Fall of Macharius

Chapter Twenty-Seven

With a mighty rumble of engines the first of the Leman Russ roared over the ridge and slammed down into the enemy position. It was at that moment they were most vulnerable, when their underbellies were temporarily exposed by the climb. That’s when the enemy should have hit them with every anti-tank weapon they had. But the time for that had passed. The Space Wolves had descended from the assault guns they had captured and were ripping through the enemy lines. Macharius’s small force kept up what fire they could in support while the Thunderhawks swooped overhead like great birds of prey, turning their guns on the enemy positions from above, slaughtering ground targets by the score, constantly in motion to stop them from becoming easy targets.

Once our armour arrived the battle was over. The terrified and distracted enemy infantry had their hands full trying to cope with the constant strike and withdrawal of the Space Wolves. They did not think to defend themselves against this new enemy until it was too late.

By then, the Space Wolves all seemed to have somehow moved out of the killing ground. They were fighting their way towards the entrance that Ivan had partially sealed earlier, moving forward squad by squad, giving each other supporting fire, striking with a precision and assurance no mortal soldier could match.

Macharius moved into position nearby and surveyed the battlefield through his magnoculars, picking out points of weakness, giving directions to the tank commanders, acting as a spotter even as he read the tactical situation. He stood tall and confident and radiated power and assurance. It was as if he fed from being on the battlefield, a god of war drinking mead distilled from blood and terror. In some ways he reminded me of the Space Wolves, with his more than human ferocity and energy.

‘It is done,’ he said. And at that moment, as if he had commanded it, there was silence. I looked down on the field and saw that he was right. Every heretic was dead or fled. We were in command of the entrance to the hive. He had achieved his victory.

We walked up to the hive entrance. The Space Wolves had settled into easy possession of it, standing or sitting in small groups amid the rubble and the corpses. They seemed as much at their ease as they ever were.

‘Well met,’ said Macharius. Grimnar rose from among his companions. He walked over to Macharius and loomed over him. He was one of the few men I had ever seen who could make the Lord High Commander seem small.

‘Perhaps not,’ Grimnar said.

‘What do you mean?’ asked Macharius.

‘I do not like the way this place smells.’ I doubt anyone else would have dared to say something like that to Macharius but Grimnar not only did so, but he also made it sound serious. And, truth be told, we all took him seriously. His instincts had been proven correct too many times in the past.

‘What don’t you like?’ Macharius asked.

‘There is the stink of old Darkness here, of ancient enemies, of the foes of the Allfather.’ Something told me that by that he did not simply mean heretics. He pointed to the fast-decomposing corpses of our former enemies. I remembered all too clearly the way such bodies had come back to a hideous unlife. Perhaps I should have wondered why it had not happened here yet. ‘These ones have been twisted,’ the Space Wolf said. ‘There is something unclean about them.’

He gestured at the hive with one huge armoured hand. ‘There is something unclean about this whole place.’

Macharius turned to Drake. ‘We must find Richter,’ he said, ‘he must face the Emperor’s justice.’

I felt sure Macharius was more concerned with the traitor escaping his justice than the Emperor’s, but it did not seem my place to say it.

Drake nodded. ‘We must go below,’ he said.

‘It will take some time to clear the way,’ Macharius replied. He turned to us and said, ‘Get some rest.’

‘We have only just arrived,’ said Grimnar. He looked up at the turrets higher on the hillside. They had continued to fire down into the killing zones. ‘I think, though, I can find something for my men to do while you recuperate from your labours.’

He turned on his heel and marched away, bellowing orders to his fellow warriors. I stood there, feeling numb. For the moment the fighting was over and I had some time to think.

It was cold. Ice had formed in the shadows of the rubble. Snowflakes were crystallising in the air. A vast cloud still hovered overhead and the dim greenish lights of the hive flickered on emergency power. A drumbeat of thought sounded in my mind. I had not seen Ivan since I drove the Hydra through the heretics. No one else seemed to have seen him either. It looked like he was another casualty.

I refused to accept it. The three of us had not gone thirty years in the Imperial Guard together just so I could lose them both in one day – it just did not seem possible. The pair of them had always been indestructible, emerging from every deranged adventure with a collection of scars and stories. I told myself to be realistic, that I had seen enough death to know that it came to everyone and often at random. Stalk around battlefields long enough and your number will come up. You’ll find yourself in someone’s sights.

I needed to find out what had happened to Ivan. I could not rest till I had done so. I got up and tried to retrace my path away from the brewed-up enemy gun where I had last seen him. It was not going to be easy.

I felt pressure build up on the back of my legs from the strain of moving downslope. Somewhere above us a turret fell silent and the sound of shelling dropped off a fraction.

