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Blood of Iax – Extract

A Black Library Publication

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Chapter One: To The Gorgon

KASTOR

The Fulminata had come to Shebat Alpha, and none could stand before them.

Kastor, Chaplain of the Dioskuri, roared. It was an expression of pure rage, fuelled by piety and stoked by righteous hatred. The noise, amplified by his vox-vocaliser, made the bellows and grunts of the greenskins surrounding him sound pitiable by comparison.

Salve Imperator shattered an ork’s skull. It then snapped the neck of a second, hurling the beast back into its kindred. Energy crackled around the skull-topped crozius arcanum, blackened blood evaporating from it with every searing strike of the power mace. Bones cracked and flesh was pulverised. The towering Primaris Chaplain was a whirlwind of furious judgement, his leather cassock and vestments snapping around him, his pitch-black power armour splattered with a patina of alien viscera.

He had moved too far ahead. He was cut off. The realisation made him smile.

An ork attempted to headbutt him. It rammed itself impotently against the stylised ribcage that encased his breastplate. Kastor snatched the beast by the throat with his free hand, hauling it from its feet so that its piggy eyes were level with the deep ruby lenses of his skull helm. The beast bellowed at him, spittle spraying from its maw, but the Chaplain silenced it with a headbutt of his own, bone cracking and tusks snapping as he caved in the alien’s face.

He dropped the ork, his armour registering the strikes of crude cleavers and fists from all sides. None penetrated. He spun in a tight arc, vestment scrolls whipping around him, and cleared a semicircle of space with a single swing of Salve Imperator.

‘See how easily the alien falls before the weaponry of the righteous,’ the Chaplain boomed. ‘Praise the Emperor for giving us this chance to enact His will!’

His slaughterous euphoria was interrupted by the familiar, battering thunder of bolter fire. Blood and sinew burst around him as a hail of mass-reactive bolts shredded the mob attacking him, their remains splattering his armour. Already the runtier greenskins at the rear of the melee had turned tail and were fleeing back up the street, perhaps unwilling to engage something that could bellow louder than one of their warbosses. Kastor let them go, the battle fury draining abruptly from his genhanced body.

‘Too far again, Salve,’ said Captain Demeter. The commander of the Fulminata was clad in his Gravis plate, the proud heraldry of the Ultramarines befouled by blood and grime. Behind him was Intercessor Squad Nerva and Ancient Mars Skyrus, who bore the lightning standard of Fulminata. Its blue-and-white silk rippled in the smoke shrouding the embattled street, the weak sunlight glinting from the wings of the golden bolt-and-aquila that tipped its crosspiece.

‘The xenos exist to be purged,’ Kastor responded. ‘And I exist to perform that purging.’

The deafening report of a battle cannon interrupted Demeter before he could respond, the shell shrieking over the heads of the Primaris. It detonated further up the street in a great storm of broken masonry and ork remains. Kastor turned to survey the Imperial forces behind the Ultramarines – a squadron of Voitekan Leman Russ battle tanks grinding forwards in single file, supported by a platoon of Astra Militarum infantry from the same world. They paused, crouched on the pavement as they stared up in undisguised awe at the Primaris who had broken the ork mob. Kastor raised Salve Imperator, the crozius still wreathed with lightning.

‘See how the beasts run, soldiers of the Throne,’ he said, his voice booming over the growl of engines and rattle of nearby gunfire. ‘This is our city, the Emperor’s city, and we will reclaim it one step at a time. Press on. Crush these alien remains beneath your boots and the treads of your mighty tanks. The Emperor protects!’

The advance continued.

‘Watch the manufactorum colonnades to the right,’ Demeter ordered over the vox, highlighting a series of towering industrial pillars on the shared tactical display. The huge rockcrete structures had once been testimony to Shebat’s productivity but now lay cast down in rubble and ruin, a metaphor for the city’s fall. It had been great once – the foremost manufactorum of Ikara IX’s Adamantium Belt, a refinery for the vast deposits of ore mined in the Tombstones, the mountain range within whose barren flanks the city nestled. Four millennia of industry had created a sprawling hive of smokestacks and smelter-scrapes, surrounded by a thicket of prefabricated habitation blocks and a further sprawl of slums and shack dwellings.

