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Knights of Macragge – Extract

A Black Library Publication

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The arena

Silence had fallen across the arena. A crowd gathered at the edges: two groups, very alike and yet also very different, each keenly eyeing their champion.

Pillium felt their eyes upon him and ignored them. He wasn’t here to entertain. He was here to prove his superiority. He hefted a blunted spear – an uncommon weapon for a Space Marine, but he liked the feel and the balance of it. The charging unit in its flat, circular ferrule had been disengaged to accord with training etiquette where lethality was generally frowned upon. He had shed his power armour too. This was also unconventional, especially given the extended period of high alert conditions currently in force, but it had been quiet for weeks. Maddeningly so. Even the Emperor’s angels needed an outlet. They were made for battle, and to deny them that was to deny a man oxygen or a fish water. Pillium had another reason for his lack of armour. He desired to hone his skill at arms and his martial instincts without a technological crutch. In the training cages, he considered such things an encumbrance. War, of course, was a different matter. Well-refined skill and instinct allied to the finest trappings of the Martian priesthood would render him formidable and the equal of any opponent. Thus was Pillium’s creed. It spoke to decades, even centuries of war-making, but in fact Pillium had only served in a handful of campaigns, and had seen but a few major engagements.

‘Are you sure you want to do this again, Daceus?’ said Pillium, languidly rolling the spear around his shoulders, one hand to the other and then back again to tuck into the crook of his right arm.

He moved barefoot around the ten foot by ten foot cage, the light from the overhead sodium lamps describing the immaculately chiselled cut of his finely muscled body. He had no upper armour, though a light training cuirass had been offered and refused, and he wore a pair of dark blue fatigues.

His opponent, a gruff and squat-looking pugilist with a shaved head and a flattened nose, had taken the chest armour and wore soft boots. He carried a blunted gladius and a small, de-energised buckler. Cuts and bruises to Daceus’ face and exposed flesh told the story of the previous bouts. The patch over his left eye, a simple thing of brown leather, covered a much older injury. The fact he also surrendered almost a foot and a half in height, and a significant amount of breadth across the shoulders and his overall frame, made it clear by any level of observation that the two Ultramarines came from differing provenance.

The two groups of supporters who had gathered to watch the contest were each relative to the size and stature of one of the fighters. Old versus young. Experience against vigour, with obsolescence in the balance.

‘Just getting warmed up,’ said Daceus, spitting out a red gobbet and wiping away the residue on the back of his craggy hand.

‘I think you might have left more blood on the floor of this arena than you have left in your body, old man.’

‘Is that right…?’ said Daceus, moving into an en garde position.

‘Take him!’ said one of the onlookers loudly, eager for some retribution.

‘In good time, Gaius,’ Daceus replied, though his eyes never left his opponent. ‘I’m going to wear him down.’

‘Of course you are,’ muttered Pillium, unconvinced.

Daceus flicked the tip of his gladius in a gesture for them to commence.

Both sides began to chant, anticipating the fight. An as yet unproven point was about to be declared and settled one way or the other.

Pillium smiled. ‘Willing to oblige, sergeant…’

He didn’t hesitate. A quick thrust drew a parry from Daceus’ buckler, and the older warrior followed up with a savage riposte from the blunted gladius that sent fiery needles down Pillium’s arm as it grazed his bicep.

A braggadocio cheer erupted from Daceus’ supporters.

‘Yes, brother!’ bellowed Gaius, who slammed his combat shield against the bars three times to signal his appreciation. ‘We roar!’

Had Pillium not reacted as fast as he did, blood would already be flowing.

He grimaced but swept low with his spear, forcing Daceus to leap back or be tripped. A second swing kept Daceus on the defensive, the blow pranging loudly against the combined defence of blade and buckler.

‘Do not get complacent.’ This from Secutius, on Pillium’s side of the cage.

More cheering broke out, this time from both sides.

Pillium leaned in until his weapons locked with his opponent’s, both hands on the haft of the spear, and braced. He pushed, feeling Daceus yield to his superior strength. Daceus was a fighter, one of the veterans who called themselves ‘Lions’ and believed strength and determination could carry any fight if meted out in the proper quantity. But he was wily, too. He dropped his left shoulder, intending to use Pillium’s own momentum against him and overbalance him. Pillium read the move and instead lunged with one knee, bringing the spear from horizontal to vertical, sweeping the ferrule up to connect hard with Daceus’ chin.

Stunned silence fell.

