The Beast Arises

‘Brother Zerberyn,’ the second captain voxed to the injured honorarius.

‘Captain?’

‘I want you to vox all companies and captains with the following order,’ Thane said. Before the battle-brother could protest, Thane added, ‘And if you don’t, Brother Zerberyn, in less than a minute you’ll very much wish you had.’

‘What’s the order?’ Zerberyn crackled back after a moment’s hesitation.

‘All Fists Exemplar battle-brothers to mag-lock their boots to the void hull.’

‘Why?’ the honour guard Space Marine voxed back.

Once again, the Apothecary and the captain’s packs brushed. Back to back, the Fists Exemplar Space Marines carved and blasted an open space in the green edifice of muscle and savagery surrounding them. An island of life — raw and desperate — in a sea of alien barbarity and death. Four gore-spattering clunks, one after another, echoed about the carnage as Thane and Reoch mag-locked their armoured boots to the blood-slick deck.

‘Why?’ Thane voxed back to Zerberyn. ‘Because we are going for a ride.’

SIXTEEN

Undine — Desolation Point

The north-eastern anchorage was treacherous but, as Allegra had indicated, deep enough to admit the submerged draught of the Tiamat. With little else but the conning tower breaking the surface, Captain Lux Allegra accompanied Commander Tyrhone’s Marineer Elites out onto the small observation deck. The Elites carried garrison-duty dirks and stubby lascarbines, slung in waterproof casings.

The grating was awash with the chemical brume that passed for seawater on Undine. The commander and several other Elites had hauled personal sweeps up onto the deck. The sweeps were one-man watercraft: lightweight planers that consisted of a pontoon chassis, steering bars and a high-power churnfan. Setting off towards the colony outcrop that was Desolation Point on the sweeps, the watercraft’s riders dragged behind them wire ladders to which Allegra and the other Elites clung.

The sky was streaming with rocks and crash-capsules, falling towards the ocean surface. Fountains of spray erupted from impact sites. The greenskin descent wave had reached Desolation Point before them.

As Allegra had predicted, the anchorage was largely deserted. Vox-casts would have warned the many denizens of the marauder colony of the horror to come. Those with grapnel-rigs, solarjammers and Q-craft took to the seas, taking as many with them as could afford to leave the island. Even now, vessels were streaming out of port: smoke-belching outriggers, armed freighters and plasteel-clad sloops.

Although they remained low in the water and were not advertising their presence, Allegra and the Elites didn’t need to avoid such pirate vessels on their shoreline approach. Each was being horrifically boarded. As green alien hulks hauled themselves up the vessels they tore pieces off them and swamped the decks with brutality and carnage. The creatures soaked up canister-shot from pintle-mounted deck weapons and made short work of pistol-blazing raiders — who eventually had little choice but to climb for their towers and rigging.

The colony itself — a fragile accretion of scrap, adapted giga-containers and chain walkways — had been well on its way to becoming a proto-hive. The restrictions of the island bedrock meant that designs became more vertiginous and the rising architecture increasingly perilous. Fires were feeling their way through the pirate haven, with smoke snaking from underbuildings and corrugated citadels. As Commander Tyrhone guided his sweep through the choppy waters of the evacuating anchorage, Allegra held on tight, her eyes kept busy with the demise of Desolation Point.

The captain had not got off to the best start with the Elites. There had been several reasons for this. Firstly, like Tyrhone, they largely hailed from the Southern hives and so were naturally suspicious of a salt-pale Northerner like Allegra. Her tattoos and piercings marked her out as being a turncoat: a pirate turned privateer. The kind of scum that real Marineers like Tyrhone and his men traditionally hunted. Her Marineer rank, similarly, had little meaning for them either. Her ‘Screeching Eagles’ had been grunt coastals and boardsmen, not the highly-trained tacticals that General Phifer retained for his security detail.