Blood Angels - The Complete Rafen Omnibus by James Swallow

Author:James Swallow [Swallow, James]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Black Library
Published: 2018-10-19T23:00:00+00:00

Through the dust, they followed behind the Whirlwind in silence for another hour before they arrived at the Flesh Tearers’ field command post. At the point of the squad’s teardrop formation, Brother Kayne studied the gutted structure they had taken as their temporary base.

It was a thing of steel buttresses and stone walls, missing a glass roof that had doubtless been obliterated in the early days of the Eritaen rebellion. A squat colonnade at one end of the old building ended in a tall, spindly antenna tower that reached into the sky; it was wilting, as if the metal had been twisted in some fearsome wind. The structure stood atop a shallow hill, giving it good lines of sight down all the highways around it. Kayne glanced at a fallen sign as they entered the courtyard, seeing a name, a designation. Situa Alexandus Regina—Adeptus Telepathica. Of course; the meaning of the strangely-barbed antenna became clear; this had been a communications temple, the nexus for planetbound signalling via machine-call vox and astropathic transfer.

He caught a familiar, stale scent on the wind—old blood. On the walls of the building he spotted dark brown spatter-patterns and metal impact rivets driven into splintered brick. Bodies had been crucified up there, at some point. He wondered if they might have been the staff of the complex; and then he wondered what had become of their corpses.

The Whirlwind peeled away from the group and grumbled to a halt near a knot of Chapter serfs, under the watchful eye of a Flesh Tearer Techmarine. There were only a handful of vehicles in the parking quadrant, and Kayne frowned at the condition of them. A Rhino, a Baal-pattern Predator tank, a pair of land speeders, all of them had a grubby and ill-maintained look to them, as if they were held together by little more than steel hull patches and prayers to their machine-spirits. But then Kayne considered for a moment; the Whirlwind they had followed also bore the same scars and rough aspect, and yet it had moved with swiftness and ready purpose. Perhaps it was not that the Flesh Tearers cared poorly for their machines, but simply that they cared little for their surface appearance.

The youth turned that thought over in his mind, his gaze moving across the other Astartes who paused in their devotions or tasks at hand to stop and watch the arrival of the Blood Angels. Their scrutiny was not kind, not indifferent, but wary, distrustful. He speculated on what they might think of Brother-Sergeant Rafen and his squad. Like their vehicles, the Flesh Tearers themselves did not display much in the way of ornamentation; the deep red of their armour, so dense that it strayed toward the purple, covered all except the helmet, backpack and shoulder pads. These were a hard, matt black that reflected no light. Kayne saw rank sigils, company badges and the like, but no decals or decoration beyond what was needed on the battlefield. In contrast, the red

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