Tag Archives: space marines do it better

06.29.16
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Space Marines Do It Better: Independence

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“You’d make me pay for a drink when the world is ending?”
Karra crossed her arms, the mutant horns of the right striking sparks against the black iron augmetic of the left.
“Zeelo, I’d make YOU pay for the drink if Angron were drowning you in a cyclone of blood. And if the world’s ending I’m not spending my last seconds looking at you for free. So pay, leave, or give me an excuse to kill you, and those are in ascending order of preference.”
Zeelo slinked out of the Bloody Cog into the rusting alley between manufactory stacks. No-one had ever proven that Karra served Iron Warriors in the armored upper floor, nor that she distilled debtors into the bloodka which got them drunk. But even Zeelo understood this might be because anyone who could prove it was now proof.
Karra unclenched her fists and went back to scouring steel drinking vessels. (Patrons had to pay extra for glass, at considerable markup, but most were smart enough to bring their own blades). She peered at the smog-choked sky through the slats of a presumably sarcastic ventilation grill. A forge world’s sky was always grey, and Ferron V’s seemingly limitless promethium reserves had turned them black long before it had been claimed by Chaos.
Now even the pretence of habitability had been cast aside as daemon-infused manufactories ran with the blood of industrial accident. Truly, Khorne cared not from who the blood flowed, and it seemed a conveyor belt was close enough if was screaming about a False Emperor and carrying replacement sawchains.
(The one smartass comment Karra had thought but would never make was “Yes, he’s a mouldering corpse incarnating the rotten lies of a weakling Imperium, true, but he is actually their Emperor. And we don’t have another rival Emperor. So he’s not a False Emperor, is he?”)
No, it was undeniable. The sky was darker. Maybe the rumours of xenos descending to burn the world were true.
Karra turned behind her armored bar/palisade to pour an expensive glass of bloodka. She raised it to the dim grill.
“Skulled for the Skull Throne!” she cried, turning her head to the sky and crushing the glass in her fist, mingled blood and spirit falling into her open mouth.
Any xenos stupid enough to attack this world would soon join it.

Xenos vessels had descended to destroy Ferron V. But it was taking longer than they’d expected. Their shock and awe strategy of awesome sky-filling discs descending into the lower atmosphere to detonate entire cities only worked when there actually were individual cities. Against the endless sprawl of a forge world it was basically acupuncture. Instead of striking fear and panic into the population they’d been forced to crawl a few kilometers at a time while their weapons recharged. It was like trying to clean a boulder with a toothbrush.
Between shots they’d stared down in disbelief as roving gangs of natives dashed into devastated areas to cart away wreckage for smelting. The surviving manufactories suddenly had new quotas to seize, and until they themselves were targeted they would work to serve their masters’ hunger. A hunger for blood, for vengeance, a hunger above all for the eating of worlds.
And now their masters were descending.

The bridge of World Eaters assault cruiser Knuckle hosted an unprecedented tactical meeting. In that “tactical meetings” of the Blood of Everything warband usually involved fighting your way to the drop pod’s controls and aiming it at the fiercest anti-aircraft fire.
The ship’s human Captain Jakk Beam took another swig from his vodekk canteen and mag-clamped it back to the side of his throne. This was a tactical decision on par with any of his brilliant void stratagems, balancing the risk of movement against the fatal effects of being sober enough to show visible fear. Once the rising star of the Imperial Navy’s Fleet Obscurus, capture by the World Eaters had revealed that his combat genius was not motivated by love of the Imperium but an advanced sense of self-preservation. A sense which had developed new tactics: keep killing enemies even when his masters weren’t on the bridge, and keep his mouth shut when they were.
Right now his mouth couldn’t have been more shut by a Cadian blockade. The assembled World Eaters had just been informed that the xenos’ shields were proof against drop pod assault, and Jakk hoped he’d still have some bridge officers left to replace the thin smear of sensorium officer, when the armored bridge portals clanked open to reveal Sergeant Amzara. Now even the other World Eaters went quiet. Jakk held so still his heart stopped.
Amzara’s expressionless helm faced the sensorium bay splattered red in warning lights and bits of its late operator. Glowing lenses turned to the vast circular xenos craft on the main viewscreen. The alien mothership was in high orbit, overseeing its daughter discs’ assault on Ferron V. A tearing grind of gears was revealed as laughter as she removed her helm.