Then the green menace had come to the Ikara System, and Shebat’s productivity had ended.

Kastor blink-acknowledged Demeter’s directive via the visor display and drew his Absolver bolt pistol. Its heavy-calibre rounds made a mockery of even the tough hides and thick bones of the orks, each detonating shell bursting apart chests and skulls in gouts of blood and pulverised organs. He forced himself to check his pace so he didn’t begin to outdistance his battle-brothers once more.

‘With the support of the Astra Militarum, we’ve already succeeded in pushing the greenskins back,’ Demeter continued. ‘The xenos currently fester in a refinery square overlooked by the industrial plants’ ruins.’

The map of Shebat overlaid on Kastor’s visor display showed that they were less than a mile from the day’s primary objective – the Excelsior Arch.

It had been more than a Terran year since war had engulfed Shebat. For a while, when the port city of Melu burned and the greenskin forces had reached the outskirts of Ikara IX’s capital city, Kroten, it had seemed as though the planet would fall to the alien invasion.

Then the Fulminata, a Primaris demi-company of the Ultramarines Chapter, had been despatched, alongside the primary Imperial Navy subsector battlefleet, three Astra Militarum army groups and a conroi of Imperial Knights from House du Frain. Within five days, Kastor and his brothers had driven the xenos from the capital’s outskirts, then followed up by breaking the greenskin siege lines encircling Merkoro.

Two weeks ago the brotherhood had arrived outside Shebat. The Astra Militarum’s Third Army, commanded by Field Marshal Stefan Klos, had secured the slum sprawl and established three beachheads into the city proper. Now the drive to the Gorgon was underway.

‘Maintain fire protocols,’ Demeter said over the vox, his voice as calm and measured as it was during the company’s firing rites on board the Spear of Macragge. Intercessor squad Nerva had secured the main thoroughfare leading into the square, laying down bolt rifle fire as the orks charged them from all four corners. The open space allowed the trio of Voitekan battle tanks to spread out, their heavy bolters and battle cannons hammering shells point-blank into the oncoming mobs.

‘See how the Emperor’s wrath cuts them down!’ Kastor bellowed to the Astra Militarum infantry squads advancing out between their tanks, adding their las-fire to the barrage. ‘Keep firing! Not a single greenskin is to leave this place alive!’

‘Kastor,’ Demeter said, his tone full of warning. The Chaplain had begun to advance again.

‘They will not stand, brother-captain,’ he said.

‘And you will not present them with an easy target,’ the captain responded. Return fire broke out from the ruins around the square’s edges, more mobs of greenskins armed with crude sidearms flocking to join the battle spreading through the refineries. Their shooting was worse than inaccurate, but there was enough of it for Kastor to take two hits to his breastplate and another to his left greave in quick succession.

‘Lieutenant, bring your weaponry to bear on the refineries,’ Demeter said, the order routed to the commander of the Voitekan armour. A clipped affirmation coincided with the whine of turret hydraulics as the battle tanks switched targets.

They never got a chance to fire. The enhanced aural units of Kastor’s armour detected a high-pitched whistle, growing rapidly louder.

‘Incoming!’

Sergeant Nerva was the first to shout the warning, issuing it over his external vocaliser for the benefit of the Guard infantry.

The first shell hit the space between the leftmost and centremost of the three Leman Russ battle tanks. The Voitekan infantry squad there simply vanished in a hail of metal and rubble that battered the sides of their tanks, spattering the vehicles with tattered human remains.

Another five shells struck the square within three seconds of the first. Fire blossomed, the detonations ripping indiscriminately into greenskins and Imperial soldiers alike. One hit the ground barely a dozen yards to Kastor’s right. He felt his auto-stabilisers lock as the blast wave struck, accompanied by a storm of rubble and dirt. His armour blared with alarms, the auto-senses indicating shrapnel damage to his right pauldron and knee joint. When the smoke settled, however, he stood unmoved, his crozius shining bright with destructive energies amidst the haze.

‘Xenos artillery,’ Demeter voxed. ‘Coming from across the river. I’m routing the coordinates to Serxis, but it will be at least twenty minutes before the bombardment cannon is locked.’

‘Priscor and Quintillius have been hit,’ Sergeant Nerva added. ‘If we stay here, we die. We either go back or we go into them.’

