Marduk froze, pushing himself flat to the ground as his keen auto-senses flashed a warning
before his eyes. The massive gates of the bastion began to open, folding in upon themselves and
sliding into a hidden recess within the rock. Four armoured vehicles emerged, the sound of their
engines lost in the howling wind.
They were non-standard template vehicles protected by thick plates of white-painted armour.
Marduk’s targeting arrays locked onto the foremost vehicle, and a flood of data streamed in front of
his eyes. A heavy weapons sponson unfolded from behind the main engine block, sliding forward
and locking into place, and the weapon panned left and right. They were light vehicles, roughly the
size of Rhino APCs, and they were clearly built for traversing the ice flows, with heavy, thick tracks
at the rear and a single upwards flaring ski as broad as the tank at the front.
If it came to it, they would easily be neutralised by his Land Raiders, but he had no wish for the
enemy to know, prematurely, that they were under attack.
The vehicles moved up the steep ramp of ice and snow that led from within the bastion, heavy
weapons turrets rotating with precise, mechanical movements.
They turned to the north-west, and soon disappeared into the storm.
“Do not engage,” said Marduk.
“Acknowledged,” came Kol Badar’s response, his voice blurred by static.
Resuming his advance, Marduk elbowed his way closer to the enemy fortification.
39
The aquila fortress reared up above him, its twin heads glaring out into the darkness. Despite his
anger, disdain and disgust as he thought of what could have been, should have been, it gave him
perverse pleasure to see how far the Imperium had fallen. This world was evidence of its failings. It
was being abandoned, as was the entire sub-system, in the face of a xenos threat. He shook his head
in mockery at such weakness.
The long, insulated barrels of defence lasers rose up behind the aquila structure, angled towards
the heavens. He knew that the vast power source for the formidable weapons would be located deep
within the rock below. They were weapons of awesome potency, though useless against an enemy
that had already landed.
Marduk advanced a further two hundred metres, assailed by the relentless wind and biting ice.
The brutal environmental conditions did not concern him. His archaic power armour, a bastard
hybrid of marks IV, V and VI, was capable of withstanding far more demanding situations.
Within fifty metres of the enemy structure, Marduk hunkered down to assess the defences of the
bastion. Snow began to settle on his power armour, so that he was almost completely concealed.
Indeed, a human could have stood five metres away and not have seen him, blinded by the gale and
the fog.
His gleaming, black, reflective eyepieces panned upwards, targeters locking onto autocannon
turrets and demolisher cannons built into the sides of the rock face. Had the weather been less
severe, the static defences would have taken a heavy toll on the Host as it approached. Such a thing
was unacceptable, for Marduk had brought less than thirty warrior brothers with him on the mission
to Perdus Skylla.
In ideal circumstances, he would have descended upon the moon with the entire Host, and the
taking of the bastion would have been a simple thing. However, with the size of the Imperial
blockade in the sub-system such an endeavour would have been folly, for the Infidus Diabolus
would have been annihilated long before it reached the moon’s atmosphere. As such, he had chosen
to lead just a small strike force onto the surface of the moon, and slipped unseen through the
Imperial cordon.
It was not the way that he would have liked to have achieved victory, for Marduk, like Kol
Badar, would have been more pleased to have laid waste the Imperial world, to unleash the full
force of the Host and leave nothing but corpses and edifices to the great gods behind. Victory here
was important, however, and the manner in which it was achieved, less so.
Pushing his extraneous thoughts aside, Marduk turned his attention to the task at hand.
Two twin-linked autocannon turrets guarded the approach to the bastion gates, and they panned
back and forth across the open ground before them. Each was restricted to a ninety-degree firing arc,
though the arcs of the two turrets, and the others nearby, were overlapping, ensuring that no enemy
could approach the bastion from any angle without coming under fire. Heavier siege cannons
protruded from the rock face above the gates, but they were of less interest to Marduk, for he was
below their arc of trajectory. They were designed to fire upon enemy two hundred metres and
further out, not at a foe already at the base of the bastion. Still, he opened up a visual feed with Kol
Badar, allowing the Coryphaus to see what he did, so that the war leader was aware of what he
would be riding into once the gates were breached.