Amzara had become a Space Marine the same way she’d become slaughter-chieftan of her feral homeworld’s largest tribe: killing anyone who objected. She’d shredded the World Eater’s warrior trials, killing her way to the top of the Skull Mound and just not stopping until the Marines had been left with little choice but to take her or leave empty handed.
She’d been saved the bother of killing again in the implantation chambers by Combat Apothecary Grizt, who’d waved whirring narthecium blades under the chin of an assistant gibbering about hormone levels and rejection tolerances.
“Hah!” Grizt spat, jerking the blades to draw blood. “How weak do you think we are? I’ve seen marines take a tank round to the gut and tear the gunner’s head off. The things we implant, we could shove them into a grox and end up with another World Eater. Probably a smarter one than most.”
He stared into Amzara’s eyes. They did not lower. Nor, he noticed, did her fists relax even though her arms were clamped to the surgical slab. The implantation procedure didn’t work “with” the weak human body. It overwrote it. Overloaded it. Enhanced it beyond all sanity or structure to become a demi-god striding above its old species as an avatar of war. The idea that a few grams of tissue could stand against that wasn’t just laughable, it was pathetic.
He plunged a scalpel into her chest and dragged it down her sternum in a first incision. She twisted in agony but did not cry out. Grizt grunted approval.
“Any progenoid which can’t deal with this isn’t worthy of marines.”

Sergeant Amzara grinned.
“You mangy curs want someone to tell you it’s safe to attack? Should I clean your waste filters for you too? Get to the drop pods!”
The World Eaters roared their approval and stormed off the bridge. Amzara stepped forward to Jakk, who stood, his dignity demanding that he at least be punched to death instead of stood on. (The vodekk helped).
“Don’t worry Jakk, the Knuckle can punch through their shields!”
“Master,” — he’d seen from experience that prefacing bad news with “forgive me” was the galaxy’s least-fulfilling prophecy — “We have sustained maximum bombardment for five minutes with no noticeable effect.”
Amzara laughed again, returning to the brutal hacking of vox-distortion as she resealed her helm and strode to the bridge portal.
“Yes, Jakk, but the Knuckle can punch through their shields!”

The World Eater’s craft plunged into the mothership like a knife through flesh. The impenetrable field had flared like a nova as cataclysmic feedback with the Knuckle’s voids had torn them both down. Now it was just ship to ship. The xenos disc was the size of a civilization. Because the xenos disc was a civilization, stuffed with all the weak and vulnerable innards that implied, while the World Eaters cruiser was built only for war.
Forward decks clad in meters of multiply-reinforced ceramite tore like an armor-piercing round through flesh. Forward lance batteries and defense turrets burned through storage silos, civilian habs, maintenance yards and medical bays, burning as they plunged into the soft guts of an entire culture. Jakk roared as it all flared and shattered on his viewscreen, vodekk burning in his veins as the starship captain gained an impossible glimpse of the glory of urban assault.
The Knuckle’s realspace engines deafened half the ship as they overloaded and flared out, their actinic flares now the quills of an impossibly vast arrow mortally wounding the larger vessel.
Then the drop pods fired like a shotgun blast.
Designed to withstand atmospheric re-entry and orbital-insertion impacts on the most brutal battlefields imaginable, they shredded soft internal divisions built for long years of civilian life between worlds. And through the stumbling and dazed survivors tore the World Eaters.

