heavy weapon little open ground to acquire the advancing insanity.
Something Brother Micah assumed to be dead suddenly erupted in tentacles. The champion sidestepped the elastic reach of the first few, but dragging the injured Scout gave little room for manoeuvre and one of the thin appendages wound itself viciously around his leg. Pulling away from the horror, Micah plugged at it with single shots from his bolter, but a second grappler wrapped itself around the weapon. The tentacle around the champion’s leg bled some kind of caustic revenge from the feeler’s hook-suckers and the ceramite began to sizzle and smoulder. Micah yelled out in frustration and it took the gnashing teeth of Kersh’s chainsword to slice the tentacles from their beast-host. As Micah ripped the remainder of the appendage from his leg and bolter, the Scourge buried the tip of his sword in the creature’s thorax, gunning the barbed chain to full shredding majesty and despatching the monster.
The Excoriators ran. The horde closed.
Bolting down through the rat-run, the steep sides of the second battlement threatening to cascade down upon them, Kersh and Micah pounded on – the Scout Marine’s blood-drenched and ragdoll body pulled behind them. Kale backed into the gap after them, the flamer’s incessant inferno even more devastating and concentrated within the rat-run’s narrow dimensions. Charred skeletal obscenities propelled themselves through the wall of flame only to end up on the carpet of scorched and sky-streaming remains that other freak creatures sprang through to get to the Space Marines.
The Excoriator’s flamer chugged dry, and Kale threw the deadweight of the weapon at the nearest rawbone ganglefiend. The Excoriator’s bolt pistol cleared his belt holster. Still backing away, Brother Kale blasted furiously at the onrushing abominations. An absorber gushed its gelatinous way up the rat-run – it too enhanced by the bolt- hole’s funnelling narrowness. The amorphous spume-form soaked up the pistol’s defiance before swallowing Brother Kale whole.
Kersh and Micah ran on, forcing their armour’s spirits to greater feats of fibre-bundled athleticism. The rat- run exit beckoned. Kersh saw Bethesda at the opening, the screw-handle detonator in her slender hands. The Excoriators heard an appalling roar of agony but could not stop. As the Adeptus Astartes exploded out of the rat- run, the Scourge’s absterge twisted the detonator. Strategically planted demolition charges along the length of the bolt-hole fired, demolishing the gap and collapsing the run. Tonnes of rubble and fragmented masonry cascaded down, blocking off the escape route and burying the freakish abominations chasing the Excoriators.
As the dust cloud settled, with the autocannon hammering above them, Kersh surveyed the scene. Everyone, from the limping Micah to Bethesda to the Charnel Guardsman hiding down behind the remnant of a shattered spire, looked aghast. Turning, Kersh looked down on the miserable Scout he’d pulled out of the horror of the necroplex. He was glaze-eyed, twitching and mumbling to himself. Also, half of him was missing.
The absorber’s clotted immateriality had gushed up behind them and had swamped the Space Marine Scout’s legs and abdomen. Digesting them like it had Kale, the creature had left half an Excoriator. For a few moments that seemed like an eternity, nobody spoke.
‘Find something you can use as a stretcher,’ the Scourge said to Bethesda, ‘then have a team of runners take him up to his Tenth Company brothers.’
The absterge bolted off to carry out her master’s orders. Kersh’s eyes fell on the terrified Guardsman. ‘You,’ the Scourge said in a tone that blistered with fury and disappointment. ‘Get on that perimeter, now…’
The Charnel Guardsman snatched up his lasfusil in numb dread and ran back up the palisade to take his position on the battlement.
Hobbling around whilst slapping a chunky magazine into his boltgun, Brother Micah turned to the Scourge. The company champion kissed his fist in honour of Dorn.
‘You ready?’
‘No,’ Kersh answered honestly, but followed the Excoriator up towards the autocannon emplacement, leaving behind the neophyte in his pain, shock and mumbling torment.
I wish this were a dream.
