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Two Kinds of Fool

Graham McNeill

The lightless axial corridor was thick with beasts, scores of leaping, screeching killers of the hormagaunt genus. Sicarius’s command squad cut them down with disciplined volleys of mass-reactives. Explosions lit the way onward with strobing muzzle flare.

At the head of the Lions of Macragge, Sicarius met the tyranid charge head on. He went low, ducking under a slashing claw the length of a scythe, and he thrust his Tempest Blade into the creature’s thorax and twisted its energised edge. Molten flesh and black-red ichor frothed over his gauntlet.

He kicked the dying beast clear and shoulder-barged the press of aliens behind it. Bodies broke before his bulk. He stamped down on chitinous limbs, breaking arcs of bone and crushing hard shells. A jaw snapped on his left wrist, razored fangs scoring the artificer-forged plate.

Gaius Prabian took the creature’s head with a decapitating sweep of his power blade as Malcian unleashed a roaring blast of promethium from his flamer. A dozen monsters shrieked as superheated gel compounds burned them to bloody vapour.

Sicarius moved into the gap, the jaws of the disembodied head still gnawing at his wrist. The black orbs of its skull rolled over to white. Sicarius smashed it to bony splinters against the bulkhead and fired his plasma pistol. The searing beam burned out the chest of a dead-eyed horror of talons and teeth, penetrating a molten core through half a dozen more.

Vandius, Daceus and Venatio advanced with him, bolters locked to their shoulders. With flawless target prioritisation, they pumped shot after shot into the heaving mass of alien flesh.

Sicarius and Prabian led the charge, both warriors supremely gifted champions of the blade. Sicarius fought with the skill of a duellist, his sword arm trained since birth by the greatest fencing masters of Talassar. Prabian owned no such finesse. His blade arm was a killing tool, his shield a battering ram.

Malcian’s flamer unleashed another burning stream, lighting the axial with the glow of a furnace. Alien bodies burned with a curious snapping sound, like fresh kindling on a bonfire. Bolter shells detonated hormagaunts like chitinous bladders, their noxious blood spattering the wall in vast quantities.

Siciarius saw something larger than a gaunt lope down the corridor, wreathed in the play of fire and shadow. Even hunched over, its bulk was impressive, ridged and bony, with sharp chitin-hooks running the length of its spine. Its skull was a bulbous horror of ridged, overlapping plates.

‘Warrior genus,’ said Prabian. ‘A big one too.’

‘Too big?’ said Sicarius.

‘Big enough that we ought to take it together.’

‘Agreed.’

The tyranid warrior’s alien lips peeled back from its elongated jaw to reveal long, yellowed fangs. Hissing saliva drooled, and a black tongue coiled from its red-raw gullet. The creature barrelled forward on monstrously powerful legs, trampling its smaller kin in its hunger to reach Sicarius.

Twin blades of acid-edged bone unfurled from folds in its upper limbs.

Sicarius pressed himself against the shielding protrusion of a corroded stanchion and said, ‘Brother Malcian, give me some light.’

Malcian took a braced stance and a stream of liquid fire played over the creature. Its flesh ignited and it screeched in pain. Bolter shells detonated against its armour.

It left chunks of corpse-white flesh in its wake.

Prabian stepped from cover and swung his power sword in his favoured decapitating strike. A killing move, but one that could leave a warrior dangerously exposed. A flesh-wrought sword flashed up to block the blow, a second thrusting for the champion’s midriff.

Prabian rammed his shield into the bonesword, cracking the bio-weapon in two. At the sound of the blade snapping, Sicarius swung low and rammed his plasma pistol into the side of the alien’s reverse-jointed leg.

He pulled the trigger and the creature’s knee vanished in an explosion of molten bone and flesh. The monster crashed to the metalled deck and Sicarius spun, reversing his Tempest Blade to ram it down, one-handed through the back of the fallen beast’s skull.

Its agonised thrashing ceased instantly.

Sicarius left the sword embedded as the hormagaunts screeched in sudden abandonment, reeling in animal confusion. Sicarius knew the signs well enough; until another brood-leader imposed its dominance the tyranids were easy prey.

‘Kill them all,’ he said.

The Lions of Macragge advanced in a line to carry out their captain’s orders.

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