The ridiculous little xenos died by the thousands without a shot fired or blade drawn. That these tiny grey things dared attack anyone was an affront to everything the World Eaters worshipped. When the xenos’ own troops finally arrived, struggling through miles of their own stricken vessel from deployment hangars to their own burning homes, they were just larger versions of the same fleshy targets. Worthier foes attacking World Eaters already drenched in their people’s blood. They could not have been a better gift to Khorne.
One wrapped Amzara’s right gauntlet in the flailing tentacles sprouting from its back. She turned her wrist around them and yanked, headbutting the stumbling alien warrior with a squelching crunch. She roared in laughter, tearing the broken head from its shoulders, then ripping wet shards of biological helm from the small grey face within.
“Blood for the Blood God!” she cried across the vox, “Even their armor bleeds!”

The next week of slaughter was forever marked in the warband’s scar-annals. They would mount planetary assaults on this ritual date that the sheer volume of vitae spilled would reach across the warp to bless fresh butchery.
It only ended when a lowly adept of the Dark Mechanicus emerged from the Knuckle‘s smouldering enginarium. Intending only to scavenge scrap to smelt for crude replacement parts, the same heretical thirst for knowledge which had driven her from Mars now plunged mechadendrites into the glittering xenos systems.
A shock of total access almost killed her organic components on the spot. This …. even after decades on a Chaos vessel, what she now found was lunacy. Even the crude operation-daemons of the World Eater’s most basic craft required access codes to engage or rituals to placate. But so arrogant where these invaders that the vast expanse of craft had no security whatsoever.
“My lord!” she voxed to Amzara, “I have total control of the xenos craft! What should I do!”
The reply grated from a throat torn by days of ceaseless roar, and the crackle of augmitter distortion, but the savage joy of it flooded what little flesh remained on the tech-adept’s frame.
“DROP THEM!”

Ferron V thrived like never before. A few paltry cubic klicks of lost manufactorum were nothing compared to the bounty gifted by their heavenly masters. Towers of industry already erupted from the massive discs, the daemon-forges chewing through the corpses of an entire civilization. The xenos had fancied themselves a plague on the galaxy. Locusts feasting on the wealth of countless worlds. Instead they had only served to refine them, gathering a treasury of rare ores, exotic materials, obscure technologies, all dropped into the maw of the forge world’s endless appetite.
Feeding the infinite hunger of the World Eaters.

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05.22.16
by

Space Marines Do It Better: Metal

The sky screamed around the Thunderhawks as if understanding the doom they carried.  The Iron Warriors cut through the world’s thin atmosphere. Soon they would tear out its rich mineral veins to feed the endless hunger of their Daemon Forges. But first they descended on the single shining city on the planet’s surface. Nowhere near the richest deposits, the ravenous assault fleet could easily have avoided it. But the Iron Warriors’ eternal hatred could bear nothing to stand in their sight. And their Forges fed on more than mere metals.

The Thunderhawks descending through thick clouds of fumes and dirt kicked up by the bulk landers. The craft arrayed themselves in a line a mere hundred meters from the edge of the strangely defenseless city. Every building was metal, windowless, crowded together on a vast flat shining disc.

Serrik strode from the Thunderhawk ramp to the blasted earth and advanced towards the city. His squad fell in behind him, unconsciously matching the metronomic precision of his augmetic legs. Their exactitude, their strength, their perfect endurance were truly Iron Within. His face still snarled around the scars of the krak missile which had nearly torn him in half. His soul still recoiled from the suckered tentacles which had sprouted from the bleeding stumps, whipping and flailing for flesh until they’d been amputated.

Beside him Haksar still carried the Narthecian chainaxe he’d used for the “surgery”. Excision of mutation had become such a regular duty he’d installed a spare narthecium gauntlet in the haft of his axe, the better to study and destroy “gifts” of the Iron Warriors’ would-be sponsors.

Past the yellow-black bulk of the landers stood the city. Harsh. Angular. Plainly unwelcoming, but ludicrously undefended. There were no walls, no ramparts. Emplaced weapons were either utterly invisible or entirely absent, both options equally impossible to the Iron Warrior mind. It seemed that anyone could just stroll in and explore freely unless a defender happened to bump into them wandering the hallways. Though it seemed the arrival of the Iron Warrior’s annihilation force had driven even the careless creatures of this travesty to defend themselves. A door retracted vertically and  line of metal bollards filed from the nearest building, sliding across the metal to form a firing line. Some sort of self-propelled turret? They looked ridiculous. Then they fired. Ten attackers simply disappeared, vaporized by weapons far more powerful than any melta.