Momentarily dazed, Daceus staggered, blood gushing from a bit lip. He swept his gladius diagonally, left to right, a warding cut to buy time, but Pillium saw that too. He stepped around Daceus and struck so swiftly that the sergeant barely registered he had been disarmed and that the ringing in his ears was the chime of his gladius hitting the arena floor.

A rapid blow to the solar plexus finished it, driving the air from Daceus’ lungs and putting him on his back.

Gaius swore loudly, prompting a bellow of vicarious triumph from the other side of the cage.

Pillium revelled in this petty glory, despite what his better self told him about not wanting a spectacle, and made sure he met the other warrior’s gaze. There was anger there in Gaius’ eyes, hidden behind fraternal discipline but as hot as any forge. He raged – they all did, those of the old kind, when faced with the new. Pillium knew what he represented. It was extinction.

He caught Secutius’ gaze, who slowly nodded before turning his back on it all.

Pillium ignored him and remained in stance for a few seconds, looking down on his opponent with the neutral satisfaction of a predicted victory.

Staying down, Daceus explored the crack in his breastplate with his fingers.

‘That might leave a scar,’ he murmured.

‘Another for the tapestry,’ Pillium replied.

‘They taught you poetry as well, did they?’

‘And weapon mastery, hand-to-hand tactics, unarmed combat. We are experts at war.’

‘But not humility,’ said Daceus, groaning a little as he began to rise.

Pillium frowned, letting the spear drop into a one-handed grip and reaching down to help Daceus with the other. ‘I’m not sure I understand, sergeant.’

Daceus had regained his feet and was about to reply when a high-pitched whine shredded across the ship’s vox.

We are Macragge

The alarms were sounding again. From prow to stern, deck to deck, men and women scrambled into sudden and urgent activity, driven by duty and an all-too-human instinct to survive.

To live. To go on. That was it. All they had left. Previously held illusions of glory or honour or even retribution had long since given way to the overwhelming likelihood of extinction.

An atonal whine went through the Emperor’s Will like a rusty bandsaw. It drew Arna Reda’s face into a sharp grimace that pulled at her scars and set her perfect teeth on edge.

‘Get your gear…’ she growled, her skin alternating from tan to red to tan as the warning lumens flashed across her face. ‘Up, up!’

The ship’s armsmen rose with bone-tired urgency from their bunks. Sleep routine had been scheduled for forty-five minutes. They had taken barely ten. Momentum grew as the inertia of fatigue faded, ready hands grabbing the stocks of autostubbers and lascarbines. The lights were off, barring the red strobes. The ring of booted feet thundered through the corridor adjacent to the barrack room.

‘Armour on, flakweave and carapace. Heavy assault conditions. Move!’ shouted Reda, her own armour strapped and locked. Reports came thick through her personal vox, describing encounters with the enemy across different parts of the ship. Frantically, the Emperor’s Will strove to respond, its defenders coalescing the way white blood cells gather to fight an infection of the body. This ship was their body; lose it to that infection and they were all dead or worse.

Men and women filed out into the corridor clad in begrimed grey fatigues and scarred blue carapace. Reda followed them into the darkness, their numbers adding to the cacophony.

‘Who are we?’ she bellowed, her voice barely audible over the clamour.

But her charges all replied as one.

‘We are Macragge!’

‘Who are we?’ she asked again, ratcheting a grenade into the underslung launcher attached to her shotgun.

‘We are Macragge!’

‘Damn right we are,’ said Reda, ducking under an overhead branch of piping, and clapped the armsman in front of her hard on the shoulders to make him pick up the pace. ‘Now, let’s kick these bastards off our ship.’

She clamped on her helmet, hooking up the chin strap one-handed.

It had happened fast. Nothing, weeks of empty patrols and raw-nerved uneventfulness and then suddenly peril. Ships had materialised. With so few interceptors left and a dearth of still-functional anti-aircraft guns, the enemy boarders had been virtually unimpeded. But even without some of her guns, as weary as she was, the Emperor’s Will still had teeth.

Inside the ship everything was red-flushed darkness as gaudy as a neon abattoir. As the walls of the minor transitway pressed in, the air swilled with the stink of sweat and unwashed bodies. No time to think, no time to fear. Just fight. This was Ultramar. They were born to this, and she would not be found wanting in their eyes.

Through the press and the ruddy gloom, a small fissure of brighter light persisted ahead. The corridor’s edge. From there, the ship opened out into one of its main arterials, a larger hall. An honour hall. Reda carried on into the ruck, closer and closer to the light. Like a dawning sun it began to fill her claustrophobic world, migraine bright and hot as a forge.

