Legion of the Damned

streaming surface of the bloody berg of ice, rock and metal, though, was something truly shocking. A colossal vessel. Larger than anything Heiss had witnessed over Ultrageddon, Cypra Mundi or Port Maw. Everyone on the bridge stared, and for a moment the horror that awaited them behind the bulkhead was forgotten.

‘Dimensions…’

The midshipman had already checked. ‘Estimated six hundred and seventy cubic kilometres.’

Heiss shook her head. It was bigger than the Keeler Comet, bigger than Certus-Minor’s dwarf moons.

‘What is it?’ Randt marvelled. ‘A hulk?’

‘Magnification!’ the commander snapped, and Randt had the portside lancet bring up the craft in greater detail. Beyond its sheer size, the glorious architecture of the craft was breathtaking. Colossal lancets, arches and stained-glass observation ports. The clean lines of Gothic design and detail: mullions, transoms, fan vaults, spandrels, quatrefoils and clerestory layering. Void steeples and etherspires reached up from great halls, cathedrex and monasterial superstructures all nestled between sensoria, the elongated barrels of long-range lances, nova cannon and squat plasma cannonades. The magnificent weaponry, as well as the gargantuan Scartix engine coils upon which the structures and emplacements sat, was long lost to the Imperium. Cutting the behemoth in four were solar wings of burnished adamantium, giving the vessel the bold and unusual design of two Imperial aquilas – one slotted within the other. Four armoured wings. Four engine coil talons. A monasterial body of supra-Gothic splendour. Four sculpted heads of aquiline majesty, between which the vast craft hid a far larger weapon, the yawning mouth of an enormous torpedo launch tube.

‘Closer…’ Heiss ordered and the screen rendered maximum magnification.

Close up the craft’s Gothic magnificence assumed the macabre and chilling status of a ruin. The vessel seemed completely without power, as evidenced in the expanse of black glass, the tall dark arches and empty lancet ports. The vessel was running without lamps or nav-strobes and seemed devoid of the kind of pods, hump shuttles and barges that might be expected to swarm around a structure of its size. The cold stone and metal of its massive construction was stunning from a distance, but close up was gaunt and weathered. The stone was cracked, granular and disintegrating, the victim of an eternity of etherical erosion. The solar inlaying was shattered, and the great adamantium expanse and detail of the wings was tarnished with even greater age. In places, it seemed the only thing holding the integrity of the structure together were the growths of warpsidium and immaterial deposits spreading out from the nooks like a sterile cancer. Stranger still, the craft wouldn’t have been visible at all against the backdrop of the empty space were it not for the spectral fire that burned across every surface and suffused the derelict vessel with a golden, phantasmal glow.

‘Chaos reinforcements?’ Randt asked finally.

Heiss snorted at the thought that the Cholercaust actually required reinforcing.

‘Looks like an Adeptus Astartes vessel. A monastery or star fortress,’ she replied. ‘Any signature readings, identicoda, hell – a nameplate?’

The midshipman moved along the runebank and put his eye to a monocular viewer. He double checked his reading with a nearby cogitator. ‘Nothing.’ he said. ‘She doesn’t match any known records. As far as the Imperium is concerned, she doesn’t exist.

The incessant hammering on the bulkhead door grew as the corridor beyond filled with Khornate raiders. A nearby servitor’s jaw suddenly went to work on a stream of code-chatter that drew Randt to its runescreen.

‘I have a power signature,’ the midshipman called. ‘It’s arming torpedoes.’

The commander sat back down in her throne. ‘Ready thrusters for evasive manoeuvres.’

‘Aye, commander.’

‘Charge the lance for return fire.’

‘Aye.’

The bridge watched the ruined star fortress as the eyes of the colossal aquila heads lit up. The dark orbits of the colossal structures were vents for the great torpedo tube running between them, and they flared brightly as the spectral gleam of a warhead erupted from the star fortress’s primary weapon. Heiss watched the ghostly torpedo fly straight and true towards Certus-Minor. As it streaked away from the mobile monastery, she watched the aurulent ghostfire of its appearance suddenly intensify to a halo of plasmic propulsion.