But that’s what cannon fodder were for.

Ten out of a thousand were nothing. Regiments of barely armored scum were driven from the holds of the bulk haulers. The vast craft arrived carrying cargos of worthless mortals and left full of precious metals. The Iron Warriors drove the slavestocks forward, chainswords hacking at those too slow to the attack. The vast mass charged at the city uncaring of their losses. Those blinded by vaporization flare screamed and ran at the afterimage of light, instant death a greater reward than most Iron Warriors prisoners had even dared to imagine.

The defending drones kept up their fire but didn’t even dent the advance. Hordes of humanity broke over and around them, metal rocks helpless to hold back the tide flowing past and into the city, and suddenly the Iron Warriors slammed into them. The mass of flesh had protected the armored figures from the fusillades and now they were point-blank.

At close-quarters the drones’ defense was laughable.  Squat, flat-bottomed things, their powerful ranged weapons were front-mounted with a tiny field of fire. Their only melee weapon was some sort of … plunger? Serrik lowered his shoulder and charged into the closest, rocking it back on its base, his chainsword cutting through the gun-stalk before it could flail in his direction. The plunger suddenly surged forward and flared to swallow his helm.

The world went dark but for warning runes as it covered his eye-lenses. He roared as tore away his helm, pulling the sucking plunger out of the robot as he did so. Then he slammed his helm down, using it do drive the dangling spike of alien metal through the dome on top of the machine. It squealed and gurgled in a distinctly unmechanical manner, spurting noxious fluids around the improvised misericord before falling silent. He pulled his helm free of the now-lax sucker and resealed it to his gorget. No point in giving up the advantages of tactical insight so easily.

Alert rune directed his weapon as he turned to shatter a second with chattering bolter fire. The pathetic las and solid-slug weapons of the fodder had bounced off the armored hides, and it even weathered a few rounds of mass-reactive, but sustained fire forced dents into breaks through which explosive rounds burst it from within

Another alert and he turned to find Haksar flanked by four of the metal machines. Serrik charged forward, leaping with chainsword raised high above his head to bisect one as he landed. The two halves fell apart to spill a hideous tangled thing deep in the heart of the wreckage.

“Xenos!” spat Serrik, turning to blast the weapon-arms from a second. The machines could not evade, bogged down by the morass of expendable troops, unable to maneuver in the maelstrom of battle.

“Worse!” cursed Haksar, kicking the third from the end of his chain-axe before burying the blade in a third. He leaned in to study the narthecium display in the haft even as the spinning blades mulched the matter within. “ABOMINATIONS!” he roared, gunning his axe to spray an organic slurry from the ruined shell.

He turned to Serrik. “MUTANTS!” he roared, hate harsher than the vox-amplification. “These things were once human!”

“EXTERMINATE!” cried the nearest thing, its screeching vox-torn blare a parody of Haksar’s righteous human anger. “DALEKS ARE THE SUPERIOR BEINGS!”

Not once in his endless war had Serrik stepped backwards, but now he almost recoiled. These things thought themselves superior? They embraced this horror over the pure human form, they desecrated metal to make this mockery of strength, and they dared to have pride? His incoherent cry of hatred almost drowned out the thunder of his bolter, advancing as he smashed the Dalek’s disgusting life to shreds. These were not foes to be killed. These were offenses to be punished.

The Iron Warriors, already the embodiment of brutal close-quarter combat, erupted in fury. The Dalek line collapsed. Several screamed with anti-gravitic energy as they tried to flee into the sky, only to be slammed back down and crumple under the pauldrons of Warriors with meteoric jump packs.

“EXTERMINATE! EXTERMINATE!” The call echoed from synchronized speakers. An armored wedge of Daleks was forcing its way forward from deeper in the silver city. Ranks of their ridiculous guns fired in unison to vaporize entire swathes of fodder.

