'He's so artless, don't you think?' murmured Hakur. The esteemed Huron-Fal would have fought his own way out of that mess, but Gralgor wades in, more concerned about showing his mettle to the primarch than where best to spend his ammunition.'
We're Death Guard. We're not supposed to be artists/ Garro retorted. 'We are craftsmen in war, nothing more, direct and brutal. We don't seek accolades and honours, only duty.'
'Of course/ said the veteran mildly.
Decius came bounding up to Garro, kicking away the corpse parts from his kill. 'Ugh. Do you smell that, sir? These things, their blood stinks.'
The battle-captain didn't answer. He hesitated, his attention drifting, watching Mortarion in the thick of his cold fury. At the primarch's side, Typhon and the twin sentinels of the Deathshroud were whirling and culling, their manreapers moving unhindered through a milling, screaming pack of jorgall. The Death Lord himself had clearly deemed these inferior strains of xenos to be unworthy of his scythe, and instead was at work putting them to the light of his Lantern.
Hard-edged white rays keened from the stub barrel of the huge brass pistol, leaving purple after-images on Garro's retina despite the enhancements of his modified eyesight. Wherever the Lantern's punishing beam struck, jorgall defenders became charcoal sketches, twisting, then turning to smoke.
Mortarion reached into a hooting scram of aliens and ripped an injured man from their midst, batting them effortlessly away as he hauled the wounded Death Guard to safety. The primarch spared the man some unheard words and in return the bareheaded Astartes roared in assent, rejoining the fight.
'Magnificent/ breathed Decius, and Garro could sense the coiled need in the younger man, the yearning to run down the dune and press into Mortarion's company, to throw away all battlefield protocol just for the chance to fight within his master's aura. It was
a difficult urge to resist. Garro felt it just as strongly, but he would not lower himself to duplicate the self-aggrandising behaviour of men like Gralgor.
Then the younger Astartes tore his gaze away and cast around. 'So this is the great creation of the xenos, eh? Not much to look at.'
'Human spacefarers once lived in cylinders such as this/ noted Sendek as he reloaded, 'in the deep past, before we mastered the force of gravity. They called them ohnyl colonies.'
Decius seemed unimpressed. 'I feel like a fly trapped in a bottle. What sort of inside-out world is this?' He gestured upward, to where the landscape curved away to meet itself kilometres over their heads. A thin bar of illuminators extended away down the axis of the cylinder, disappearing to the fore and aft in yellow clouds. Garro's eyes narrowed as he spied motes of dark green moving up there, shifting through the corridor of zero gravity at the world-ship's centre.
Hakur tensed at his side. 'I see them too, battle-captain, airborne reinforcements.'
Garro called out on the general vox channel. 'Look to the skies, Death Guard!'
On the blood-slicked sandbanks, Mortarion stabbed at the air with the blade of his scythe. 'The captain of the Seventh has keen vision! The xenos seek to distract us with easy kills, to keep our attention on the ground!'
The primarch gave Garro a curt nod and strode to the top of another shallow powder dune, ignoring the scatters of enemy needle-shot that whined off his brass armour. Mortarion let his hood roll back so he could turn his face to the caged sky. We must correct them.'
For a long second, Nathaniel found himself rooted to the spot by his master's casual acknowledgement, despite his best intention to make little of it. The favour of his primarch, of an Emperor's son, even for an instant was a heady thing indeed, and he found some understanding as to why men like Grulgor would go so far to court it. Then Garro shook it off and slammed a fresh sickle magazine into his weapon. 'Seventh, to arms!' he cried, bringing the bolter to his shoulder and sighting upward along its length.
The jorgall flyers came in numbers that dwarfed the ragged packs of land-based fighters the Death Guard met at the lake. Clad in a flickering green armour that wound about them in strips, the airborne xenos had sacrificed two of their limbs to their mechanical surgeons. In their stead were beating wings of sharp metal feathers, each edged like a razor. Feet had become balls of curved talons, and there were more of the lethal arc-throwers and needle-guns embedded in joints where they had keen fields of fire.
They came down whistling and hooting, met a wall of bolt shell and high-energy plasma and died, but this was only the first wave and more of them, green glitters in the sky, poured out of the gauzy yellow cloud.
Garro saw one of Hakur's men wreathed in humming glints of artificial lightning and smelled the stench of crisping human meat as a flight of the xenos flyers shocked the life from him. Nearby the dreadnought Huron-Fal deployed his missile packs and threw explosive death into the wheeling flocks, blasting dozens of them out of the air with the concussion. For his part, Garro moved carefully, low
to the oxide sands, picking off the xenos in bursts of full-auto fire as they dropped in on swooping strikes. The attack pattern of the aliens was clear. They were attempting to push the Astartes back into the icy lake.
'Not today,' said the battle-captain to the air, clipping the wings of a large adult female. The creature spiralled headfirst into the sands and twitched.
He became aware that he had company. Garro glanced over his shoulder and frowned in mild surprise at the cadre of lithe golden figures coming up behind him. The Sisters of Silence moved in quick lockstep, maintaining coherent fire corridors and combat discipline with an efficiency that he had only previously seen among his brother Astartes.
It was difficult for him to tell the women apart. Their armour was polished to a glittering sheen, unadorned by any brash sigils or fluttering oath papers like the pale wargear of the Death Guard. Their faces were hidden behind hawkish gold helmets that reminded him of the barred gates to some ancient citadel, no doubt equipped with breather gear that let the unmodified Sisterhood manage the toxic air of the bottle-world. They seemed identical, as if they were forged from some mythic mould by the Emperor's hand. He wondered idly if normal men might view the Astartes in a similar way.
The Sisterhood carried swords and flamers, blades and plumes of fire licked at the jorgall flyers as they dipped into range. Some also carried bolters.
As was their vow in the Emperor's service, the women never spoke, even those speared by needle rounds or struck by arc-fire. They communicated in line of sight using a gestural language similar to Astartes battle-sign, or through a code of clicks over the vox. From the way they crossed the engagement
zone, he had no doubt in his mind that they knew exactly where they were going.
As they passed, the Sister closest to him spared Garro a look, and the battle-captain felt a peculiar chill fall across him. That the Sisterhood ranged the galaxy in search of rogue psychics to capture or expunge was widely known, but what was less understood was the manner in which they did it.
Garro had heard that unlike other living beings, these unspeaking women were silent not just in the material world, but also in the ephemeral realm of the mind. There were names for them: untouchables, pariahs, blanks.
He frowned at the irrational nature of thoughts, pushing them away. In the next second, they were forgotten as warning runes blinked inside his visor. Garro caught the sound of shrieking air over razor wings.
He moved as a flight of jorgalli came down upon them. Fast as only an Astartes could be, he slammed his hand into the back of the Sister at his flank and sent her down and away as tenfold claws cut through the air towards them. Garro threw his arm up to deflect the blow and felt the talons slice gouges through his vambrace. The screeching jorgall ripped upwards and into his helmet, tearing it from his neck ring in a bone wrenching impact. He staggered and recovered, bringing his bolter to bear. Garro's gun barked and from the sand the Sister fired with him. None of the flight that had dared to attack them lived to take air again.