The hall was burning.

‘That isn’t the lumens,’ she murmured as the armsmen flooded out in search of cover.

It was fire.

‘Into position!’ Fallad was shouting orders, as cerulean las-fire spat either side of his gesturing form. ‘By squad, by squ–’

He stopped short when his throat was shot out. Blood exploded in slow motion, painting his armour plate and spinning Fallad so he fell face down in front of the advancing troopers. Others died too. Head shots, through gaps in their armour, some caught in the throat like their sergeant.

‘Down, down!’ shouted Reda, barely able to make out the enemy amidst the cascade of heat and light and smoke. ‘Into cover,’ she roared. ‘Rebreathers on.’

She dragged on her own mask and the sound of her rapid, adrenaline-fuelled breathing resonated loudly in her skull. It failed to block the high-pitched whine of lascarbines and the thud of solid shot. Metal-on-metal ricochets lit the edge of the maintenance alcove in sparks like dying fireflies. Hunkered down, she gave a burst of retaliatory fire and a smoke-hazed silhouette sank from view ahead.

Reda estimated around seventy per cent of her force had survived deployment into the arterial. She had around twelve troopers with her in the alcove, and several groups of a similar size stood farther up the corridor or crouched directly across from her, exchanging blind snap-fire with their foes.

Cultists, she realised. No enviro-suits, no rebreathers, though they did wear masks. Leather, but not animal hide. Reda thought she recognised part of a human ear on one of them, dried out and beaten flat. Cheap armour, scavenged gear. They were inferior in every way to the Ultramarians, but they had a manic fervour, an utter disregard for their lives or the lives of their comrades that went beyond suicidal. Through drifts of smoke, Reda saw a cultist crouched over one of the injured. A crude bone mask hid gender and identity but revealed a balding skull, wretched with rad-scars and tufts of wiry, white hair. Clad in black leather and rough brown hessian, the cultist looked more like a butcher than a soldier and went to work on the injured armsman with a serrated knife about the length of a human forearm. The armsman screamed, already in agony, but now having to deal with the torture of his flesh too.

Reda fired two shots, and the boom of the shotgun’s report barely registered in the madness of it all. The first shot almost cut the cultist in half and blasted it into the darkness to lie with the rest of the dead. The second killed the tortured armsman, and Reda said to herself this was mercy.

A heavy rate of fire was coming from the armsmen now, their better training and equipment tipping the scales. The cultists had thinned, still trading shots, still seizing like hungry arachnids on the wounded.

Reda had seen enough.

‘Push up, push up!’ she roared, letting the vox-emitter strapped to her breastplate carry the order.

The armsmen moved as one, suppressing fire staving off the worst of the cultists’ reply. It was all over in a few more minutes, the last of the cultists slashing its own throat and hollering some dark promise to its gods before it bled out all over the deck.

Recyc-fans had kicked in, draining off the worst of the smoke, and only then did Reda see the enemy’s entry point. A crude breacher shell had cored through the hull, the melta-burns from its cutting array still glowing hot around the savaged metal, such was the rapidity of the engagement. Banners, parchment rolls of honour, had once stood in this hall. They were soot and charred remains now, despite the best efforts of the armsmen to save them. And now they realised where the fires had been started.

Pulling down the rebreather mask, Reda regarded the ragged horde her troops had just annihilated. Cannon fodder. Light enough fires, cause enough disruption and the true target of an attack is much harder to discern.

Reports of further engagements tripped over the vox-feed as if to confirm this fact.

‘Lieutenant…’ A bloodied trooper, Gerrant, approached Reda to ask an unspoken question.

The sounds of battle echoed from deeper in the ship, north of their position. The enemy amassing its disparate forces, trying to attain coherency. The armsmen had to meet them and make sure that did not happen.

‘Anything from Colonel Kraef?’

Gerrant shook his head.

‘Then we move up,’ said Reda, and then louder so that all the survivors could hear. ‘You three,’ she said, her gaze quickly taking in three armsmen, ‘get the wounded to the medicae. The rest,’ she said, indulging in an emphatic reload of the shotgun, ‘forwards on my lead.’

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A Black Library Publication

First published in Great Britain in 2019.
This eBook edition published in 2019 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd, Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

Produced by Games Workshop in Nottingham.
Cover illustration by Mauro Belfiore.

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ISBN: 978-1-78999-441-4

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