“PERNAK!” called Serrik. The response was an earthquake in metal as the company’s Dreadnought charged across the battlefield. Mortals too slow to escape his path were ripped and torn on the hooked and bladed flanges across his armored shell.

“IRON WITHIN” boomed the entombed Warrior. The blood-soaked machine smashed into the Dalek wedge, scattering them left and right. His immense left power fist grabbed the closest by its domed ‘head’, hoisting it aloft before closing, crushing, hurling the sparking wreck at two more. His right weapon was an immense Siege Spike – four meters of cursed black iron designed to puncture the stress-points of fortifications – with pistons that screamed as it punched through fallen Daleks.

“IRON WITHOUT!” responded Serrik, the cry taken up by every Iron Warrior on the surface.

“Advance! Destroy! None of this filth will feed our forges!”

Servo-bundles flexed and pumped, master-crafted armor built to embrace and enhance his transhuman perfection, both pulsing with strength as he pushed forward to lead the charge.

“These wretched things desire extermination and we shall bring it to them!”

 

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12.30.15
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Space Marines Do It Better: Apex

The Catachans were scared of the jungle. Seven words which threatened the entire Jautjex campaign. The Rolling Iron tankers of Sherman’s world, where cribs were fitted with toy promethium motors so that infants learned to sleep through the rumble and stink, flinched at every noise. The 7th Cuchulains — masters of city clearance despite a tendency to treat bars as primary targets — sang no victory songs and only muttered into their drinks. Sure, it was only in the jungle, went the stories, but anything which could kill a Catachan in the jungle could kill anyone else anywhere. The Death Corps of Krieg 544th company said nothing. They marched into the jungle and were never heard from again.

The Imperium’s relentless advance slowed, and stalled. Even minor operations bogged down and ballooned into costly engagements. The Astra Militarum’s mailed fist weakened as the blood of morale was drained by rumor. And all the while Catachans continued to die in the green. Their new fear should have made them cautious, but the resulting shame made them suicidal. Squads tore into the undergrowth desperate to prove their valor, only to find the still-dripping chunks of their predecessors and one sobbing soldier babbling tales of the jungle itself rising to kill them all.

Karn-Tor hung from the branches thirty meters above the trail. The hunt was beginning to bore her. The prey were plentiful and loud, but had become embarrassingly easy to kill. She’d already proven everything she intended, challenging herself on the hunting ground of a planetary conflict, and had to admit to herself that continuing bordered on gluttony. She’d hoped to draw out the elite of this species and was saddened to imagine that she seemed to have found it. It was probably time to move on.
Movement. Herd approaching through the undergrowth on either side of the trail. Thermal lenses revealed eight, no, ten figures. Much larger before. She smiled behind her mask. Maybe this world would offer one last indulgence. She flexed her hands, rolled her neck, waking the muscles in preparation of flensing to come. Perhaps even a trophy. As they came into view she saw some kind of black armor…
Everything exploded. The world disappeared in fire and concussion.
Thermal lenses overloaded, sheer reflex kicked her off the branch. But hot shrapnel tearing through vines and mosses meant her foot slipped through the mulched vegetation to send her plummeting to the ground. Even as she twisted to catch a vine she saw her intended destination disappear in a blaze of fire.
Accident.
The thought cut her like a poisoned blade leaving a wound which would never heal. Accident. She had survived by accident. These filthy prey would scream to give her atonement before night fell. They would fail, but that is what prey were for.
Her invisibility shroud rippled green and brown to hide her from sight as she vaulted across the canopy. But the explosions followed. She lengthened her leaps, aiming further, faster, but she saw more massive black figures emerging from the trees to her right. She zagged through the massive trees, increasing to sinew-tearing speed, but then the trunks to her left erupted with craters. Yet more of the hard-shelled prey emerging on the right. She cut low, sacrificing vantage for sheer speed, dropping to the ground into a full sprint. How big was this herd?
The explosions never stopped. She outran death with every footfall. Only now did her echolocator compensate for the cacophony to pick out distinctive prey signatures. The waterfall of static along the left of her mask display resolved into distinct detections, triangular glyphs scrolling across the bottom.
Close range: low frequency: machinery/combustion — crude transport rockets. Ten signatures. Ten signatures. These were all the same ten prey, flanking her.
Hunting her.
Sheer suicidal rage almost killed her on the spot, sacrificing her escape and her self to stand and spit on such an affront. Karn-Tor was a hunter. The greatest in her clan. Possibly the greatest in her tribe. She had collected trophies from all this galaxy’s most dangerous prey. An Ork skull so large it was now her trophy cabinet, containing the heads of Necron and Dark Eldar alphas, embellished with carved shards of Zoanthrope scale. Her soul held no doubt she was the greatest hunter alive.
But she was no warrior.