‘Into them then,’ Kastor snarled, feeling his battle fury surging to life once more.

‘As the Brother-Chaplain says,’ Demeter responded calmly, as the air filled with the shriek of more incoming shells. ‘Primaris, advance.’

POLIXIS

‘Medicae!’

Polixis was already moving up along the street’s left-hand pavement when he heard the scream. Ahead, he could see a platoon of Namarian Imperial Guardsmen caught in a barrage of crudely aimed ork firepower, coming from a bombed-out residential block. He watched as the Namarian’s colonel went down.

Polixis kept to the side of the street, instinctively knowing that it was unlikely any of the orks’ shots would be coming his way when there were so many targets out of cover ahead of him. In just a few seconds, the Namarians had taken a slew of casualties. He saw the platoon’s medic – caught sprinting towards the fallen colonel – collapse in a burst of blood as he in turn was hit in the side of the head.

‘Medicae!’ came the scream again.

Polixis cursed. He considered carrying on through the haulage work yards to his left, to link back up with Squad Valorious. But with the Namarian colonel down, their entire advance was stalling, and the wider spearhead couldn’t afford that. Against his better judgement, Polixis cursed and broke from cover.

He ran from the street’s edge and crossed to the downed colonel, using his bulk to shield the man. Shots came cracking his way, but he was too busy assessing the Namarian’s injury to even notice. The man had taken a hit to the leg, probably an artery shot. Polixis spent precious moments slicing away his blood-drenched fatigues, trying to decide how to deal with the wound. His own equipment was far superior to anything carried by the Guard, but he had forgotten just how incredibly fragile humans were. It was only at times such as these, kneeling over the wounded soldier, that he properly appreciated the gulf between the Imperium’s fighting forces.

Arterial spray painted Polixis’ white gauntlets red. The Primaris Apothecary let out a slow breath as he tied off the torn femoral artery, applying a coating of counterseptic powder to the bloody gash in the colonel’s thigh. The Namarian screamed.

‘I have nothing for your pain,’ Polixis said gruffly. ‘Everything that will fortify my brothers would kill your kind.’ Polixis bound the wound tightly with a bandage pad taken from the man’s supplies and looked across at the Namarian platoon’s corpsman. He was kneeling on the pavement, hands and forearms as red and soaking as the Space Marine’s. His expression was an all-too-familiar rictus of concentration as he fought to tourniquet a leg torn almost in half by an ork slug round.

More hard rounds cracked past, one grazing Polixis’ shoulder. Namarian infantry were supporting a combat team from Intercessor Squad Valorious as they secured the haulage work yards of the refinery district, a slow, grinding battle that had been going on since dawn. It had put their sector of the assault behind schedule. Polixis had been drawn from the main spearhead by two injuries to Valorious, Brothers Vespasior and Gallus. Neither were fatal, but the same could not be said of the wounds the Namarians were sustaining.

The Apothecary’s heads-up tactical display lit with new information. The spearhead of the Primaris assault, driving directly for the Excelsior Arch, had suffered three casualties. The log scrolling past identified heavy shelling, and the guns’ thumping reports were audible from where he stood. He blink-clicked the company command channel.

‘This is Helix. Do you have need of me, captain?’

‘If not now then we will soon, Brother-Apothecary,’ crackled Demeter’s voice, overlaid by the crash of detonations. ‘Redeploy to our coordinates with all haste.’

Polixis sent an affirmation and moved to the side of the Guard corpsman struggling nearby. He bent down and grasped the bloody limb in one hand, yanking the tourniquet into place with the other. The wounded man wailed, slick with sweat, his face a wretched mask. He had the white eyes of a beast in pain, stripped of the intelligence and dignity of the human race. It was difficult to resist an impulsive sense of disgust at such a display. He is only a man, Polixis found himself thinking. Now was no time to consider the contrast between the Guardsman’s desperate, agonised expression and his own stark white battleplate and helm. He wondered whether the man’s terror was magnified by his presence. It would not surprise him.

‘I must go now,’ he said to the corpsman, who was looking at him with wide eyes. ‘Check to make sure it’s tight enough and tie off the popliteal. As far as I can judge your kind, the colonel is stable, but you must get him to cover. Remember your training and you will save lives here today.’