I came to the burned-out remains of the Hydra chassis. It was just a pile of scrap metal now, twisted and fused and blackened by the passing of war. Bodies lay all around it. Most of them were in the state of advanced decomposition I associated with the heretics. One or two of them were the torn remains of more normal mortals.

I walked over and inspected the nearest. It wore the grey of one of Drake’s storm troopers. Its mirrored visor was cracked and broken with droplets of blackened blood congealed on it. Within I saw the face of the storm trooper, for the first time ever. It looked normal and peaceful in death but it did not look like anybody I knew. I thought about burial, of saying the funeral rites, but I was just too weary.

I tried to recreate the path along which I had driven. You’d think it would be easy, what with tanks leaving tracks behind them and all, but there were bodies and signs of blasting everywhere. And that realisation did make it easier for I could trace from the blast circles every impact point at which the tank had been hit.

I studied the corpses of the fallen and noticed something familiar lying downslope and off to the left. I had found Ivan’s body.

My heart sank when I saw the shattered remains of the broken bionic that lay close to the fallen figure. Ivan lay face down, his back bloody, coils of wire and metal emerging from his shoulder. Heart in my mouth I walked over to where he lay.

He was pretty badly beaten up. His back was riddled with shrapnel. His legs were wounded. His arm had been removed by the blast. I turned him over, worried by what I would see. Maybe his front was worse than his back. Maybe he was going to spill his guts all over the ground.

He didn’t, but his eyes were closed. I checked his heartbeat and was relieved to find there was still a pulse. At that moment his eyes flickered open.

‘What the hell happened to you?’ I asked.

He looked up at me and said, ‘Damned if I know.’

His jaw was twisted out of shape and his words mangled even more than usual.

‘I was running away from the anti-tank gun. There was an explosion and I felt a pain through my shoulder.’ He looked down at the metallic stump where his bionic arm had been.

‘Can you walk?’ I said. I tried to lift him to his feet. He stretched himself and rose shakily then walked over to where what was left of his arm lay. It did not look as if it were going to be repaired any time soon and we were a long way from getting any spare parts.

‘How did it go? We win?’ Ivan asked. ‘The last thing I remembered was seeing some lights in the sky. I thought it was the explosion.’

‘Space Wolves,’ I said. ‘Grimnar pulled our nads out of the fire again.’

‘That was good of him.’

‘I think he feels he owes Macharius for what happened on Demetrius.’

Ivan nodded and then took another experimental step or two. ‘It’s lucky he felt that way then. I was pretty sure we were all doomed. Where’s the idiot?’

I wanted to tell him but I could not. The words just seemed to get stuck in my throat. I tried to force them out again and still nothing came, only a strange gasping noise that I could not even make sound like words.

‘Damn,’ Ivan said, his words mangled. ‘Damn. Damn. Damn.’

We limped up the slope again towards where the rest of the Lion Guard were encamped. ‘How did it happen?’ Ivan asked eventually.

‘Shrapnel in the gut,’ I said. I paused for what felt like an hour and added, ‘Our own side.’

He looked away and shook his head. ‘Typical,’ was all he said.

I lay on the side of a vast daemon. It was as big as a hive but its flanks were green and slimy. Warts the size of turrets emerged from its side, burst blisters made huge gates in its skin. When I looked up I saw a great grinning face looking down at me. It was the same daemon I had seen when I lay in the hospital back on Niflgard. It smiled, revealing huge glistening yellow teeth, but there was no humour in its eyes. They were empty abysses cold as the darkness between the stars. There was a vacuum in them that threatened to suck my soul right out of my body.

I knew I had to look away or I was doomed, so I forced myself to look down. For a second I was looking at the daemon’s skin but that faded into translucence and I was looking at its internal organs, veins the size of streets, intestines big enough to hold a city. Corpses lay everywhere. They looked as if they had died all at once. Those street-veins were filled with them. They had that strange decomposed look I associated with the walking dead. I wondered what had happened to them.

It took me a moment to realise: life support failure, the nightmare of every hive dweller. The moonfall must have taken out the power and the circulation of air and all the cleansing systems must have failed. With the strange logic of dreams I was no longer looking at a daemon’s innards but a dead hive city and I always had been.

It was not entirely dead though, for within it, like maggots wriggling through a corpse, things still moved. Some were monstrous, partially human, but too big and too large, with white skin that somehow reminded me of slugs. There were other monsters born of men who had fed on the diseased corpses and been twisted by it.