A mere hunter operates on their own terms. They understand that they might die, but they never willingly offer themselves for death. Faced with unexpected reversals their first instinct is to flee, to lick their wounds. Then return to base re-arm and restore the total advantage over their targets they enjoy so much.
Karn-Tor angled towards the preparations she’d made only as a matter of excellent hunting technique, with no thought to actually using them. She dove into a gully cut in the jungle by one of countless waterways, through false netting of expertly cut vine and fronds. As she crawled down the narrow channel, far too small for the bulky giants behind her, the plasma cannon on her shoulder rotated to spit an actinic globe backwards, collapsing the entrance.

Karn-Tor’s ship was buried deep in a narrow ravine in the rock with snares set on the only approach. She ducked through the hatch, sealing it behind her, and swung across to the pilot console. She settled into the single pilot throne. She would take fine trophies from these new prey to slake her shame. And if they were still alive as the flayed them, well, that would only…
Cold metal at her throat.
Shadow Captain Kyre appeared behind her. There was no other word for it. The heavy gauntlet which was suddenly holding the knife was painted black. Another slowly turned her chair, that she might see him. No. That he might inspect his catch. The same hand raised and tore the tribal mask for her face, revealing her blotched skin and fanged mandibles. She could feel disgust pulsing even through the glowing lenses of his armor. Harsh blare thundered through a crude vox-grille.
“It is right that you hide your vileness from the Emperor’s sight. But none can hide from His justice. Even the darkest shadow cannot save you.”
The blade did not cut sideways but pushed forwards, servos shoving pushing the metal blade clean through flesh and bone.
“For the Raven Guard are already there.”

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09.11.14
by

Space Marines Do It Better: Xenos

The filthy xenos couldn’t even burn right. Thick smoke choked the chamber, not with the victorious feast-smells of roasting flesh, but a scratching foulness which cut the throat and pained even his implanted multi-lung. Vithar’s fangs bared at the sense-memory: they burned like the Illuminated Ones his pack had ended during the Purge of Scriatia. Blasphemous, many-angled things, worshipped into being through stained-glass windows set in cathedrals of heresy, and blasted back to oblivion by melta fire. His nostrils flared at the same stink of poisoned silica.

His flamer washed over ranks of eggs. He’d boarded the vessel searching for a lost scion of the Belisarius Navigator house. The wayward mutant’s craft had crashed on Levitian Quartus-26, and it seemed his family wanted their errant son recovered despite such blatant proof of his flaws. They had requested that the Vlka Fenryka “extend the courtesy of assistance as part of their honored alliance”. Vithar snorted. Navigators always used too many words. Due to sitting in sealed chambers with no tales of their own to tell, no doubt.

Vithar had been returning to his squad aboard the Fenrisian supply barge, Gnawed Femur. As the only ship in range, it had been diverted to recover the target. Even one Astartes was likely overkill for simple rescue. Low orbit auspex had located a crashed vessel, though interference from particulate storms confounded any further details. His first glance had told him the ship was not Imperial, but the Navigator might have sheltered within. One could never predict the insanity of those who gazed into the warp. He had unclasped his helmet, that his senses could best hunt his prey, and started searching the vessel.

