The Inquisition War (58 page)

Grimm burrowed in a pouch and pulled out a speckled pebble. ‘Huh! Will this do? I picked it up on Darvash to fiddle with. A worry-pebble. Here.’ Grimm thrust the pebble at Meh’lindi. ‘Shall I bore a hole and thread a thong? Where do you wear these things?’

‘Against her chest, under her garments, I believe,’ said Petrov.

‘Against her heart,’ Grimm said glumly.

Petrov eyed the glittery flecks in the stone. ‘That looks suitable. Those speckles are like scintillae of soul. Some silver wire would be best, cradling the pebble rather than piercing it.’

‘I’ll look in the engine room.’

‘You need to choose an aspect,’ Petrov told Meh’lindi. How it fulfilled that cobweb-grey fellow, carbuncled with rubies, that here was a mimic eldar!

‘I’m aware of that,’ she replied.

‘You ought to be a Dire Avenger. They are the least specialized, the most common, I believe. I have gleaned many rumours in my star-travels.’

Meh’lindi nodded. She said something in the eldar language, which might perhaps have signified that she was not entirely ignorant on the subject.

‘You’ll have to make do without the psycho-sensitive armour – unless or until you can steal some. Aspect warriors can dress ordinarily, I believe, unless at war. If anything eldar can be described as ordinary!’ Petrov’s look implied that she was already sufficiently extraordinary.

Jaq cleared his throat. Petrov’s fixations seemed to make the Navigator imagine that he could pre-empt the planning, as though this journey were for Petrov’s private fulfilment.

‘We have a shuriken pistol in our armoury,’ said Meh’lindi. Thus she forestalled the Navigator’s next likely suggestion. ‘What eldar name have you chosen for yourself?’ he pressed her.

Her faint smile was ominous.

‘Mile’ionahd,’ she replied. ‘Warrior of wonder, warrior of surprise.’

‘Ah, and will you fool the eldar themselves, irrespective of fooling me?’

‘You’re impertinent,’ she told the Navigator. ‘Mile’ionahd will be Callidus.’

Jaq asked impatiently, ‘Are we at the jump zone yet?’ Petrov’s cool green gaze interpreted the navigational icons. He tugged on his studded ear-lobe. Then he nodded.

‘So let us pray,’ said Jaq. And then: '
on to Stalinvast
.’

TEN

Battleships

C
APTAIN
L
EXANDRO
D’A
RQUEBUS
of the Imperial Fists stood with Terminator Librarian Kurt Kempka on one of the observation terraces of the Gothic-class battleship
Imperial Power
.

Fifty metres away, a senior ship’s officer paused briefly. His heavy high-collared greatcoat was trimmed with silver fur. His sleeves and breast were adorned with honour braids, nobility brooches, ship’s icons and medals. A power-cutlass hung from his belt.

The officer glanced respectfully at the two puissant Marines, but would not intrude.

Lexandro and Kempka were both wearing pus-yellow dress uniform. Fanged skulls within crosses decorated their knees. Their fur-trimmed cloaks of dark blue were embroidered with sunbursts and icons.

A line of five-lobed windows revealed, a kilometre below, the starlit deck of the battleship. Like some broad gargantuan spear-blade, this deck jutted fully four kilometres into space. Moored halfway along it, the Fists’ own troopship seemed almost lost amidst the battleship’s Cobra attack cruisers. Nevertheless, that troopship’s sleek bulk housed assault torpedoes into each of which half a company of Fists could pack.

The cinquefoil windows also framed a sister battleship sailing in harmony with
Imperial Power
, gushing a wake of brilliant plasma. How splendid that celestial city of crenellated spires studded with great lasers and bomb launchers! How like an axe-head was the warp keel diving below.

Further off was an ancient ironclad, massively armoured.

‘Praise be to Him,’ remarked Lex, and Kempka nodded.

Aye, glory to Him-on-Earth. Glory likewise to the indomitable dead primarch who had founded the Fists.