The man visibly struggled to find a response, staring at the giant, white-armoured warrior, but Polixis was already moving off, breaking into a run as he left the humans behind and headed south.

He checked the visor display again as he went. One of the three wounded sigils – Ovido’s – had flashed from yellow to red. He was flatlining rapidly, the vitae signs on Polixis’ diagnostor helm fading. The Apothecary picked up speed, servos whirring, boots pounding debris-strewn streets as he used the burst map uploaded to the shared tac-display to navigate along the rear of the ground taken in the morning’s assault. The orks had been driven from their positions across the city, yielding four miles in barely an hour and a half.

The Gorgon was almost within touching distance.

Polixis’ map turned him westwards, back onto the leading edge of the assault. Staying behind the immediate front line would take too long – he would have to skirt through it. Passing a trail of injured Astra Militarum troopers and stretcher-bearers in the pelts of the Tmaran Scalp-takers, he headed down a side street away from a gunfight that appeared to have broken out in the smelter work yard of a refinery primus. The tribal warriors cringed back at the Space Marine’s passing, averting their eyes from a being Polixis knew they likely deified. He barely even acknowledged their presence, instead activating the vox.

‘Prime Tertiary, be advised, I am inbound on the rear of your position.’

‘Acknowledged, Helix,’ came the reply from Lieutenant Samson. Polixis pounded into the work yard, taking a sharp right into cover behind a conveyance belt for mega smeltry blocks. Terrified-looking Tmarans scrambled to make way for him as heavy slugs cracked overhead. As he entered, he saw that the far wall had been demolished and appeared to be acting as a strongpoint for a greenskin mob that had entrenched itself in the neighbouring ore warehouse.

There were two other Primaris in cover behind the heavy conveyance belt, Brothers Cypran and Caius.

‘The lieutenant?’ Polixis asked over the external vox. Caius gestured towards the doorway of the main manufactorum building. Outside it a haulage lifter had toppled over, providing a length of reinforced plasteel that sheltered more Guardsmen. Samson was among them.

Polixis broke from behind the conveyance belt and vaulted the lifter’s fallen crane, slamming into the gravel beside Samson. The lieutenant didn’t look up from the fresh ammunition drum he was clipping into his auto bolt rifle.

‘Just passing through, Helix?’ he asked, using the Apothecary’s battle cant signifier.

‘Yes. Your situation is stable, lieutenant?’

‘Keeping the beasts’ attention on us,’ Samson said, nodding to Cypran and Caius, the latter of whom leant over the conveyance belt to ease off a burst of bolt rifle fire. ‘Faustus is taking a combat team north around their flank. We should be moving on within the next ten minutes.’

‘I’m needed with the captain,’ Polixis said, glancing once more at the tactical display. Brother Ovido’s vitae signs were crashing.

‘Fastest way is to the right,’ Samson said, nodding to the work yard’s north wall. ‘Covering fire on my mark.’

Polixis broke from behind the crane as the thunder of bolters filled the work yard. The sudden fury seemed to only encourage the orks, who returned fire with a chorus of howls and roars. Shots sparked around Polixis, but none touched him as he hammered pauldron-first into the red brick wall. The masonry gave way with a crash. He carried on through the broken rubble and dust, finding himself in an alley running parallel to the work yard, presumably the same one taken from the manufactorum by Faustus en route to the greenskin’s flank.

He took the first right, into a grimy, deserted inner-city hab street. An ork scrap-truck lay at the far end, burning, surrounded by an indiscriminate litter of greenskin and Guard dead. The bodies were brutalised, the full savagery of the two races’ antagonism clear in eviscerating blows and point-blank weapon blasts.

The air filled with a familiar, furious shriek as a cruciform shape shot overhead, dangerously close to the jagged tops of the ruined refinery stacks. The Imperial Navy Lightning fighter was pursued by a crude ork aircraft, its autocannons blazing. The contrast between the two races could not have been clearer – the sleek, war-ready Imperial machine and the brute, ramshackle xenos engine, its ugly form riveted and bolted together in haphazard fashion. The mere sight of it stirred Polixis’ disgust. Both flyers were out of sight again in an instant, a scattering of hot brass falling around Polixis as ejected cartridges sprayed across the street. The Apothecary paused briefly to assess his map, continuously updated with feedback from the linked auto-senses of the rest of the company spread across the city. The distant shellfire was now altogether closer, and he could see a haze of smoke rising above the hab units directly ahead.