The giant xenos corpse had not surprised him. As far as Vithar was concerned death was the xeno’s natural state, one he was blessed to help them attain. But the wounds were troubling. The thing had died poorly, burst from within. Tyranids. He growled and pressed on.

The only scents remaining in the long-dead vessel drew him deeper into the vessel. A large chamber, still moist, a low fog stirring as he strode into horror. The cavern was infested with ranks of what were quite clearly eggs. Vithar voxed the Femur.

“Large numbers of dormant xenos located. Commencing purge.”

And now they burned. His flamer washed over ranks of the foul incubators, baptizing the xenos with sacred promethium, burning them from the Emperor’s galaxy. Bursting motions turned his head to see things scuttling to escape the flames. He twisted to turn the judgement of fire on them, washing the walls, the roof, the skeletal claws falling, curling, blackening. A clatter directly above, he was pulling the flamer up even as everything went black. Knives of pain stabbed into the sides of his skull. Unutterable horror forced into his mouth, slithering past his tongue, questing to implant. He roared in inchoate fury, the last air driven from his lungs by this unforgivable desecration of the Emperor’s flesh. His teeth slammed shut, a portcullis, and his mouth flooded with pain. The thing on his face convulsed as he tore its weakened grip free, dropping to one knee to punch the horror into the ground. He spat a smoking chunk into the yellowed ruin.

He bent the flamer to the immolate the remains even has his gauntlet sizzled against the grip. His flamer continued to function. His armor was uncompromised, but would require repair and ritual cleaning to soothe its spirit at such insult. Finally he turned his attention to his burning flesh. His Betcher’s gland was gone, ruptured by the acid, and the melted stubs of many teeth would need to be replaced. He could feel his breath whispering through holes in his cheeks and under his jaw. Larraman cells were already hardening inside his mouth, and along the gouges in his vocal cords. Through it all, the flamer burned.

Pathetic. If their idea of defense was bleeding, he would be happy to oblige them.

The Femur’s preparations for departure were almost complete when the Navigator’s retinue arrived. Vithar stared through the armorglass viewing block of the airlock’s inner door. The Navigator was comatose, human eyes closed, third eye hidden under a securely knotted bandana. A bandana with bloodstained holes on either side, as if punctured by knives. An attendant hammered on the glass, screaming through the intercom channel.

“Open the Emperor damn hatch! We have to get him inside! Quarantine won’t help him!”

Vithar’s scarred gauntlet rose to the control panel, punching in the override. The heavy internal doors thunked and ground into the wall. The attendant recoiled from the end of Vithar’s bolt pistol. A voice ground like hate itself.

“Only the Emperor can help him.”

Suffer not the alien to live.

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03.27.14
by

Space Marines Do It Better: For the Emperor

Pink clouds screamed past the drop pod. An energetic impurity in the atmosphere flared in the pod’s wake, bisecting the sky in a line of fire. This same impurity had driven the people of this world to construct a vast floating hive, where the resulting wealth had fostered impurities in their souls.

The drop pod punched through the upper tiers of the hive, smashing through layers of penthouse and pleasure dome. These noble heights had eschewed defense for luxury. So spoiled by wealth, so secure in their remote location, the lords of these heavenly spires had thought themselves above the need for war. But now war had fallen upon them.

Space marines exploded from the pod, cobalt blue through the rubbled grey of impact clouds, the thunder of bolt pistols cleansing anything foolish enough to bear weapons in their presence. The civilian population had already fled the city. Now the defending garrison shattered under the sledgehammer assault.

Sergeant Auctorem smashed through a defensive checkpoint barely worthy of the designation, lip curled in distaste behind his vox-grille as troops tumbled and scattered around him. These traitors were incapable of even the most elementary defense. Clearly non-locals, new to the hive and utterly ignorant of the defensive potential of confined urban assault, but that didn’t excuse their abysmal aim. Throne, they didn’t even use cover! They seemed to be ice-worlders, white armor more concerned with concealing the wearer than protecting them, so flimsy that an explosive bolt ending one soldier would wound two comrades.

