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Dishonoured

Ray Harrison

Around the outpost of Blight’s Edge, a warhost of angels fell to earth.

They came to excise, to cleanse, to burn. To take back the planet of Schrödinger VII from the necrons, in the Emperor’s name.

Instead, they fell, they died. The ice turned black with their blood.

Marshal Helbrecht of the Black Templars saw the enemy approaching. Forty pairs of eyes hanging in the dark, burning with soulless fire. Beyond them, Blight’s Edge burned, explosions and crackling gunfire echoing out across the ice.

The vox squealed and roared in his ears. Between the ebb and flow of the static he could hear his brothers fighting at the other insertion points situated around the outpost. Where he had ordered them to be. Where he had been sure they could take their enemy by surprise.

They were already here!

Do not falter…

We are surrounded!

They were dying.

All of them.

The advancing necrons began to fire. Gauss fire whickered across the ice.

‘They think us undone!’ he called out. ‘Push them back!’

Helbrecht led the charge, the wholesale slaughter of his brothers ringing in his ears. He met the first necron warrior with a crash of ceramite and metal.

The creature didn’t get the chance to fire. Helbrecht punched his sword through the xenos’ throat, severing cabling and tearing the creature’s head from its body. The light in its eyes guttered out. He pulled his sword free and the necron’s body crumpled.

Before it hit the ice, it disappeared with a sound like a thunderclap, but Helbrecht was already moving to engage his next foe.

Around him, his brothers fought like war given form. The squad’s standard bearer, Evrain, had one of the necron creatures pinned to the ice, impaled on the banner pole. Garel and Thibaut stood at his side, keeping the necrons back. The standard was ancient. It had seen a thousand battlefields. Every burn mark and ragged thread was a testament to Helbrecht’s strength, to the strength of the Chapter.

It was a symbol. It was faith.

Evrain freed the banner pole from the necron’s ruined form and raised the standard high. A roar went up across the vox from eight battle-rough throats.

Helbrecht’s champion, Aergard, was by his side. He was Helbrecht’s shadow, and his sharpest blade.

‘They foresaw the location of our landing sites,’ Aergard said.

Helbrecht couldn’t deny his words, but that didn’t mean he had to like them. The Marshal engaged a necron warrior, separating its legs from its upper body with a brutal strike from his sword. It toppled onto the ice, but still its top half crawled towards the Marshal, clawed hands digging into the ground.

It should have been dead.

Aergard drove his sword into the top of its head, and it spasmed and sparked at the champion’s feet before vanishing completely.

‘What would you have us do?’ Aergard asked.

Helbrecht raised his bolter and fired over his champion’s shoulder, knocking one of the necrons backwards onto the ice with a burst of flame.

‘What we came here to do,’ the Marshal said. ‘Purge them. Every last one of them.’

Aergard turned away from the Marshal and fired his bolter. The bolts hit home, blasting holes in the chest of a necron warrior. The xenos kept coming, wounds re-knitting. It levelled its gun, and the maw of the weapon began to glow with emerald fire. Aergard rushed forward, taking the necron’s head with a sweep of his sword. The body fell backwards to the ground, the gauss blast it had fired screaming skywards, and as the body hit the ice it phased out with a clap of pressure.

‘That could have been the end of you.’ Thibaut’s voice was underpinned by echoing snaps of bolter fire.

‘Yes,’ Aergard said, turning and firing at another of the xenos creatures. ‘But it wasn’t.’

Thibaut snorted and cut the vox link.

Across the ice from Aergard, Thibaut and Lidas were battling with the necrons. The two Space Marines fought like brawlers, without grace, but with matchless ferocity. Where Aergard found clarity in the execution of his duty, Lidas and Thibaut both found joy. Lidas fought with his gladius in one hand and his chainsword in the other. He punched the gladius into the side of a necron’s metal skull. The short blade snapped off at the hilt. The necron staggered, twitching. Lidas took its head with a messy swing of his chainsword.

Aergard knew that behind the mask of his faceplate, Lidas would be grinning.

The Black Templars had pushed the necrons back, claiming the ice as their own. At Aergard’s side, Helbrecht tore the last of the xenos open from hip to shoulder. The life went out of it with a burst of wicked green light. It fell.

‘If they had looked to test us,’ the Marshal said, ‘then they should have sent more.’

Aergard didn’t get the chance to reply. The world lit up for a split second with a blinding flare of light. In its wake, the darkness parted as if a veil had been lifted. Seven necrons appeared. Six held bulky shields and wicked blades, but the seventh was smaller, hunchbacked, and twitching with synaptic misfires. It wore a rotten cloak around its lumpen shoulders. A single green eye looked out from under the hood.

At Aergard’s side now, Thibaut slammed a fresh magazine into his bolter.

‘How accommodating.’

Aergard silenced him with a look.

The Black Templars drew together, each protecting his brother beside him.

The hunchbacked creature cast its eye across each of the Space Marines. With a garbled machine-squeal, it raised its arm and pointed at Evrain.

‘I, Kheprys, demand this one,’ it said in halting Gothic.

The standard bearer cursed. He fired his bolter at the creature, only for the explosive shells to detonate in the air around it. For an instant, Aergard could see the reflective curve of some sort of shield, as if it were made of impossibly thin glass.

The creature, Kheprys, laughed. It sounded like air escaping from a valve. Its guardians started forward, closing ranks.

They were coming for the standard bearer.

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ISBN: 978-1-78572-179-3

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