He sped down a side alley, over a carpet of blackened, shrivelled bodies that had been caught in the promethium gout of a flamer. Ahead of him, the refinery square opened up. It had been reduced to a wasteland, pockmarked with craters and the strewn wreckage of human and alien corpses. He passed over a female Voitekan with her ribcage split open by shrapnel, side by side with a greenskin whose head had been half-demolished by a bolt-round. Beyond them, another human and alien lay intertwined, a Voitekan’s bayonet impaled through the beast’s eye while its fists remained clamped around the dead man’s throat, both bodies frozen in their death throes.

The battle had swept through the open space and continued now on its western side – Polixis could see Ultramarines and Voitekan infantry to his left fighting together, engaged in a close-quarters firefight with greenskin mobs that had spilled over into a violent melee on the corners of adjoining streets. To his right, a Leman Russ battle tank lay near the start of a street leading off to the east, gutted by what looked to have been a direct shell strike, flames blazing from the twisted wreckage. Another had made it halfway across the square before a further hit had thrown one of its treads, leaving it slewed to one side and immobilised.

Brother Priscor lay against the tank’s flank. Polixis crossed the square at a run, the air around him resounding with the fury of the combat playing out barely fifty yards to his left. Priscor’s vitae signs were dropping steadily. The Apothecary saw why as he approached – the Primaris had lost both legs, presumably to a close-range shell strike. They’d been severed just below the knee plates, two nubs of ripped muscle and skin, blood and stubs of bone. A smear of red on the sooty flagstones of the square marked where he’d dragged himself to the battle tank’s protective bulk.

Polixis dropped down beside the wounded Ultramarine. Priscor’s helmet turned towards him.

‘Brother-Apothecary. You’re a welcome sight.’

‘Remain still, Brother Priscor,’ Polixis said, speaking with the brusque tone he fell into automatically during field surgery. ‘This will not take long.’

He plugged a prognosticator into Priscor’s left tasset dermal node, linking his armour with that of the wounded Primaris. Polixis’ visor display blinked as it updated with fresh data, the diagnostor helm providing him with a full readout of Priscor’s body readings.

‘Your Larraman cells are working to cease the blood flow,’ he said as he uncapped the plasma node latched to his backpack and linked it through the port in Priscor’s vambrace. ‘But you will bleed out before they are able to heal the wound sufficiently. I am providing you with a transfusion, followed by a cell acceleration stimm to hasten the process. That will stabilise you until you can be moved.’

‘Bastard greenskins,’ Priscor spat, but said nothing more. Polixis noted the strain indicated on his visor display from the Intercessor’s left gauntlet, where Priscor was still gripping his bolt rifle.

The Apothecary activated the transfusion pack, the clear plastek of the plasma node turning a deep red. As it pumped fresh blood into the downed Adeptus Astartes, he slipped the multisyringe from his medicae webbing and flicked the adapter to the coag-stimm. Priscor made no sound as Polixis jabbed the needle into the port in his right tasset and depressed the plunger. Not for the first time the Apothecary wondered at the strange torture entailed in the existence of a Space Marine – while his genhanced metabolism meant that pain was more often than not reduced to little more than a dull ache, the changes wrought also ensured that he would remain fully conscious and coherent except in the direst of circumstances. A human warrior who had suffered similar injuries would have been left barely conscious, but Priscor would be afforded no such respite.

‘Your vitaes are stabilising,’ Polixis told him, glancing at the display readings as the stimm set to work. The pulse of blood from both stumps had been reduced to a slow ooze, congealing around the great scabs that had begun to blotch the hideously torn muscle tissue.

‘Your secondary heart should provide sufficient circulation,’ he went on. ‘But do not try to move. I have tagged your armour with a retrieval sigil. Provided we do not lose this position you will be evacuated within the next half an hour.’

‘You have my thanks, Helix,’ Priscor said, helm turning to look towards the battle raging along the square’s western side.

‘I know what you’re thinking,’ Polixis said. ‘But you will not leave the side of this tank. Consider it under your protection until its crew can refit. I will not lose any more of the Fulminata on this campaign.’