They could not be real, I told myself. I must be dreaming. And it came to me that I had experienced such dreams before in other places like this and they had always contained within them seeds of truth. I felt breathing become difficult as one of those walking corpses turned his glowing eyes to look at me and stretched out one gauntleted hand. I knew without being told that if he completed that gesture he would become fully aware of me and I would die. I turned to flee…

I came to wakefulness around the gate of Richter’s citadel. I could see Drake nearby and Macharius and Grimnar. A halo of light played around the inquisitor’s head and I guessed he must have been working some strange sorcery of his, perhaps the backlash of it had touched my dreams and those of the other Guardsmen around me.

Drake’s whole posture spoke of weariness, as if he had been overstraining his gifts. He looked like a man who had just run for a day carrying a full pack. ‘Richter is down there,’ he said, ‘and so are other things. If we go down there, death is waiting for us all.’

‘It awaits every man around every corner,’ said Macharius.

‘That is well said,’ Grimnar agreed.

‘You are resolved then?’ said Drake.

‘Aye,’ said Macharius.

‘Very well then,’ the inquisitor said. ‘We should make ready to depart.’

‘I want to get my hands on the traitor and put an end to this once and for all,’ Macharius said. I picked myself up and looked around. Ivan lay nearby. He was awake and studying his surroundings. He had the veteran’s gift for being able to sleep anywhere and at a moment’s notice and wake in an instant. I walked over to him and drew my boot back.

‘Cold here,’ he said. He was looking in the direction of Anton’s burial mound. I had showed him where it was.

‘Then we’d best get you into the warm, little man,’ said Grimnar.

I heard men discussing the arrival of the Space Wolves and how victory was certain with the Emperor’s Angels beside us. There was a confidence in the air now, as if the presence of the Space Marines were a sign of the Emperor looking with renewed favour upon Macharius. Knowing the circumstances in which their aid had been granted I was a bit less confident but I said nothing. On a battlefield, morale is everything, and the presence of Grimnar and his band was good for our morale.

I heard the roar of Leman Russ engines and the grinding of great blocks of rockcrete being dragged away from the entrance of the hive. It seemed as if the gloom of this world had really infected me, for I did not share the soldiers’ confidence in our ultimate victory. I had the feeling that none of us were going to come out of this alive.

The Space Wolves had already scouted ahead before we even entered the hive. They moved in advance of us now as we roared into the depths.

I rode along within the Leman Russ Macharius had chosen to be his new command vehicle, and eyed the streets warily. Dead bodies were everywhere and I half expected them to come springing to life around us.

In some ways Richter’s citadel was like any other hive, smaller than most perhaps but otherwise the same. It was a complete city with its own life support systems, built level upon level, rising hundreds of metres into the air, sinking thousands of metres into the planet’s crust.

The effects of the moon-strike were evident, though. The city was cold and dead inside. Corpses filled the area massively: life support systems had failed and air purifiers had ceased to function. In whole sectors people had choked to death on poisonous fumes. Obviously someone somewhere had been working on bringing the systems back on stream but it had come too late for the people who had died here.

Drake sat with Macharius in the command cockpit. ‘There is an odd psychic pulse here,’ he said. ‘I don’t like this at all.’

‘You think this is another trap?’ Macharius asked.

‘I know it is.’

‘Good,’ Macharius said. ‘Then we are in agreement.’

I thought again about the dead bodies and the lack of walking dead and I realised that the most likely reason they had not risen and attacked us yet was because it was not time for them to do so.

‘There’s something else here,’ Drake said. ‘The feeling of something tainted and evil. I sense the presence of Nurgle’s daemons.’

‘Grimnar said something similar,’ Macharius said. ‘He caught the scent of an ancient enemy, whatever he means by that. He looked happy about it, though.’

‘He would. He lives to die in battle,’ Drake said. ‘I can think of few things the Space Wolves count as ancient enemies that I would like to meet.’

‘If it is our fate to do so, it is our fate,’ said Macharius. He sounded at once mocking and resigned. There was weariness in his voice and in his manner. ‘All I ask is to settle my score with those who have betrayed me.’

I wondered if it was worth the lives of all the men who were going to die for that to be accomplished. I pushed the thought out of my mind. After all I was only there to drive the Leman Russ and put myself in the way of any bullets aimed at Macharius. I wondered at the fact that I had become so cynical. Had I been infected with something more than illness when I came here? Anton’s death had hit me hard and made me all too aware of my mortality.

Ivan had been silent since we mounted the Leman Russ. We were not a cheerful crew as we pushed on deeper into the hive of the dead.

There were more and more corpses as we made our way down. They looked as if they had fallen to some disease. We drove for hours and everywhere we found death.

No one engaged us. No one attacked us. The hive lights were dim and flickered as if still on emergency power. The air had a greenish tinge to it that was in no way natural.

I don’t know what Macharius was expecting but I doubt that it had been this. I could sense the tension when Grimnar’s signal came in. It seemed some of his Wolves had taken prisoners.