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The Vengeful Dead – Extract

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THE VENGEFUL DEAD

Mike Vincent

My name is Ingalion Carthis, and I have died twice before.

I am facing my third death, from which there can be no resurrection. The plasma incinerator of my right arm sparks, coils flickering as I bend my will to the task of cycling it up once again, aware that every time may be the last. The gatling cannon beneath my left fist is dented and almost out of ammunition. I am limping. I know my machine-core has logged the incident that damaged my left leg, but I cannot remember it in the moment. I remember little in the furnace of battle. Who I am. Who I was. Such things fade in the fury. There is one thing that remains undiminished, though.

I am a Red Talon. I am vengeance incarnate.

My foe has revealed himself. The filth of humanity’s greatest betrayal, crawling forth. Night Lords. Nine legionaries in midnight plate and swaddled in foul leathers, knives glinting in the vacuum. They expected crew survivors, Space Marines perhaps, but not a Redemptor-class Dreadnought. They are under-gunned to face me and they know it. Bolt-rounds spew silently at me, drifting cones of vapour marking their passage in the airlessness. Two hit me, ringing against my front armour with hateful knells that only I can hear, echoing in my amniotic vessel. A huge slice of voidship wreckage has ploughed a ragged furrow in the grey surface of the planetoid, and four heretics now break from the cover afforded by the upraised rock of the furrow’s edge. I barely need to think. A burst of fire from my gatling cannon drenches them in tracer and one falls, nigh decapitated. Another takes rounds in his back. He is wounded, but not felled. They make it clear and drop into a crater, immediately opening fire to cover their comrades. The other five break out and I pan my weapon towards them, relishing such open targets.

Only now do I see that one of the Night Lords wields an ornate baroque meltagun, and his careful aim costs me. My gatling cannon abruptly comes apart, the spinning barrels scything away in pieces. The last of its ammunition cooks in its hopper, bathing me in sparks and scoring bright gouges across my armour. I bellow wordlessly. With my gatling fire stifled, the other heretics have reached their own cover. I am exposed, and another sound melta shot could quench my fury forever. Straining my reserves, I loose a bolt of plasma from my incinerator, aiming for the melta gunner. Feedback from the death of my gatling cannon has temporarily scrambled my targeting cogitator, and the plasma erupts in the regolith five yards short. As the cloud of fused particulate clears, I see the Night Lords have fled out of my kill radius into a defile that tracks away over the foreshortened horizon.

I should ease my plasma incinerator down into dormancy. I should regroup and strategise. Instead, I lurch forwards, resolved to pursue my enemy. System alerts flash on my vid-feed and the broken armature of my leg screams against my efforts. Two steps, five, a dozen.

I admit the folly of my resolve. There is no way I can catch the heretics. I allow my combat systems to cycle down and status runes on my vid-feed change gratefully from crimson back to ochre. Some even return to emerald. I stand for several moments, my plasma incinerator releasing gouts of coolant that evaporate instantly in the vacuum. Runes threaten me with a damage update, but I discard the warnings with a thought. I know my destiny. I cast my auspex out into the locale. It identifies several large pieces of the Red Talons frigate Persecutis, which was, until ninety-four minutes ago, the vessel I was embarked upon. Righteous fury swells again.

The Dorgiev Agglomeration has always been a high-risk space lane, clotted with trillions of pieces of debris on eccentric and dramatically intersecting orbits. The Adeptus Mechanicus is certain the debris field will stabilise itself within one or two hundred thousand years, but there is little solace in that astronomical curiosity for the dozens of void-faring Imperial vessels that need to cross the Agglomeration every Terran standard year. The Persecutis has made the crossing many times before without incident.

But the Night Lords are as cunning as they are cruel. I cannot conceive of how long it must have taken to install cyclonic missile traps in the icy shale of so many asteroids. Doubtlessly years. Nor is there any way of knowing how many other pieces of the Agglomeration have been mined so, save a meticulous survey of every single tiny body by an Adeptus Mechanicus augur fleet. The Night Lords have wreaked their havoc well, for the Dorgiev Agglomeration is now nigh impassable until such precautions have been taken. Decades at least, perhaps a century.

Now, their trap sprung, they wish to remove any chance of the wider Imperium receiving word of their endeavours. Kill teams, to obliterate the survivors. I have no interplanetary-range vox, and the Persecutis was on deep transit, alone and unsupported. I will die on this rock. The Night Lords could consign me to a slow death as my reactor burns out and the life-giving concoction of my amniotic fluid gradually degrades, but that is not their way. They will find me and revel in my undoing.

Let them come.

My first death was that of the child I was, before my elevation to the Adeptus Astartes, and in truth there is nothing to mourn. How can I mourn something I no longer comprehend? Only ghosts whisper to me from my child-eyes. Ghosts of a banal existence, merely human.

My second death was a matter entirely different. The Reiver soldier suited me. The fighting was always close and brutal. On Goreaumunda the Red Talons decimated the Agnost separatists and my Reiver squad had the honour of executing the High Agnost as he attempted to flee. A digital weapon in his brooch of office nearly ended me there, but for a chance malfunction. The beachhead in the Kolvokani Shipyards had nearly claimed me. As we swept across the spars of the void dock under grav-chute propulsion, a lance strike atomised seven of my squad, yet I was untouched. From scores of battles across a dozen sectors I emerged, bloodied but unbroken. Until Ba’Or Tertius.

On Ba’Or Tertius we drove, as ever, into the heart of the enemy. My first encounter with the despised Night Lords. We dropped directly into their command position amid our own bombardment. Wreathed in flame and accompanied by the hymnal of explosive ordnance, we butchered they who measure their own butchery so highly.

Sorga landed first, planting a krak grenade in the gorget of a hulking heretic in Terminator plate. The beast bisected Sorga with its fanged axe before the charge blew it apart in a gout of bloody flame. Lumetz, Barrada, and I came down together, blasting with our bolt carbines. A servitor-thing with a whiplash limb tried to entangle me, but I drew my knife and severed the limb in a single motion. I shot the thing’s face off as it screamed. The entrenched position was coming apart under Red Talons shell-fire, and I dodged a crumbling revetment as orange sand flooded through the cracked rockcrete.

Like a breaching sphyrn-tooth, a Night Lord with a pair of lightning claws burst from the sand. I felt the tiny, scorching particles rain onto the exposed part of my face. I jumped back, raising my knife instinctively to block. The rippling power of the claws missed my chest, but I watched, unfeeling, as my arm below the elbow came away in shreds. Barrada leapt across me as I fell back, pistoning his knife into the warrior’s collar and neck. They both died, punctured and gore-sodden, falling together to be buried by the incoming sand.

‘A bold gambit, wretch.’ A voice like a hypodermic needle pierced the noise of the bombardment. We turned and saw a traitor in bronze-chased plate standing upon the parapet above me. He went without a helm and his face was ashen pale, hairless, split by a too-wide grin as he drew a long, curved power sword from a sheath made of human leather. Other Night Lords appeared next to this swordsman, whom I surmised was their commander. A standard bearer took pride of place at his right hand, hefting a broad depiction of the Traitor Legion’s bat-winged skull surmounted on a clawed portcullis.

The Gates of Torment. A warband of raiding torturers, long to have preyed upon the loyal citizenry of the Imperium. The serpent we Red Talons had come to behead.

This commander was Vorghyst, then. The artillery was still falling, and showers of grit came a few seconds after every deafening blast.

‘A bold gambit, indeed!’ Vorghyst sneered, but I could see the wounded pride in his eyes.

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