‘I’m no use here,’ Priscor growled.

‘You are,’ Polixis said. ‘You can tell me where Brother Ovido is.’

Priscor pointed towards the melee, his voice shot through with an angry regret.

‘He was still with Nerva when I saw him last. If he has fallen, it will be in amongst that.’

‘Then I am needed elsewhere, brother,’ Polixis said, removing the plasma node and capping it, cutting off the transfusion. ‘A week in the Spear of Macragge’s medicae bay and I will have you fully fitted with bionic substitutes. You’ll be back down here with the rest of Nerva before the last of the xenos have been purged.’

‘I’ll take that as an oath, Brother-Apothecary,’ Priscor said sternly as Polixis stood. ‘For Ovido’s sake.’

‘For Ovido,’ Polixis agreed. He turned west, towards the edge of the square and the battle still raging there, and broke once more into a run.

As he went, he unclamped his Absolver bolt pistol.

It was clear to Polixis that the greenskins were on the verge of breaking. He saw a detonation rip through the rear of the aliens’ mob, wicked metal slicing thick green flesh and sending blood and limbs skywards. He realised that their own artillery across the river had attempted to shift its target zone to account for the Imperial push across the square, but with typical orkish inaccuracy, was overcompensating and now hammering the mobs in the rear still trying to force their way to the front. At the same time, Intercessor squad Nerva and the single Leman Russ that was still fully functional had been reinforced by a company of Voitekan infantry, who were now pouring las-fire down the streets branching from the western side of the square. Faced with the choice of dying beneath their own barrage or throwing themselves at the steadily advancing Imperials, the greenskins had chosen the latter.

As Polixis ran he located the company banner of the Fulminata. Its blue-and-white silk fluttered proudly exactly where he’d expected to see it – at the point where the greenskins had reached the Imperial line on the rubble-choked corner of one of the refinery blocks, unleashing a swirling melee that threatened to drag in the Voitekan platoons on either side. Amidst the flashing blades and churning bodies, the Apothecary caught the actinic flash of power weapons and heard a familiar bellow ring out, audible even over the crash of the nearby shelling.

He very nearly smiled as he ran.

Then the fury of close combat hit, and the honed skills of a warrior bred for nothing but total war took over. Ahead, a greenskin hefted its crude axe to cleave the skull of a wounded Zoitekan Guardsman. Polixis fired, his bolt detonating inside the creature’s guts, shredding its lower torso. It went down with a bellow next to the Guardsman, and Polixis finished it with another shot to the skull. Directly ahead, Brother Tarquin grappled with another greenskin, the Primaris’ gladius lodged in the beast’s chest. Despite this, it tried to grind its own cleaver deeper into the space where the Space Marine’s pauldron met breastplate. Polixis shoulder-charged the ork, throwing it back with a grunt and dragging both weapons free. Before it could recover its balance, he fired again, blowing away half its face in a spray of foul alien gore.

‘Brother Ovido?’ he demanded, half turning to grasp Tarquin’s shoulder.

‘The captain,’ he grunted, opening fire with his own bolt pistol, aiming past the Apothecary as another ork rushed at them, bellowing.

Polixis pressed on. All around him men, beasts and the Adeptus Astartes grappled and hacked, stabbed and spat, but it was a blur even to his hyperactive senses. His eyes were fixed on the company banner, grasped high in the fist of Ancient Skyrus, lit by the lightning of Captain Demeter’s power sword and the blazing crozius arcanum of Chaplain Kastor. As he broke through to them, he noticed a crumpled body at Skyrus’ feet.

‘Ovido,’ the standard bearer said.

Polixis didn’t require his prognosticator to know that the Primaris was dead – two heavy slug rounds had punched through his breastplate, cracking the Space Marine’s fused ribcage and almost certainly rupturing both hearts and lungs.

‘Brother-Apothecary,’ said Demeter. The captain was half facing away from him, dragging his power sword from another greenskin corpse. ‘Kindly perform your rites.’

Polixis knelt beside Ovido. He activated his narthecium, the advanced medicae tool that encased his left gauntlet, muttering the Litany of Recovery as he did so. A glance told him the sternal progenoid, the gene-seed buried in Ovido’s chest, had been damaged beyond recovery by the two shots that had killed him. The secondary cervical progenoid, however, was not beyond saving.