“Brother Namar-sin,” said Kol Badar in a growled response to the visual feed. “Move your
coterie into position and target the turrets. Fire on the First Acolyte’s command.”
“So it shall be, Coryphaus,” came the response. Somewhere behind Marduk, invisible even to
his augmented sight, the Havoc Space Marines of Namar-sin’s coterie would be targeting the
autocannons with their ancient heavy weapons.
Marduk again looked up, peering through the blinding ice storm.
“Come on, Burias,” he hissed in impatience.
40
Two hundred and fifty metres up, Burias scaled the vertical rock face, hauling himself up hand over
hand.
Kol Badar had identified one last possible escape route from the bastion, and it was the icon
bearer’s duty to close it off.
He had allowed the change to come over him, bringing the daemon Drak’shal to the fore, and
great horns rose from his head. Hellfire burnt within his eyes, and his teeth were bared, exposing a
double row of serrated shark-like teeth. Impossibly, his darkly handsome, immaculate features could
still be seen beneath the image of the daemon, as if both beings were coexisting in the same space.
Bunching his leg muscles, Burias pushed off from rock face, leaping upwards. He grabbed a
rocky overhang with one hand, and for a second he hung there over the vertical drop. The ground
could not be seen below, lost in the swirling storm, though the glow of lascannons could be dimly
discerned. Hauling himself over the edge, the heat of his breath clouded the air around him, and
feral eyes locked onto the hateful shape of the giant aquila that reared above him. He dug his taloned
hands into stone carved in the form of feathers and continued his ascent.
Up above, roughly a hundred metres away, the twin eagle heads of the colossal stone aquila
glared out across the landscape, one facing east, and the other west. A bright light shone like a
lighthouse from the eye of the right eagle head, while the eye of the left head was dark and blind.
Burias ascended towards the shining eye, his talons easily finding handholds between the
massive carved feathers. He ascended the sheer exterior of the immense statue, swiftly, barely
pausing as he climbed, like a dark stain upon the noble eagle’s body. The wind howled around him,
buffeting him and threatening to rip him loose, and ice and snow drove into him at gale force.
Climbing swiftly and surely, he scurried up the curving neck like a spider until he was directly
below the head. With a snarl he sprang out, twisting in mid-air, and one hand locked around a
feathered grip three metres higher. Without pause, he continued up beneath the immense head,
crawling upside down along the underside of the monolith. He paused as he reached the beak, for
the stone was as smooth as glass and there were no handholds. He changed the angle of his climb,
and scrambled up the vertical eagle head, being careful to stay out of sight of the shining eye, and
pulled himself atop the massive structure.
Oblivious to the danger the winds presented as they assailed him, Burias threw his head back
and roared into the gale.
Dropping to a crouch, Burias made his way on all fours towards the eagle’s shining eye.
Cautiously, he peered inside.
He saw a man sitting at a desk, an almost completely empty decanter of dark liquid in front of
him. By his manner of dress, he was clearly a high-ranking official, and another man, young and
awkward, stood at his side. The two appeared to be engrossed in conversation, and they did not
notice the daemonic vision of the possessed warrior glaring in at them. There were two exits from
the room: an elevator lift that would descend into the body of the aquila, and a heavy blast door.
Climbing backwards, Burias-Drak’shal reached the top once more, looking down. On the back
of the eagle head, fifteen metres lower, was a protected platform where a small shuttle was docked,
and where the blast door led.
Burias-Drak’shal perched some ten metres above the blast door, and settled down to wait. If any
eye had been able to pierce the darkness and the howling gale he would have looked like a malicious
gargoyle, crouching motionless as he awaited his prey.
“In position,” he growled, his fang-filled mouth forming the words awkwardly.
“Received, Burias-Drak’shal,” replied Marduk. The snow settled over him, so that only his
baleful skull-faced visage peered from beneath the white blanket, his black eyes staring hatefully at
the enemy structure.
“217th Havoc coterie, split,” Kol Badar ordered. “Heavy weapons, hold position. Namar-sin,
move the rest of your squad forward to support the First Acolyte, and ready melta-bombs. Move on
the First Acolyte’s word.”
41
“Forwards on me,” motioned Marduk as Namar-sin and three of his coterie emerged from the
blanketing gale behind him, crawling stealthily forwards, their horned helmets covered in a thick
layer of snow.