Lex’s own left fist itched. It often did so when a campaign was gearing up. This itch was within. Upon the very bones of his left hand he had once inscribed with an engraver tool the names of two battle-brothers who had been closest to him in all the universe, though he could only acknowledge this fact after they were dead.

To engrave his bones, he had first dissolved the flesh of his hand in caustic acid.
Pain is the healing, purifying scalpel!

The chirurgeons of his fortress-monastery had rebuilt Lex’s hand with synthmusclefibre and nervewires and pseudoflesh. True, he had been reprimanded and he had experienced punishment in the nerve-glove – which cloaked his whole body in simulated furnace-fire. Yet his gesture of devotion had perhaps been admired. Here he was, decades later: an officer, a captain, with six steel service-studs in his forehead.

Twelve studs decorated Kempka’s forehead. However, the Librarian – a powerful psyker whom Lex held in comradely awe – was a military seer rather than a tactical commander. Lex could faintly smell the Librarian’s superhuman hormonal secretions, like a sacred spice.

Lex’s finger-bones tingled and prickled. They wished to be encased in a power glove, clutching a heavy bolter and firing it. To slay is to pray, is it not?

Yet not to fire heedlessly. A Fist was a planner and a thinker.

Thus Lex had only lost three of his company of a hundred men (and ten wounded) on the planet Hannibal, where the itch had most recently been assuaged in action against alien eldar warriors.

T
HE
F
ISTS’VESSEL
had been far indeed from the fortress-monastery which sailed everlastingly through void in the Ultimum Segmentum.

There had been a rumour of tyranid incursion deep into the Imperium, deeper than ever previously reported. Were those terrible creatures about to seize another human world so as to harvest its population and pervert people into freakish slaves of their biotyranny?

Hannibal was a human colony. Evidently due to a warp storm it had been out of contact for several thousand years until an exploration team of Terror Tiger Marines rediscovered it. That team had been destroyed. Before he too was killed, and despite suffering psychic damage, the Tigers’ blind astropath had managed to send a confused message about terrifying tall, slender aliens with baffles of bane-white and fiery red who flourished some type of energy-sword almost too swiftly for Marines to see.

Those weapons sounded chillingly like the boneswords of tyranids.

Recently, the Terror Tigers had suffered a dire mauling in an attack by a mutant warlord upon their monastery world. Unlike the Fists, the Tigers were land-based. The Tigers had lost almost a quarter of their Chapter before eventual victory. Almost two-andhalf companies destroyed! The Tigers’ commander had decreed his own execution without honour.

Since the Tigers were so depleted, it fell to the Fists to send a company to Hannibal, under Lex’s command and accompanied by a Librarian who could combat alien psychic malice.

H
OW SWEETLY
L
EX
remembered the final ground engagement which had driven the surviving alien trespassers back to a sub-light ship.

These aliens were certainly no tyranids bent on the vilest
bio-exploitation
of what they did not exterminate. No, these were arrogant eldar – and they had ordered the human population to quit Hannibal within a year or else be forced to leave.

Brown-skinned colonists had babbled to Kurt Kempka in a barbarous dialect of Imperial Gothic of how an alien spokesman had declared that the human scum on this world were themselves trespassers. Human beings were parasites upon this planet which aeons ago – before some unmentionable event – those selfsame aliens had supposedly terraformed with an eye to the distant future.

The eldar were not only arrogant but irrational. How could a disorganized population of millions go any place else? Hannibal had been their home for aeons. They had no ships.

All they had were the mammoth armour-skinned beasts native to Hannibal’s jungles, beasts towering ten metres high on legs each as thick as the trunk of the stoutest tree.

And so the people had ridden these beasts against the eldar warriors, beasts which were the zoological equivalent of Titans manufactured by the Adeptus Mechanicus. These living Titans were not armed with plasma cannons, macro cannons, or multimeltas – only with crossbows and muskets.

The alien warriors were so swift. Female warriors, they were. With their laspistols they blinded the pachyderms. With their power swords they hamstrung the armoured beasts, bringing them crashing down. The warriors’ masks were screaming faces. From those came such mind-shrieks as to stun the beasts’ riders insensible and stampede the mammoths.

