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Tears of Raphaela – Extract

A Black Library Publication

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TEARS OF RAPHAELA

Richard Swan

The city of Pallas was dying.

It was a decaying corpse. Its people were sludge. Rockcrete foundations sank into cake-soft earth as bioformatic viruses corrupted and destroyed and liquefied every last one of the city’s organic compounds.

Brother Ramethos moved quickly through the haunted streets, drawn by the sound of distant bolter fire, the quieted servos of his Mark X Phobos armour little more than a whisper on the alien wind. Pallas had once been the jewel of the nameless southern continent of Raphaela, a far cry from that poisonous pile of the capital, Elinor Vektra. Pallas was the ‘garden city’. A place of wide, pleasant boulevards, expansive dwellings of white plaster and terracotta roofs, of arboreta, water gardens and public parks.

Now it was churned earth, pounded and ripped apart by uncountable hoofs and claws. It was as though one of the gigantic agri-monotaskers, the big harvesters and threshers from upcountry, had bulldozed the place, sucked up the ground and everything on it, pulverised it, separated it out into its component parts, and sprayed the chaff in its wake.

The air was lousy with gas and spores, so thick that his cameleoline cloak was a sick, virulent tapestry of greens and yellows. His visor optics blared incessantly with air-quality warnings. Two days ago his helmet filter had warned of intolerable levels of toxicity. Now he was running entirely on his suit’s internal oxygen supply.

The air was soup-thick and malignantly hot. On windless days, unaided visibility was down to twenty yards in places. That morning, fast-moving alien vapours had charged the atmospheric clouds full of static energy, and the whole sky had erupted in a freak electrical storm. The subsequent squall and caustic downpour had sluiced the remains of the city, creating great stinking bogs and foetid rivers of human remains and alien matter. Already these impromptu waterways squirmed with fresh, mutant life.

Ramethos needed height, and fast. It did not take him long to find what he was looking for: a skeletal hab-block of grey rockcrete, though the rear of it had collapsed where the foundations had turned to slurry. Indeed, that it was standing at all was thanks to a dozen spined protuberances, great chitinous spikes as thick as tree trunks and as strong as iron. How deep did the roots of these alien tendrils go? Could they ever be unearthed? Could Raphaela ever be saved from its xenos taint?

Ramethos moved quickly, quietly, expertly. What bioforms remained here were the injured, the lame, waiting for death and their eventual reclamation. The tyranids were ruthless in their pursuit of destructive consumption, in a way that the Imperium could only aspire to be. Ramethos avoided those he could and quietly destroyed those he could not, severing heads with a quick slash of his combat knife or crushing them under his boots. He had bigger game to hunt.

The sounds of battle were still faint, but growing louder. He tried again to raise his brothers on the vox, and then widened the band for any Imperial forces at all – there was an Astra Militarum staging area further south, one that he knew still existed – but there was nothing. Nothing but static and the occasional blurt of ghost chatter. There had been nothing for days now. He knew the other two members of Zavian Squad were dead, but as for the rest of the Lamenters strike force that had made planetfall? There was no way to know.

The thought had left him deep in the grip of melancholy, the gene-curse of his Chapter, as he darted into the high-rise. His Phobos armour had been stripped to its barest essentials, but that did not stop him from sinking almost to the knee into the disgusting earth. Foul humours erupted from the swamp of putrefaction.

Bodies were in great abundance here. Hundreds of ’gaunts lay in piles, in various states of violent disassembly. In and amongst them were the bodies of dozens of Astra Militarum soldiers, draped over the corroding barrels of heavy weapon emplacements. Here, too, was the body of a sergeant from Assault Squad Volturno, having died directing the defensive efforts. Ramethos’ blood surged as melancholy filled him like a physical force. No veteran of the Eridayn Cataract should have perished here at the hands of mindless xenos filth.

They had sold their lives dearly, and Ramethos would mourn them, when there was time.

He sped through the building until he reached the top floor. Above, broken rockcrete revealed a grey sky filled with black shapes where high-altitude spores and other bioforms drifted on the wind. He thrust his pistol into its holster and his knife into its sheath and snatched his bolt sniper rifle from his shoulder, bringing the scope up to his right eye.

He quickly found his target.

The winged tyranid prime was a ghastly creature. It sat at the nexus of a vast swarm of slaved synapse creatures that lumbered through the city, some flying, most occupied with the busywork of scavenging and killing off Imperial survivors. These minor bioforms – rippers, ’gaunts of every type, gargoyles – swayed with bovine stupidity, nothing except extensions of their commander, little more than external neurons twitching and pulsing. Not the prime, though. That was a creature of intelligence, and unshakeable, unquenchable malevolence.

