Void Stalker by Aaron Dembski-Bowden Page B

need for self-preservation (one couldn’t call it fear, especially when it lay closer to anger), the thrusters on his back trailed thin, bleak coils of smoke. They were eager to breathe flame and howl loud, carrying him up into the sky. He was eager to give in to it. All he needed was somewhere to soar. Trapped on board the dying Echo, it wasn’t a likely prospect.
    Over the vox, First Claw were still berating the Bleeding Eyes for retreating.
    ‘Let them whine,’ Vorasha chuckled, his laughter a hissing ‘ Ss-ss-ss’. Both of them were clinging to the ceiling as they fled. The other Bleeding Eyes, whittled down these last months to the most stubborn and brutal survivors, clawed their way across the walls and floor.
    The ship shuddered again. Lucoryphus had to cling to the metal for a moment with his hands and foot-claws, to prevent being shaken free.
    ‘No,’ he hissed back. ‘Wait.’
    The Bleeding Eyes halted with inhuman union, each of them holding motionless, clinging to the walls around their leader: a pack meeting in three dimensions. Vorasha tilted his sloping helm, watching as a bird might. Each of them regarded their champion with the same tear-trails painted upon their daemonic iron faceplates.
    ‘What? What is it?’
    ‘You go.’ Lucoryphus punctuated his order with an irritated shriek. ‘Fall back to the second concourse. Reinforce Fourth Claw.’
    Their muscles tensed as the instinct to obey ran through them. ‘And you?’ Vorasha hissed back. Lucoryphus gave a wordless cry, the call of a carrion crow, as he turned and moved back the way they’d come.
    The Bleeding Eyes regarded each other as their leader tore back down the corridor, running along its ceiling. Instinct pulled at them: the pack hunted together, or not at all.
    ‘Go,’ Lucoryphus voxed back to them
    Without sharing a word, they reluctantly obeyed.
    From his birth on an orderly, respected feudal world at the edges of Ultima Segmentum, the warrior had risen among the ranks of his Chapter through a liberal measure of discipline, focus, skill and peerless tactical acumen. None of his brothers had bested him in an honour duel for close to four decades. He’d been offered a company captaincy on three occasions – to assume the mantle of mastery over a hundred of the Emperor’s chosen warriors – and had refused with humility and grace each time.
    One shoulder guard was given over to the white stone majesty of the Crux Terminatus, the other bore the symbol of his Chapter carved in blue-veined marble and black iron.
    To his brothers, he was simply Tolemion. In the archives of his Chapter, he was Tolemion Saralen, Champion of the Third Battle Company. To the enemies of Terra’s Throne, he was vengeance incarnate clad in carnelian ceramite.
    His armour was an ablative suit of composite metals, layered and reinforced through hundreds of hours of consummate craftsmanship. His helm, with its ornate faceguard and bronzed grille, was an imposing and crested relic from a bygone era, forged in the age of humanity’s interstellar apex. One red gauntlet clutched a trembling thunder hammer, its power field charged to a teeth-aching whine. The other held a huge tower shield out ahead, the barrier’s shape that of an aquila in profile, one golden wing spread to protect the bearer.
    The order he growled to his kindred was a mere two words.
    ‘Boarding blades.’
    The warrior’s remaining three brothers advanced alongside him, slinging their bolters and drawing pistols and short swords.
    First Claw watched this implacable advance, pouring fire down the corridor, watching everything they had shatter harmlessly against the champion’s tower shield.
    Mercutian dumped his heavy bolter with a disgusted crash.
    ‘I’m dry.’ In mirror image of the closing Space Marines, he drew a bolt pistol and the gladius sheathed at his shin. ‘I never thought I’d want to see Xarl,’ he added.
    Talos and Cyrion drew their blades a moment later. The prophet