by Gaius Marius » Sun Oct 09, 2011 8:03 am
Chapter 9 is here. Challenge for those paying attention, in the past 2 chapters several new characters have been introduced. 2 of them have names from the same piece of classic children's literature. First one to guess it wins a cookie.
Chapter 9: Fanged Hunter
‘We have no movement in the compound Captain,’ the assault team voxed in.
They were floating high in a re-purposed Valkyrie, waiting for Weyne’s word to strike. Until then, they were providing reconnaissance.
‘I hear you Sergeant,’ Weyne said to Tavi, one of the few veterans in his company. His other squads were gathered near him, hidden in the nightworld’s paradoxical flora. Unwilling to risk either of his two Thunderhawks, Weyne and his Astartes had grav chuted in from high orbit. They had fallen for over thirty minutes before landing in the pitch black landscape surrounding the overrun Despoiled compound.
‘1st Squad,’ ordered the Captain, ‘move to the gate and keep to the shadows. Such as they are.’
The Astartes, only recently promoted from scouts, moved out with well practiced stealth through the foliage. As his other squads followed at staggered, covering intervals, Weyne took his helmet off to smell Ascillia’s air.
Ascillia was a paradox, totally pitch black and yet covered in jungles. It’s bizarre green dwarf sun produced no spectrum of light visible to the human eye, yet more than enough heat and radiation to allow for a plethora of native plant and animal life. The only light to human eyes came from three artificial ‘moons’, low orbit refueling stations who eternally scrapped across the upper atmosphere, casting tiny sparks across the sky.
To Weyne, the air smelled of rotting plant matter, a smell common to any jungle, lit or not. But behind the plant reek was the smell of wood ash, ozone from overrun electrical engines and blood. Vast quantities of old blood.
‘Stay alert,’ said Weyne as he put his helm back on, needlessly for his Space Marines were already at full readiness, ‘this is a site of conflict.’
The Fire Beasts moved through the jungle, each squad covered by the others. Their bolters, long barreled models fitted with serrated bayonets, were held snuggly at their shoulders, ready for either ranged or close combat. Soon their loping gate took them to the vast clearing burned from the dark jungle where the Despoiled training compound stood. The small fortress was silent and unlit, its many spot lights unlit and its walls unmanned.
‘Move in,’ ordered Weyne, ‘stay calm and keep your eyes wide.’
Moving into the fortress, Weyne was struck by the massive damage done to the place’s gates.
‘Captain Korimand, we’ve entered the base,’ voxed Weyne, ‘no activity yet. The gates have been torn off their hinges.’
‘Rammed or blasted?’ asked Korimand from the safety of orbit.
‘Torn,’ insisted Weyne, ‘physically.’
The rest of the compound wasn’t much better. Scores of barracks had been burned and the others had been smashed apart with a deliberateness that did not suggest collateral damage. Whatever had destroyed this place had done so after its garrison was already dead, showing extreme such extreme hate it was not content to leave even its dead enemy’s homes standing.
‘1st squad with me,’ ordered Weyne, ‘we’re going to the motor pool. 2nd to check the walls and 3rd hits the warehouses. Devastators stay here as a reserve. Sergeant Tavi, keep circling.’
His squads moved across the ruin, twelve square kilometers of blackened rubble. 2nd Squad found that the gun batteries on the wall had been attacked from within, their barrels bent and their mechanisms fouled. But their magazines and power cells were full; they had not fired a shot during whatever battle had taken place.
Weyne and 1st squad found that the tanks and APCs in the motor pool had been destroyed to vehicle. Treads had been torn into individual sections and cast wildly about, engines had been ripped out and piled in a sacrificial stack, explosive payloads and fuel had been used to blast open the remaining shells.
3rd squad discovered that the vast warehouses filled with supplies for sixty thousand men had been burned to the ground. However, analysis of the ashes found that they had been filled to capacity when fired. Greed had not been a motive in the attack.