The horror of the warp was visited upon Certus-Minor. The cemetery world was flash-fried in the insanity of battle as the planet’s unfortunate orbit passed through the tail of the Keeler Comet. The unfiltered dross of Chaos – gathered like scum at stagnant borders between our reality and its own – pouring through the rift and raining down on this tiny part of the Imperium.
We fought for twenty hours straight, knee-deep in abomination, holding our nerve and retaining our sanity amongst the madness of raw havoc taken form. The Fifth Company held its ground and earned great honour in the field of battle. If the shoreline of dead flesh is anything to go by, decorating the city perimeter, the odds were appalling. For twenty hours the heavenfallen swept down on us, drawn unthinking to Obsequa City like a lighthouse of soulfire, hungry for our humanity. We fought like we had never done before, our superhuman bodies pushed to their limit. Hearts thundered blood around our bodies. Reactions crackled like lightning. Eyes only saw enemies. Arms burned numb defiance – living extensions of our blessed blades and bolters. We took life without strategy. Technique and the art of battle were mere memories. We killed through necessity, for behind every enemy entity lay another and another, and it was all we could do to survive.
In the twentieth hour of bloodshed the aberrations stopped. Numbers of the warped began to dwindle. The masses thinned and our efforts became easier. We pushed the monsters back to the first perimeter, and on the lost battlement we decimated their remaining number. This was no battle tactic. The beasts had simply spent themselves in mindlessly assaulting the city. There were no more to kill because we had killed them all.
Although the Fifth Company has achieved a great victory over Chaos, it was not without cost. Brothers Ebenezar, Tycharias, Moliath, Ashkelon and Techmarine Dancred have lost their lives to the horde. Their bodies are laid out as custom dictates, with all the horror of their battle wounds on display. Tycharias particularly is a mess. Dancred is a butchered carcass of Adeptus Astartes flesh and twisted, claw-mauled hydraulics, electrical systems and bionic framing. The Techmarine fought bravely, but his position on the line was overrun and the abominations pushed on into the city. Members of Squad Contritus were instrumental in holding the invasion back – their sniping talents put to the test as the steep streets of the Saint Bartolome-East district became wall-to-wall Chaotics. The Excoriators Scouts thinned out the misshapen mass with precision fire, giving Skase and several of his Squad Cicatrix brethren time to redeploy and push the monsters back. It took several bombing runs by the Thunderhawk Impunitas to fully sanitise the vicinity of hellspawn and their taint, however, leaving the district a derelict waste.
Whereas my Excoriators have upheld their proud tradition of attrition, I must accept responsibility for the failure of almost everyone else. I ask too much of the cemetery world’s common humanity. Without the weakness of Imperial citizenry there would be no need for the Adeptus Astartes, and nothing has made this clearer than the manner of the Certusian retreat. History records the accomplishments of all-too-ordinary men: the war for Armageddon, the Euphrassic Massacres and the numerous Black Crusade honours of battle-hardened Cadians. Our species can be strong and our spirit beyond measure. This is what is celebrated in the myth and legend of song and saga. But for every Imperial citizen who has ever held their ground in the face of the xenos invader, the heretical traitor or Chaos marauder, a thousand have fled. It is in the fear and dread of those thousand that the Imperium’s doom is written. Men, women and children in whose trembling hands weapons turn to water. The faint-hearted majority who run for their lives in the expectation that others will save them. Perhaps the Adeptus Astartes are to blame for this. The Imperium’s strength is its weakness. The existence of demigods turns common men into bystanders. They catch a glimpse of the divine and consider themselves beyond the calculus of fate. The Emperor’s Angels will save them. They are witnesses to the clash of good and evil in the galaxy, failing to recognise that it is upon their collective shoulders that the destiny of an empire resides.
For all my gene-bred superiority and Angel’s arrogance, I find it hard to blame them. I am more than human and yet, on the dark fringes of my understanding – lapping against the bedrock of my warrior heritage,
