Warhammer 40,000 universe at
games-workshop.com

eBook license

This license is made between:

Games Workshop Limited t/a Black Library, Willow Road, Lenton, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, United Kingdom (“Black Library”); and

(2) the purchaser of an e-book product from Black Library website (“You/you/Your/your”)

(jointly, “the parties”)

These are the terms and conditions that apply when you purchase an e-book (“e-book”) from Black Library. The parties agree that in consideration of the fee paid by you, Black Library grants you a license to use the e-book on the following terms:

* 1. Black Library grants to you a personal, non-exclusive, non-transferable, royalty-free license to use the e-book in the following ways:

o 1.1 to store the e-book on any number of electronic devices and/or storage media (including, by way of example only, personal computers, e-book readers, mobile phones, portable hard drives, USB flash drives, CDs or DVDs) which are personally owned by you;

o 1.2 to access the e-book using an appropriate electronic device and/or through any appropriate storage media; and

* 2. For the avoidance of doubt, you are ONLY licensed to use the e-book as described in paragraph 1 above. You may NOT use or store the e-book in any other way. If you do, Black Library shall be entitled to terminate this license.

* 3. Further to the general restriction at paragraph 2, Black Library shall be entitled to terminate this license in the event that you use or store the e-book (or any part of it) in any way not expressly licensed. This includes (but is by no means limited to) the following circumstances:

o 3.1 you provide the e-book to any company, individual or other legal person who does not possess a license to use or store it;

o 3.2 you make the e-book available on bit-torrent sites, or are otherwise complicit in ‘seeding’ or sharing the e-book with any company, individual or other legal person who does not possess a license to use or store it;

o 3.3 you print and distribute hard copies of the e-book to any company, individual or other legal person who does not possess a license to use or store it;

o 3.4 you attempt to reverse engineer, bypass, alter, amend, remove or otherwise make any change to any copy protection technology which may be applied to the e-book.

* 4. By purchasing an e-book, you agree for the purposes of the Consumer Protection (Distance Selling) Regulations 2000 that Black Library may commence the service (of provision of the e-book to you) prior to your ordinary cancellation period coming to an end, and that by purchasing an e-book, your cancellation rights shall end immediately upon receipt of the e-book.

* 5. You acknowledge that all copyright, trademark and other intellectual property rights in the e-book are, shall remain, the sole property of Black Library.

* 6. On termination of this license, howsoever effected, you shall immediately and permanently delete all copies of the e-book from your computers and storage media, and shall destroy all hard copies of the e-book which you have derived from the e-book.

* 7. Black Library shall be entitled to amend these terms and conditions from time to time by written notice to you.

* 8. These terms and conditions shall be governed by English law, and shall be subject only to the jurisdiction of the Courts in England and Wales.

* 9. If any part of this license is illegal, or becomes illegal as a result of any change in the law, then that part shall be deleted, and replaced with wording that is as close to the original meaning as possible without being illegal.

* 10. Any failure by Black Library to exercise its rights under this license for whatever reason shall not be in any way deemed to be a waiver of its rights, and in particular, Black Library reserves the right at all times to terminate this license in the event that you breach clause 2 or clause 3.