He emptied his bolt pistol into an arriving squad – they charged through doors single file! – while checking the blinking auspex in his left hand. He indicated the gore-painted door.

“Forwards!”

The door disappeared in a flash of melta, power-armored figures pouring into the central cryo-facility before the smoke could collapse against clouds of freezing vapor. The chamber was a stark industrial coliseum. Two figures dueled on a ring around a central pit, but broke off to face the marines, power swords raised. Auctorem’s bolt pistol locked at the larger.

“In the name of the Emperor, you will submit!”

Face hidden behind a blasphemous insectoid mask, the black-clad figure spoke in a voice buzzing with the bass of mechanical augmentation.

“So, he suspects. Then the Emperor shall fall sooner than planned.”

“Blasphemy!” swore Auctorem, his fire held only by duty to their greater mission. “Submit to His Will!”

The smaller figure screamed as he charged.

“I’ll never submit!”

Bolts cracked the air but incredibly, impossibly, the youth advanced, power sword humming against the storm of death. Auctorem’s tactical mind targeted and analyzed the new threat factor.

Theoretical: blocking shots with a power sword would be a useful ability if you could persuade your opponent to fire only one shot at a time.

Practical: any defense dependent on your foe not doing their best to kill you is suicidal.

Marine Procursus proved the practical by add his own bolt fire. For an insane instant the youth still advanced, sword a blue blur, an impossible shield, before sheer weight of fire punched past. Even as one bolt was blocked a second exploded through the waif to fling his body backwards into the pit.

Insect-mask collapsed to his knees.

“NnnnooooooOOOOOOO!”

Auctorem switched aim but still held fire. He needed answers.

“The prisoner. Where is your —”

The scream of tearing metal as his right arm flung out to the side against the will of wearer and machine spirit, bolt pistol flung from his grip. His multilung slammed against the inside of his fused ribcage, desperately expanding to tear air through a suddenly constricting throat. His secondary heart boomed, double-pulse cannonading through his skull, but his mind thundered with only one word even as the other marines were punched backwards.

“WITCHERY!” Pure fury burst Auctorem’s last breath through the unnatural obstruction to curse the abominations inflicted on the Emperor’s galaxy. The pressure on his throat redoubled, crushing his larynx, an invisible vice ignoring his armored gorget to crush the life from his flesh.

Theoretical: an ability to bypass armor is a significant tactical advantage.

Practical: an ability dependent on your enemy patiently waiting to choke is flawed.

The floor shook under the thunder of his steps, or maybe it was his own heartbeats, both smashing in a relentless assault against an impossible force. His lungs were collapsing with unnatural swiftness, and it felt like that his head must surely be torn off, held in place only by his helm.

The red helm of an Ultramarines sergeant. Neither cease nor pause were possible.

The kneeling figure’s dark helmet exploded under Auctorem’s armored gauntlet. Plastek? Did these madmen care nothing for survival? A sucking hiss did for a curse as he considered the lack of prisoners, scanning the room for the most likely route. There. A cargo passage leading to the landing pads. He gestured forwards.

The city was in flames, survivors of the defending garrison in total rout. Ships screamed away from every launch pad. Auctorem shouldered through the doors to the target gantry (was nothing on this cursed world capable of defense?) where a ship shaped like a death-worlder’s tribal mask was already lifting off..

Procursus dropped to one knee, shouldering a rocket launcher and spitting death in the same smooth motion. The contrail speared the rising craft, exploding into flaming wreckage which rattled back to the pad. Auctorem strode into the inferno. Ruby eyes gazed into the burning death. There.

He dropped to one knee, palming the block of carbonite. Unscathed. He signaled the Thunderhawk to come collect their prize. They would return it to the Censura.

There the rogue would share his secret route to the heretics on Kessel.

Space Marines and the Ultramarines are property of Games Workshop.

Part 2: Space Marines Do It Better: Xenos

Because it’s fun, because space marines do it better, and because anyone worrying about galaxies being long ago or far away should know time flows differently in the warp.
You can continue to serve the Emperor by learning how Warhammer 40K Is The Most Metal Game Ever.