He accessed the emergency sealants around Ovido’s gorget, unclamping his helmet with a quiet prayer to the armour’s machine-spirit.

‘Blessed battleplate, yield your fallen brother to me now.’

The fallen Ultramarine’s face was revealed – wrathful in death, pale and stony-eyed, as though still damning the xenos that had shot him. Mag-locking his bolt pistol to his thigh, Polixis used two fingers to close the Ultramarine’s eyelids, before triggering his narthecium’s carbon alloy chainblade.

Combat recoveries were unpleasant at the best of times. The reverence and care that the body of any fallen member of the Chapter deserved had to be set aside in favour of measured haste. Polixis sliced the tip of the chainblade along Ovido’s throat, cutting the white flesh with a practised stroke. Blood welled bright from the small incision as he deactivated the chainblade and extended the narthecium reductor’s extractor tube and flesh hooks, sliding it into the cut and keeping the wound from sealing. The thumbnail-sized pict-caster above the tube’s tip linked with his helmet display, showing him the grey, fleshy gland he sought in Ovido’s neck. With a blink-click he triggered the extractor tube’s scissor end after it had slid over the progenoid, neatly severing the gland from the connective tissue embedding it into the larynx.

With the gene-seed disconnected, Polixis activated the reductor’s suction valve. There was a whirring noise as the gland was dragged free from Ovido’s flesh and shunted up the extractor tube into one of the sealed cryo-receptacle vials at the narthecium’s rear.

As Polixis worked, the slaughter around him continued. His transhuman senses were aware of it, capable of splitting focus between the probing of the extractor and the surrounding thump of axes and the clang of steel on ceramite. He pulled a mortis tag from his plastek medicae webbing and inserted it into Ovido’s primary breastplate port, just to the left below his fused rib-plate, providing a beacon to locate the body later now that the battle-brother’s auto-senses were offline. As Polixis stood, a spray of blood splattered his white armour, a greenskin’s severed head flying past him from the direction of Captain Demeter.

‘He is recovered,’ the Apothecary said, speaking the rite of the fallen. ‘His legacy endures.’

‘Brother Priscor?’ Demeter asked.

‘Stable.’

‘Then let us press on,’ Demeter continued, switching to address both the Primaris and the Guard over the vox. ‘The Gorgon lies just ahead, my brothers. Forward!’

KASTOR

An hour since first entering the refinery square, the Fulminata secured the eastern end of the Excelsior Arch. Kastor caught sight of the great bridge ahead, scarred by the bombing runs of Imperial Navy Marauders, craters riddling its broad expanse. Still it stood. Greenskins packed it from span to span, the mobs thrusting individuals through the holes and over the bridge’s sides in their bestial eagerness to reach the east embankment and join the battle raging through Shebat Alpha.

The final phases of the day’s objectives were at hand – they were to secure the eastern bank of the river. Demeter led the final drive to the bridge. Kastor strode to his left and Polixis to his right, their bolt pistols thundering, the Intercessors of Squad Nerva forming a wedge around them, while Ancient Skyrus’ banner fluttered at the centre of their formation. Voitekans kept their flanks clear with volleys of las-fire, the Guard maintaining their discipline in the white heat of the close-quarter combat that had been grinding on ever since the refinery square. Reinforcements pressed in from the north and the south – a squadron of Namarian Leman Russ battle tanks and two companies of Kelestan Stormers, relentlessly driving the greenskins towards the banks of the river.

That river was the Gorgon, the great, sluggish expanse of polluted water that curved through the heart of Shebat, two thousand paces from one embankment to the other. The Excelsior was the greatest of six bridges that had once spanned it, from Saint Collum’s Crossing in the north to the adamantium mag-lev line in the south. A week of Imperial bombing runs in the build up to the offensive had reduced all but one to broken stubs and rockcrete rubble heaped in the foaming sludge below. Only the Excelsior endured.