Those devil-women with flame-orange hair screeched and darted, easily butchering all opposition.

And then, like an answer to a prayer, from out of nowhere, unimaginable to most of the denizens of Hannibal, there had come that ship of the Terror Tigers, bringing knights in power armour.

Not nearly enough Tigers...

With only light losses, the superior force of alien banshee-bitches had destroyed the Tigers. Next, the eldar had begun a methodical massacre of the human population. The arrival of those Tigers had annulled the useless year of grace.

To exterminate millions would take a long time. Meanwhile, the colonists could always evacuate their world – if only they could teach mammoths to fly into space and learn to breathe vacuum.

During the extermination the Imperial Fists had landed. A whole company of a hundred Marines. Soon, inspired by prayers to their primarch, the Fists were making headway with insignificant losses.

The banshee-bitches seemed to have lost their sense of judgement. They had become obsessed with the dance of death they performed, like vulpine predators in a vast shed of chickens, crazed with killing.

In the final action, Lex and Kempka and the ten squads with their sergeants had advanced in their power armour through a devastated jungle where titanic corpses of mammoths rotted.

Had the mammoths stampeded to escape from the stings of lasers? Smashing trees in their panic, uprooting other trees in their agony?

Every few minutes, several masked banshee-bitches would rush from behind the shattered bole of a tree or from behind a mountainous cadaver. They would howl their amplified mind-shriek, but the Space Marines’ helmets incorporated psychic shielding. A wave of nausea was the usual consequence, disorienting but not disabling.

Blue mists lazed through the jungle, as if serpents of smoke or gas had been born from the dead pachyderms.

How agilely and how swiftly the alien bitches moved. They fired laser pulses. They dodged bolter fire as if foreknowing where an enemy would aim. They rushed in upon a chosen Marine, swirling their power swords. Their armour was the colour of bleached bone. The helms of some were of bone-hue too. Other helms were blood-red. Plumes were flame-red.

The sheer rage which emanated from them! Their uncanny deadly dexterity! If the bitches had all attacked at once, they really might have harmed the Fists. Yet these shrieking aliens seemed to be challenging themselves to isolated exhibitions of reckless daring – as though they had become frenzied puppets in a fatal drama.

Two warriors had raced from behind an armoured hill of decaying mammoth tissue. They pranced towards Lex. The screams were sickening in their vehemence.

His bolts missed the jinking attackers. The aliens might almost have been distorting space itself by their ghastly gymnastic antics. Their power swords veered to left, to right, to touch the speeding bolts and twitch them on their way. Co-ordinated laser pulses had incandesced upon the pauldron protecting Lexandro’s left shoulder. The doubled energy blast bored inward searingly. Briefly, he tasted the spice of pain. Diagnostic icons flickered on the readout projected within his visor. The injury was minor, a tender caress of combat.

A Banshee was so near! During the fleeting distraction of those icons, the alien had reached Lex. Her power sword was swinging to slice into his armour.

Bolts from Lex’s gun pierced the armour of her belly. Within her, they erupted. Even so, the sword impacted against his breastplate. With a raucous screech and a spray of sparks, the power blade sheared a few millimetres into his eagle-plastron. Unable to bring greater force to the blow, her alien entrails torn and mingled, the wielder of the sword was already dying. The sword’s power failed.

Briefly Lex had stared at the scream-mask. Stretched lurid lips seemed about to kiss him upon his snout-visor. About to ravish his tough helmet with a bite.

What agonized face hid behind that mask? Oh, he knew well enough what kind of face. With their power gloves his men had ripped the psycho-masks from several earlier corpses.

A female face! Intoxicatingly lovely. Strange. Alien.

Truly Lex had forgotten about females of his own species – who were just as alien to him. Ach, of course he had seen womenfolk since entering his fortress-monastery. He had killed some, but never come so close to one. Servitors who had dwelled for generations aboard the fortress-monastery necessarily included females to generate more servitors. But those were beneath a Fist’s notice.