Marduk resumed his advance, inching his way forwards. Imperial sweeps arced across the ice
three times, and the Word Bearers froze each time, instantly cutting relay feeds and voxtransmissions
to make themselves all but invisible.
The distance to the closest turret was no more than twenty metres, and the bastion gate was less
than forty. Metre by metre, Marduk and his chosen brethren crept forwards. The wind suddenly
dropped, and warning sensors flashed in Marduk’s helmet. Without the interference of the billowing
ice-crystals in the air, the turrets swung towards the Word Bearers and opened fire.
A fraction of a second before the autocannons unleashed their fury, Marduk rolled to the side
and high-calibre rounds ripped up the ground where he had lain. One of the Havoc Space Marines
was hit by the opening salvo, his helmet smashing apart beneath the heavy weapons fire, staining the
snow with his blood.
“Now,” barked Marduk into his vox-relay, and a beam of light stabbed out of the storm as one of
the heavy weapon-armed Havocs of the 217th coterie fired his las-cannon, and one of the turrets fell
silent. A stream of white-hot plasma engulfed another turret, and plasteel and rockcrete ran like
liquid as it was destroyed.
Marduk was up and running, roaring a catechism of devotion as he unslung his chainsword.
Autocannon rounds screamed past him, and one of them clipped his shoulder, jerking him to the
side, but not halting his progress. Another lascannon beam stabbed from the gale, and a third turret
was destroyed, detonating from within as its ammunition cache was hit. The resulting explosion
threw chunks of rock in all directions. Marduk swayed his head to the side as a piece of red-hot
rockcrete the size of a man hurtled past him.
Marduk was five metres from the last remaining turret, and he threw himself forwards into a roll
as its barrels swung towards him, spitting a torrent of high-velocity rounds. He came up to his feet
beneath it, and grabbed one of the barrels. Servo-muscles straining, he pushed upwards with all his
might, overextending the automated turret housing, exposing cabling and ammo feeds. Sparks
spattered off Marduk’s skull-faced helmet, and he slashed his chainsword across the turret’s
internals. The whirring chain links tore through the cables, and oil gushed like blood. Releasing his
grip on the barrel of the weapon, the turret flopped lifelessly to the side.
More turrets, higher up on the bastion’s face, were opening fire, raining down a hail of gunfire,
which was answered by the heavy weapons fire of those warrior brothers further back. One of
Namar-sin’s coterie was caught in a fusillade from two directions, and fell to one knee as his body
was pierced a dozen times. Still, he refused to fall, and pushing himself back to his feet, he ran on
towards the bastion gates.
Bullets glanced off Marduk’s shoulder plates, and a round caught him in the chest, knocking him
back a step, though it did not penetrate his thick ceramite armour. With a hiss of anger, he lurched
forwards, running down the incline towards the bastion gates. Beneath the overhanging lip, he was
protected from the worst of the fire, and Marduk pulled a melta-bomb loose from a chain around his
waist. He whispered a prayer to the Great Changer as he primed the potent grenade and slammed it
onto the thick door, placing it over one of the locking mechanisms. Electromagnets held it firmly in
place, and a red light on the melta-bomb began to flash.
“On approach,” said Kol Badar, his voice overlaid with static and interference.
As another melta-bomb was slammed into place by a warrior of the 217th coterie, the champion
Namar-sin staggered into the protection beneath the gateway, smoking bullet craters across his
armour. His left arm was gone, blown clear by autocannon fire, and his armour was awash with
blood.
“You took your time,” growled Marduk.
42
“I apologise, my lord,” he said. The powerful anticoagulants in the warrior’s blood had already
stemmed the flow, and formed a thick crust around the shocking wound.
“I can still do my job,” said Namar-sin defensively, feeling Marduk’s gaze on his injuries.
Gritting his teeth, the champion primed his melta-bomb somewhat awkwardly with one hand, before
slamming the bulky grenade into position.
More lascannon beams stabbed from the ice storm towards the bastion’s defences as the Land
Raiders approached. In response, the first of the battle cannons spoke, firing blindly into the gale,
the ensuing reverberations shaking the ground.