The bridge’s entrance archway lay before the Primaris. Kastor could tell that it must once have been an ornate affair, a great stone monument engraved with images showing the industriousness and toil of the city of Shebat. It had been scarred by the brutalities of war, and was now further defiled with the crude iconography of the greenskins: huge skull effigies and totemic devices had been bolted to its front and sides, and a rickety-looking ork crane had heaped wrecked battle spoil – weapons, armour, even parts of a burned-out Leman Russ – on top of it. The transformation of humanity’s great works into a bestial mockery of their former glory sent fresh fire blazing through Kastor’s veins.

‘Drive them into the Gorgon, my brothers!’ he bellowed, charging forwards into the press. Shells fell from across the river, indiscriminate detonations ripping through the embankment zone. Kastor realised he was grinning with a rictus of frenzied passion as he set about once more with Salve Imperator, the crozius crushing skulls and cracking shoulders and ribcages. Demeter joined him, both his power sword and his boltstorm gauntlet ignited, a crackling tempest of destruction. Kastor was partially aware of Polixis on the other side of the captain – the Apothecary had drawn gladius and Absolver bolt pistol, medicae tools exchanged for the implements of butchery.

A battle cannon shell pounded into the press of greenskins beneath the archway in front of them, dangerously close to the advancing Primaris. The shock wave battered the Space Marines, accompanied by a hail of shattered rockcrete and body parts. The blast cleared a space ahead, affording the Ultramarines a break in the melee. It was then that word crackled over the captain’s earpiece.

‘The Spear strikes,’ he relayed to those around him. The words had barely been uttered when the heavens parted.

A spear of light lanced down from above. Its brightness imprinted itself even on the lumen dampeners of the Ultramarines’ visors, searing a perfect circle in the ashen clouds. The light struck the ground directly across the river, the point of impact obscured by the warehouse blocks lining the opposite bank. There was a burst of brilliance, followed by a thunderclap like the closing of the Eternity Gate. The warehouses shuddered, and seconds later the shock wave hit the east side of the river, buffeting man and ork with the fury of a gale. Kastor lowered his head into the storm, stabilisers activating once again. He felt debris striking his armour, ricocheting off his legs, torso and pauldrons and making his vestments whip about him. The rockcrete underfoot shuddered, the city shaken to its very core.

The shock wave passed. The light blinked from existence, replaced now by a great pillar of black smoke that began to rise towards the torn sky. The Spear of Macragge had struck, an orbital bombardment that had obliterated the ork artillery positions firing from across the river. The shellfire ceased.

The stunned hush that followed didn’t last long. There was a cracking sound, and the ground shook once more. The crack rose to a crash, echoing back from the ruins bordering onto the river and overlaid by the howling of thousands of alien throats. Kastor realised that the Excelsior Arch, battered for days by munition payloads, was finally breaking in the aftershock of the Spear of Macragge’s strike.

He lowered Salve Imperator and watched as the great bridge began to collapse. The arch closest to the west bank gave way first, plunging hundreds of greenskins into the broken rockcrete and toxic slurry of the river below, the xenos struggling and clawing at one another as they were slowly dragged under. The rest of the great bridge followed arch by arch, the air filling with the sound of ruination as the city of Shebat was split in half. The destruction only ended a hundred paces from the east bank’s defiled entrance archway, the last of the bridge’s masonry crumbling away to leave behind a jagged stub of stonework, the last remnants of Excelsior’s majesty.

As the echoes of the collapse began to fade, the Imperial forces redoubled their assault. The surviving greenskins trapped on the east bank were cut down, bolt-rounds and las-bolts bursting apart their toughened hides and crude scrap armour. Kastor strode ahead of the advance, unheeding now of the orks dying around him. He entered the shadow of the archway, the stonework soaring above him, and turned back the way he had come. Before him were his battle-brothers, stained and scarred by the day’s fighting, and either side of them the stern-faced men of the Guard, bloodied but with victory gleaming in their eyes.

‘Brothers!’ the Chaplain bellowed, voice amplified to a thunderous exhortation. ‘The day is ours! In the Emperor’s name we have purged, and by His will we shall do so again! Today we have reclaimed half of this great city. Tomorrow, we retake the other half! Ave Imperator!’

The response, issued from human and transhuman throats alike, was deafening.

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For my granddad, Dennis. You’ll always be loved.

A Black Library Publication

First published in Great Britain in 2018 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd, Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

Produced by Games Workshop in Nottingham.
Cover illustration by Marc Lee.

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ISBN: 978-1-78030-925-5

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