The Emperor's Legion (Watchers of the Throne #1) - Chris Wraight Page 0,116
technology behind that beam was far beyond anything possessed by either the enemy or our own regular armies, and a blue-white column of searing energy pierced straight through the cruiser’s shielding, blowing a ragged hole amid an explosion of released static.
It was all we needed.
‘Now,’ I commanded.
The teleport chamber blazed into cold life, flooding all of us in columns of spitting witch-light. For a split second we were nowhere, ripped from the heart of the engagement and flung into the netherworld of the warp. I heard a sound like rushing water, booming in my ears, covering an undertow that might have been screams.
Then the world of the senses crashed back into solidity around us. We rematerialised within the cruiser’s bowels. The walls were concave and serrated, as if we were in some immense black ribcage, and spiked columns soared up towards a many-tiered hammer-beam roof hanging with stalactites of iron. The metal was dank, glistening with condensation, and the inner atmosphere was as hot as a furnace. Sparse red lumens barely broke through a thick miasma that swayed and undulated with something like sentience. I could smell a range of overlapping aromas – hot metal, old blood, the rotten-fruit stench of primordial corruption.
My helm-cogitator immediately scanned through the decks, giving me a three-dimensional schema to navigate by. I could already hear brazen war-horns sounding in the depths. The distant report of cannon fire continued, indicating that the Chelandion still lived. With the Emperor’s blessing, it had hopefully now pulled clear again and run for sanctuary further out, but we had passed close by on that infiltration run and the ship had no doubt taken heavy damage.
One reading on that schema made no sense to me. It was as if the scans dropped off a cliff when trying to probe a whole section of the lower hull. Something huge was masked, cut out as if physically excised. Instinct told me that was what we had come for, and I gave the order.
We moved out, our weapons glittering in the darkness, only to find the enemy coming for us. They had reacted with predictable speed, charging down the ship’s clanging corridors to engage the boarders in their midst. They were legionnaires, for the most part, lumbering out of every corridor-mouth in a thudding chorus of heavy bootfalls, bolters booming, chainblades revving, vox-augmitters roaring. Their black-lacquered armour glinted, a livery that sucked the meagre light into itself as if famished for it.
We swept into close-combat, Custodian and anathema psykana against heretic Legiones Astartes. My spear hurtled, trailing golden paths within the miasma. I saw Aleya tearing into them, kicking out with her armoured boot even as her blade danced. The Sisters had no daemonic aura to contest here, and so fought just as we did – warriors tempered in the furnace of physical conditioning, immune to fear, faster and stronger than all but the mightiest of our peers in the Emperor’s service.
But the foes we faced were nigh as deadly. The rawest of them were hundreds of years old, the first among those who had marched with the Warmaster in the lost age, steeped in the cruel tutelage of the Eye and now advancing under the Despoiler’s colours. They had been bloated, changed and ravaged by the gifts of their gods, made both stronger and wilder, the heralds of a new age of ruin. This was their place, and they crashed through the clouds of vapour with a swagger of assurance.
I slammed into the first of them, a thick-set champion with a tusked and bloated death mask, his lenses as red as coals and his armour draped with sheets of flayed hide. He punched his chainblade into me, and Gnosis met the lunge halfway, turning it back before the energy fields exploded in snarls of flame. I lashed out with my gauntlet, cracking into his gorget-seal, then switched my blade back to drive it under his breastplate. He was fast and he was strong, but I had ended many of his kind in hundreds of Blood Games. I knew the way they fought, I knew their doctrines and their habits, and so I thrust a final time, propelling Gnosis up into his lungs and ripping through the power pack beyond. The reactor cells, warped and corroded as they were, imploded noisily, burning him from the inside.
I cast his spasming body aside and advanced further, fighting my way out of the hall and into the warrens beyond. My brothers came with me, as did