Blood of the Emperor by Various Authors

Author:Various Authors
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2021-02-04T14:40:13+00:00

THE WILL OF THE LEGION

Andy Clark

Captain Hashin Yonnad squeezed his bolt pistol’s trigger. The gun boomed as it spat self-propelled micro-missiles down the length of the corridor. Around him the warriors of Breacher Siege Squad Tybo added their fire to his, each Iron Armour-clad battle-brother expertly plying his boltgun over the rim of his shield.

At the corridor’s far end, their targets were blown messily apart. Rangy human warriors in brightly patterned enviro-armour detonated as though each had swallowed a grenade in some obscene suicide pact.

In turning their guns upon the ships of the Third Expeditionary Fleet, these Driftborn may as well have done just that, thought Yonnad. He advanced, reloading as he went. Blood and pulverised meat dripped from the walls and ceiling onto the Imperial Fists as they passed.

‘No small thing, to see such bloodletting aboard the Tribune, eh, captain?’ asked Sergeant Tybo over the squad vox as they clattered up a flight of iron steps. They passed their Legion’s sigil, embossed upon the walls in semi-precious metals and lit red by the strobe of alarm lumens.

‘It will not last long,’ Yonnad replied. ‘Our enemies fight with vicious tenacity, but they have nothing to truly threaten the Legiones Astartes. When the ships of the Third Expeditionary Fleet entered their domain, they should have capitulated at once. The Consus Drift might have been a staging post. Instead they force us to make of it a mass grave.’

He shook his head and sighed. ‘Wasteful.’

They emerged into an intersection and were met by another hail of bullets that clanged from power armour and boarding shields.

This latest band of boarders had dragged heavy munitions crates into a crude barricade. Checking his auto-senses’ map of the Tribune he saw that the fighting had brought him almost to the ship’s outer hull.

‘This position was intended as a last-ditch defence for the enemy’s beachhead,’ opined Tybo.

‘Perhaps, in their ignorance, they never believed it would be needed,’ Yonnad replied. Certainly, the fire from behind the barricade was ragged and haphazard, easily shrugged off by Tybo’s legionaries.

‘Break them,’ Yonnad ordered.

Shields interlocking, bolters fore, the Breachers pressed forward. Their guns thundered, the sound filling the intersection and drowning out the terrified screams of their enemies. Pale-skinned, dark-eyed Driftborn were torn to pieces and the stench of blood and ordure filled the air. Some tried to fire back with their boarding rifles and wide-muzzled pistols.

Futile, thought Yonnad, pitifully so.

The bullets barely marred the legionaries’ shields. By comparison, simply standing against the Space Marines’ blizzard of fire was to die. A dozen Driftborn did so in the first seconds of the gunfight; another half a dozen followed them moments later, and then the last of their number were fleeing down the corridor in animal terror.

‘Follow. We finish this.’

At their captain’s command the Breachers bulled their way through the ill-fated barricade, their heavy boots crushing ruptured corpses into the deck plates as they strode relentlessly after the retreating Driftborn.

Through another bulkhead door, down a chevroned ramp between thumping pistons the size of

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