Engines of War by Steve Lyons Page B

point behind him. It spat hot metal at the Plague Marine, punching new holes through his armour.
    Galenus had one ear tuned to the voice of a southbound Stormtalon pilot. He was on the edge of vox range, fading in and out, but the captain picked up the salient details of his report. The pilot had just laid eyes upon the Death Guard’s Thunderhawks.
    There were two of them, as the Quintillus ’s scans had suggested. There was something else too. Another daemon engine – the same as the first two, dragon-like in appearance – had been clinging to one of the transporter’s hulls, which was why the scans had missed it. It had disengaged now and was coming at the Imperial Stormtalons, breathing fire.
    The pilot’s voice cut out altogether then, drowned in static.
    Galenus tried to contact the Quintillus , but received no reply. He spoke to Terserus over their private channel instead. The Dreadnought confirmed that, no, he couldn’t raise the battle-barge either; the fault wasn’t with the captain’s equipment.
    ‘The warp rift,’ Galenus muttered. ‘It’s directly between us now. It must be interfering with our vox signals.’ He wondered, for the first time, if Captain Fabian had been right. Should he have stayed in orbit? He didn’t like being out of touch with his forces like this.
    ‘You’d rather be up there,’ asked Terserus, as if the captain had voiced his thoughts, ‘not knowing what was happening down here?’
    This happened sometimes: a glimmer of his old self surfacing from the mist – the Sergeant Terserus of old, who knew Galenus better than anyone ever had – and, as usual, he was right. The captain had made his decision. He had to fight and win the battle he had chosen to fight.
    He swung his blade and cut both legs off a zombie at the knees. It fell, but dragged itself back towards him on its stomach and elbows. It tried to bite Galenus’s ankle; he kicked it in the head repeatedly until the last of its mouldering teeth fell out.
    There was more help on the way too. Another battle-brother had broken through the Plague Marines dwindling ranks.
    Galenus only wished he knew what was happening elsewhere on the planet.
    He wished he knew for sure why Death Guard gunships were headed towards Fort Garm. He wished he knew how the effort to slow them down was going. He wished he knew the condition of Fort Kerberos’s Great Seal, still buried somewhere beneath his feet – was it intact or wasn’t it?
    He just wished he could be certain that he wasn’t fighting for nothing.
    Below the wreckage of Fort Kerberos – a long way below– a figure stirred.
    His bones were broken. He was pinned to the ground by heavy debris. He had thought himself dead, and, perhaps, for a short time, he had been.
    The last thing he remembered, he had been locked in mortal combat with a single foe; no match for him, or so he had believed at the time.
    Naracoth had been arrogant and careless, and the memory of it shamed him.
    His enemy – Artorius, the Space Marine, although he had been battered and bloodied – had first taken his hand and then swept his feet out from under him.
    He had snatched up a weapon from the ground and plunged it into Naracoth’s skull with all his fading strength, penetrating his brain. He should have been dead.
    It seemed, however, that his god was not yet done with him.
    The roof of the shrine – the shrine in which he had fought, beneath the fort – had mostly collapsed. An obstinate pillar had held, sparing Naracoth the full force of the cave-in. His opponent had not been as blessed by his own paltry deity. A silver gauntlet protruded from beneath a hunk of rockcrete.
    Artorius’s head, throat and chest had been utterly crushed.
    Naracoth lifted his own bloated head with effort. The sodium torches that had lined the smooth walls had been extinguished. The shrine, however, was bathed in a bright, flickering purple light, the source of which he couldn’t see.
    His eyes searched for the