With comms as dead as most of the population of the city, he could only watch on in anger as the last of his battle-brothers in this part of Pallas were killed, utterly overwhelmed by the predations of the swarm. He watched as bolter fire flickered and zapped and popped from within the mass of creatures, like lightning flashing through cloud, blasting and shredding and exploding ’gaunts by the dozen but making few inroads into the swarm at large. The prime itself seemed almost untroubled by this handful of small, yellow-ceramite-encased warriors, directing its innumerable thralls onto them with something approaching disinterest. Ramethos swore under his breath – the battle was already reaching its conclusion. If he could hit the prime, it would send the swarm into a frenzy, and perhaps spare a few of his brothers’ lives, to say nothing of the broader implications of their continental war effort.

An Executioner round would be needed for this beast. He had but a few left. With quick, precise, expert movements, he loaded one into the bolt sniper rifle and carefully lined up the shot. He needed nothing to rest the rifle on; his suit could rigidify into statue solidity on command.

‘Move,’ he breathed, willing the bioforms to part and give him a clear shot. Even with its self-guiding mechanism, there was no sense in firing the Executioner round into such a large mass of bodies – the risk that it would blow up against an insignificant ’gaunt was much too high.

‘Move, damn you,’ he muttered again, tracking the prime as it sauntered away from the Lamenters. He hated it – detested it, as was only right and correct – but rage was not his primary motivation. It had never been. It was grief. His cheeks were wet with tears – real ones, to go with the red teardrop tattoo under his left eye. The older he grew, the more this dark melancholia affected him. He could go for weeks at a time now in its grip, his mood bleak, the sense of hopelessness an almost physical weight pulling him down. The misfortune of his Chapter, the cosmic, genetic misfortune written in the stars, permeated him. It saturated the words of his oath of moment – to kill this prime – as palpably as his tears saturated the foam cushioning of his helmet seal. He would kill it not for hatred, but for sorrow.

The prime spread its wings in a sudden and surprisingly graceful motion. It was preparing to fly away, when a sudden hail of fire – an incredible last-ditch effort by the remaining Intercessors before they were finally cut down – ripped into those great leathery folds of skin and perforated them in dozens of places. The prime let out an enormous roar of rage at this parting injustice, only now engaged in a firefight that was already over. It flapped its wings experimentally, once, twice, three times, but the great rents in its skin bled air and it could get no purchase to lift its bulk off the ground.

Ramethos settled his aim and quickly incanted his oath of moment. ‘Rest now, brothers,’ he whispered softly. ‘Your penitence is complete. For those who remain, we shall bear the sins and scars of our Chapter in your name. Blood of Badab be forgiven. So I lament–’

Movement to his right.

Too late. Three hormagaunts, synaptically untethered and rabid, clattered into him from the side, smashing bodily into his bolt sniper rifle. He swore as he was knocked off balance. Great organic scythes as sharp as any monofilament wire stabbed and scratched great rents into his Phobos armour.

He twisted and ducked away to the left, one of the ’gaunts slamming into the far wall. He punched a fist directly through its neck and through the wall itself, inadvertently expressing its acidic glands. The foul liquid immediately began to sizzle against his gauntlet, and his helmet display blared with warning optics. He could not afford a breach in his suit, not in this atmosphere.

One down, two to go. He snatched his bolt pistol out of its holster, but it was sheared in half by a talon.

‘In the name of–’ Ramethos snarled, tossing the useless weapon aside. He snatched his combat knife out of its sheath and dodged one, two, three swipes from the leftmost ’gaunt. He slashed at it with his knife, cutting nothing but air, but a follow-up kick – a clumsy, ill-thought-out motion – smashed the thing’s jaw. It screeched, collapsing to the floor, where it scrabbled about insensibly.

The third and final ’gaunt’s eyes rolled with avian stupidity as it gauged the situation and the great yellow monstrosity in front of it. Within half a second it had pounced, but alone it was no match for an Adeptus Astartes.

A hundred were, though. Ramethos had seen it time and again on Pallas.

He smashed the knife into the beast’s face with ease. The thing’s brain pan split open in a great welter of gore. It died immediately, hanging from Ramethos’ outstretched arm like a coat on a rack. He threw the corpse off disgustedly, and then dispatched the remaining wounded bioform by standing on its neck. The weight of his armour did the rest.

He took a few seconds to check that there were no more creatures coming up the building, and then stole back to where his bolt sniper rifle lay on the floor.

‘Blood of Badab,’ he muttered angrily. The magazine had been destroyed in the melee. One of the creature’s scythe-talons had penetrated it. The housing itself was bent and twisted out of shape, too. He inspected the Executioner rounds inside. Two had been rendered useless, deformed along with the magazine. They would likely explode if he tried to fire them.

He tossed the magazine to the ground then very carefully pulled back the bolt handle. He breathed a sigh of relief. He’d had one Executioner round chambered. His very last round. He withdrew it from the rifle and checked it to make sure that it hadn’t been nicked by the alien’s talons, but everything else about the rifle was in perfect working order.

There was no time to waste. With his blood singing in his veins, he rechambered the round and brought the scope up to his eye.

But the prime and its horde were gone.

The opportunity had passed.

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