‘Did you see that?’ Randt said. Heiss nodded in silence, heart in her mouth, as she watched an illusion sear into reality and that reality rocket into the side of the Keeler Comet.

‘God-Emperor…’ she mumbled, but it had already happened.

The Keeler Comet, which had been traversing the galaxy for aeons and had last passed through the Imperium ten thousand years before, exploded. The flash of the torpedo’s impact picked out the irregular shape of the Ruinous object before the destructive force of detonation ripped through the body, wracking it to its frozen core and smashing it into a billion astral splinters. Within moments the comet was no longer there, just the bloody reminder of its void-smearing tail. Instead, the comet had become a rapidly tumbling apocalyptic heavenfall of blood-black ice shards, enormous rock fragments and rare metal nuggets, accelerating towards Certus-Minor at the speed of a bolt-round. The violently transformed Keeler had changed direction once again, this time blasted towards the cemetery world’s all-embracing, gravitational pull.

Heiss and Randt stared at each other in horror. The flesh-hungry marauders at the bulkhead were forgotten. None of them would survive the coming armageddon.

‘Thrusters, now!’ Heiss shouted. The Apotheon might not have very much manoeuvrability, but what it did have the commander intended to exploit in getting the lance in position to blast incoming fragments of ice and debris on course to hit the vulnerable ship.

‘Enemy vessels disengaging,’ Randt reported.

Heiss took a deep breath of satisfaction. The pirate captains of the raiders and armed freighters that had grappled the Apotheon had no intention of weathering the coming storm with the defence monitor, and were doing their best to haul off. The Cholercaust fleet below, stationed in low orbit, would not be so fortunate. Unlike the marauders, they would not see catastrophe coming. The ravenous raiders swarming the blood-splattered decks of the Apotheon had been abandoned by their Chaos captains and continued in ignorance to breach the bridge bulkhead. The degenerates would not be denied their last supper and communion with the dark lord of blood and vengeance. They would get through the bulkhead eventually and when they did, it would be carnage on the command deck.

‘Randt,’ Heiss called.

‘Commander?’ the midshipman answered, a tremor in his voice.

‘Get me the Adeptus Astartes.’

‘The Excoriators haven’t been responding to our vox-hailing,’ Randt told her. Heiss could imagine why.

‘Get me somebody. Anybody. The Excoriators have to know what is happening up here.’

Umbragg of the Brazen Flesh hunted like an animal through the lonely maze of ambulatories and tight alleys that was the cemetery world city. Like a predator of the deep, a clawed fiend stalking through the night or a mythic Fenrisian wolf, blood-tracking its doomed prey. He felt his ancient skin tighten over his blood-engorged, muscular frame. His brute biceps, globed shoulders and rockrete-hard chest pressed against the constraints of his World Eaters plate. He could feel the Blood God’s blessing – slabs of bronze, threading through the engineered tissue of his superhuman body like streaks of fat. Part flesh, part unfeeling lump of brazen indestructibility, Umbragg had served his master well.

With his warband, the Clysm, the World Eaters champion had fought on a thousand worlds, butchered human and alien alike in the name of wanton carnage, and brought glory to Khorne’s name through his prosecution of crusades, the slaughter of the Dark Prince of Pleasure’s perverse followers and the taking of skulls on an obscene scale. He had killed at the great Doombreed’s side, slayed with Skarbrand, murdered his own with Kharn the Betrayer and fought in every Black Crusade to ever strike fear into the weak heart of the Imperium. He had served with his daemon-father, the Primarch Angron himself, during the Dominion of Fire, on war-torn Armageddon and before the walls of the Imperial Palace on doomed Terra. Now, he served the Pilgrim – daemon prince and Right Claw of Khorne – leader of the Cholercaust Blood Crusade, who would take the Blood God’s disciples back to Ancient Terra and finish what they had started.

Blood-furious, Umbragg slowed to a trembling halt, his chainaxes like two silent scorpion claws held at his sides. They trembled not through fear – his scarred brain knew nothing of the emotion, bar what he saw others feel in his maniac presence – but through fury. His body quaked. His gore-rusted plate rattled. Elsewhere in the city, his brothers had found their quarry. He heard bolt-fire and the scream of axes. He felt the death of innocents only