Slaughter abandoned his combat knife. Leaving it embedded in the torso of his first kill, he threw himself over the corpse and into the face of the second warrior-form. He drew his broadsword as he leapt, sweeping the powered blade out of its over-shoulder scabbard and forwards, so that its cutting edge led the way.
Space Marine and Chrome warrior-form met. The clash made an air-slap that hurt Laurentis’ ears. The Chrome smacked Slaughter hard, twice, its claws drawing sparks off his armour. The Space Marine rocked, reeled back from the blows, and then renewed his efforts, hefting the blade into the Chrome’s shoulder with both hands.
It was the Chrome’s turn to reel. It staggered sideways. Taking a better grip on his gore-slick sword, Slaughter delivered a second blow that did significantly more damage. Split open, the Chrome tilted and fell backwards.
Laurentis hadn’t even seen the third enemy. Slaughter had. The warrior-form was very dark, the colour of a bruise. It came down the tunnel from the other direction, moving with extraordinary speed, claw-limbs hinged out to rain lethal downstrokes on the Imperial Fist.
Slaughter switched around to meet it, hacked with his sword, and took off one forelimb. The creature milled at him, claws glinting in the noxious light. Slaughter ducked aside, letting the blow go long over his shoulder guard, stooping his back into a turn that took him under the Chrome’s guard and into its chest. He stabbed his sword in, tip-first, cracking the organic armour, and then shoulder-barged the clacking alien backwards, freeing his blade so he could thrust it again. The second time it went clean through the creature.
He ripped the sword out, and the warrior-form went down.
‘Magos?’ Slaughter called out, checking up and down the tunnel, sword ready.
‘Yes, captain?’
‘Are you alive there?’
‘I am, captain.’
‘Get ready to move with me when I tell you. The Chapter Master has sent Daylight Wall to get you out of this.’
‘It is very much appreciated,’ said Laurentis. ‘I thought I was d—’
‘Shhhh!’ Slaughter warned him.
From the distance, Laurentis could hear the sound of bolt-weapons firing.
‘There’s a lot of opposition in this zone,’ Slaughter said. ‘A lot.’
Laurentis began to wonder where the rest of Daylight Wall Company had got to.
‘Let’s move,’ said Slaughter, and beckoned the magos biologis after him. The captain had made some kind of assessment presumably based on the data his armour was feeding him and incoming vox-signals, neither of which Laurentis was privy to.
They began to work their way back down the nest tunnel, picking their way through the ruins of the magos biologis’s convoy. The carriages were all shredded and crushed. His servitors and juniors were dead or fled. Blood-smoke wafted in the gloom of the tunnel. Now our matter is vaporised, Laurentis thought unhappily.
‘They have shown unexpected resolve within the perimeters of their nest,’ he said.
Slaughter grunted in reply.
‘We don’t much like the unexpected,’ the captain said.
‘Because?’
‘Because nothing should be unexpected.’
‘I see.’
‘I didn’t expect to run out of bolt-rounds today, for example,’ Slaughter said. Laurentis saw that the Space Marine captain’s massive firearm was clamped to his belt. He’d exhausted its munition supply. The fight must have been extraordinarily intense.
Slaughter glanced down at Laurentis.
‘There are supposed to be munition trains moving into the nest, at least one near here,’ he added.
‘Ah, so that’s what I owe my salvation to,’ Laurentis replied, trying to sound brave. ‘You were looking for the ammunition.’
‘I had an order,’ snapped Slaughter, ‘from the Chapter Master.’
‘Of course. I apologise.’
‘The fact that you were near a munition train was simply a bonus.’
Laurentis managed a laugh. Then he realised something that chilled him. Just as Laurentis had done, the Space Marine captain was trying to make light of the situation.
They really were in the most terrible trouble.
Eleven
Chapter Master Cassus Mirhen watched the stricken Amkulon begin to fall out of fleet formation. There was something significantly wrong with the strike cruiser’s engines. It was venting radioactive clouds and all contact had been lost in a blizzard of vox-interference.
‘Did Lotus Gate get clear?’ he asked.
Akilios shook his head.
‘We don’t know yet, sir.’
‘Find out as soon as you can. I don’t see any drop-pods or escape boats.’
The truth was, it was hard to see much of anything. The incoming feed to the main viewers and the repeater and image-booster screens was fogged by the radiation backwash and some kind of gravimetric distortion. That was what Severance had been trying to warn them about. Mirhen had most of the Lanxium’s tech-staff working on the issue, analysing the data sent over from the Amkulon. Initial reports were bad. Pockets of gravity distortion were being detected in a range of orbital locations. No one could explain it, and no one could adequately explain why there had been no sign of the phenomenon before the fleet moved into its assault anchor.
Now there was the Amkulon itself. A whole ship, a good ship, and a whole wall of shield-corps brothers, potentially lost.
Mirhen watched the flickering, jumping screen image. The majestic strike cruiser was making a slow, pitching descent into Ardamantua’s gravity field, unable to support its mass. How long? An hour? Two? Four? The crippled drives would probably blow out because of the stress before that.
‘Can we get relief boats out to them?’ he asked.
‘We’re trying now, sir,’ replied Akilios.
‘We must be able to fetch some of them off it.’
‘Yes, sir.’
Mirhen turned to the ranks of the technicians and science adepts.
‘I want this explained,’ he said. ‘I want this accounted for and explained.’
The adepts nodded, but Mirhen felt no confidence in their response. They were as mystified as he was.
He was about to add further encouragement — at least, what he felt was encouragement — when the bank of screens behind him lit up brightly for a moment.
‘What was that?’ he asked, turning. ‘Was that the Amkulon?’
The airwaves were filled with vox-static and ugly distortion.
‘No, sir,’ replied a detection officer. ‘That wasn’t the Amkulon. Sir, the battle-barge Antorax just… just exploded, sir.’
Twelve
The sky was weeping light.
Slaughter kicked his way through a half-collapsed section of tunnel wall and hauled himself onto the softly curving upper surface of the blisternest.
It was raining some kind of liquid that wasn’t water through an ugly squall that blew sidelong and made every surface slick and sticky. The nest was a huge sprawl, like some mass of offal oozing on a slab, magnified to titanic proportions. There were loops of tunnel that looked like intestinal knots, there were renal lumps and lobed chambers. Some sections of the vast, organic city were patterned coils like the fossil imprint of ancient seashells. Other sections were crushed to pulp by orbital bombardment and airstrikes. Smoke bled up from the blisternest in a thousand places, mixed with the wind, and washed into the squalling storm. Slaughter heard the downpour tick and tap on his helm and armour.