‘Sir, I have movement on the ground,’ voxed Sergeant Tavi from the Valkyrie, ‘we’re investigating now.’
A half dozen bulky shapes fell from the circling aircraft, their backs lit with the exhaust flames of jump packs. They zig zagged through the air to avoid any fire from the ground and landed silently in the jungle outside the camp. Tavi and his unit were not outside long before voxing in.
‘You’re going to want to see this sir,’ said the Sergeant, ‘it’s one of … ours’
‘I’m incoming. Is it alive?’ asked Weyne
‘In a manner of speaking,’ answered Tavi.
It took Weyne a few minutes to cross the ruined camp and its broken perimeter, finding Tavi’s squad in a guard position in the black bush. A Cadian officer was staked to the ground, wooden spars hammered through his wrists and ankles. It was obvious from their jagged angles that the long bones in the man’s arms and legs had been broken, his tongue ripped away and his purple eyes had been plucked out. His body was covered in unhealed wounds, each scar replicating the same symbol over and over again.
‘His wounds still bleed and he has not yet been killed by the planet’s fauna. This was done recently,’ reasoned Weyne, ‘possibly as we we’re coming in from orbit.’
‘The symbols in his hide, what do they mean?’ asked Sergeant Tavi.
‘I’ve not seen their like,’ admitted Weyne, ‘they’re not chaos symbols that’s for certain. Too regular, too angular. They look almost Old Imperial but they’re too… savage for that. But this, this is a message. Whoever did this wants us to know they’re still here.’
‘My pilot is reporting lights in the jungle Captain,’ said Tavi, ‘it’s a structure, a large one. About ten kilometers from here.’
‘We’re hitting it now,’ decided Weyne, ‘Thunderhawks come in for pickup. Korimand, the main camp is clear for any landing. We’re moving to a secondary target.’
‘I will land at the camp and make my way there,’ said the expedition’s warped commander.
…..
The structure proved to be a manse, the fortified home of the night world’s Governor-General. It was built along Dark Cadian lines with high dirt berms and angular walls studded with firing ports, covered in frescoes of the Chaos Gods. A battalion could hide within its windowless depths and every external light blazed.
‘Our enemy wants us inside,’ said Weyne, ‘the place reeks of an ambush. It is probably wired with a few megatons of explosives.’
‘I doubt that,’ argued Tavi, whose lethal lightning claws were unsheathed at the prospect of indoor butchery, ‘the deaths at the camp were done with hand weapons, or just hands in most cases. This foe does not use explosives.’
‘Still, caution pays,’ said Weyne, ‘we’re blasting through the walls. Take your men high and go through the roof. All tactical squads, plant demo charges on the wall. Detonate and move on three.’
Each squad’s demo-carrier placed a fat satchel charge bursting with high explosives to the walls, while the squads stacked up next to the gaps. When it came, the explosions were large, but directed inwards and away from the Astartes. The Beasts poured through the gaps made in the structure, which was where they were hit.
Scores of hulking grey shapes hit the Astartes, attempting to overwhelm them with claws and teeth. In every case the foe was Astartes size or bigger and their strength was prodigious. But the Beasts were in barbed plate and their bolters bore bayonets. The rooms where the fight took place were small and soon filled with clanging steel and gushing blood.
Weyne’s opponent slammed into him as the Captain entered a fire charred sitting room. He had brought a storm shield from one of the thunderhawks' armories and the electrified Ceramite was the only thing that saved his life. The shield crumpled under the enemy’s assault as grey shape easily Weyne’s size slammed its shoulder into the storm shield. The Fire Beast blocked another blow with his falchion, the energized steel ringing as six razor sharp claws met the blade.
Snarling, Weyne brought the ruin of the shield into his opponent’s face, scattering teeth across the room. In response, the monster tackled him, screaming as Weyne raked its side with his sword. Up close, the Fire Beast could see that his enemy was some horrible fusion of Astartes and wolf, its fur grey and its eyes yellow. The monster’s remaining teeth snapped for the Space Marine’s skull and judging by its massive neck muscles, Weyne had no doubt it could bite through the Ceramite. He dropped his falchion and pulled a knife from his belt, slamming the dagger repeatedly into the monster’s side. Blood, bright and rich, poured from its side and the animal howled in pain as it scrambled off the prone Astartes, a cry that sent the Fire Beasts senses on fire.
Answering howls ripped from the combating wolf-things fighting the Fire Beasts, from inside the manse, from out in the jungle. By the Captain’s judgment there were scores of them. Hundreds.
‘All squads, fall back to the Thunderhawks now,’ ordered Weyne, ‘Valkyrie One, give us a strafing run for cover once we break off!’
‘Have Vulkan’s sons truly fallen so low?’ asked a voice. It was deep and wet, a low leopard growl that would have instantly caused Weyne to draw his blade were it not already in his hand. The voice’s tone spoke of wisdom earned through centuries of difficult experience and hatred built by a lifetime of disaster.
‘Not as low as you monster, your form shows your corruption’ Weyne said to the still unseen speaker, he and his Astartes still attempting to fall back. At the first syllable from their hidden spokesman the wolf creatures had backed off, their heads held low and their yellow eyes still shining with hate.
‘Captain,’ said Tavi, ‘look, there is armor beneath their fur. These were Astartes once.’
'As were you,' said the voice, 'you wear Abaddon's symbol do you not? Were the gifts of the Dark Powers really so great as to make you replace the Beast's skull and Vulkan's flame so easily?'
'The Beasts do as ordered,' said Weyne, finding himself drawn into an argument with his apparent enemy, 'no matter the cost to ourselves.'
'We were the same once,' was the counter, 'there was no mission we would not complete. No brother the Vlka Fenryka would not slay at the Emperor's command. All it took was a word and we would die to see it carried out. We were butchers and murderers, the Golden Throne's leashed dogs. We were hated for that, but we basked in that hatred. For the fact that mankind could spare the effort for hatred meant the Emperor's flock was safe.'
'You are Space Wolves?' asked Weyne, incredulously, 'Impossible. Abaddon crushed the Fenrisian Imperium centuries ago.'
'Embers survived,' came the reply, 'loyal embers that sought to start the fires of man anew.'
'Astartes alone cannot rebuild the Imperium,' said Weyne, 'we have learned that at our peril.'
'No, not alone,' said the hidden man, 'but there are those that can. Those that will. Those that must.'
'How?' asked Weyne.
‘We are all of us born into sin and corruption,’ said the speaker, his form seeming to congeal from the shadow’s inside the manse, ‘but it is in us to overcome it. Bloodlust can be mastered, change directed purposefully, desire quenched to a subhuman level and decay halted entirely. Chaos thrives on emotion, human emotion. If we make ourselves beasts we get rid of the pain of being a man.’
‘That is from our holy books,' declared Weyne, 'those are the words of First Bull Douglas from millennium ago. Show me your face, you who know our words.'
The figure that stepped from the manse was ancient beyond years and battered beyond measure. Its powder blue armor had been through so many cycles of repair and damage that it was one vast spider web of cracks and chips. A moth-eaten black wolf pelt that had been holed in a thousand battles and shrank by endless years under alien suns was nailed to his back. Two yellow eyes stared out from a face that was a network of crisscrossed scars. His hair was long, grey, matted and filled with eagle feathers and knuckle bones. A snarling chainsword was in his hands, the barbs of its chain made out of strange teeth.
‘My name, errant son of Prometheus, is Ragnar Blackmane,’ said the Fenryka, ‘and I have been sent to help you.’
Last edited by
Gaius Marius on Sun Oct 09, 2011 5:31 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Space Cowboy, Spartan II, Specter, Reclusiarch
'I see the fear you have inside.'
