Ultramarines by Ultramarines (Legends of the Dark Millennium Anthology) (Retail)

Author:Ultramarines (Legends of the Dark Millennium Anthology) (Retail)
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Black Library
Published: 2015-10-27T14:35:41+00:00

Practical. That was how they’d once done things. Back in the days of the Legion. He’d read the picts of the most ancient pages of the Codex Astartes in the timbered Arcanium, looking back to a time when the kinds of missions he was known for were the norm. Back when the Ultramarines had, so the flickering image of yellowed parchment claimed, ruled hundreds of worlds.

There were few among the Chapter who would ever describe him or his methods as practical. Reckless, perhaps. Successful, certainly, but practical? Unlikely.

Yet with the ending of the war against the Bloodborn, the Chapter was renewing itself. Why shouldn’t he?

A faded aphorism within the pages of the Codex Astartes spoke of two kinds of fool, those who could not change and those who would not change.

Cato Sicarius would be neither.

Final Absolution was an inhuman agglomeration of void-wrecks and spatial debris. A ghost ship passing down through the galactic plane, it had breached Ultramarian space fifteen days ago. Its mass and residual bio-signs had triggered the deep augurs of the Kryptman line, bringing Valin’s Revenge and its escorts surging from the graving docks over Talassar on an intercept course.

Even without the Kryptman line, the presence of tyrannic organisms within Final Absolution was clear. Vast resinous plates crusted its hull armour and mucus-like accretions enveloped its dorsal surfaces like cancerous blooms of coral.

Three loathsomely organic bio-ships accompanied Final Absolution, smaller than the hulk, but still vast and grotesque in their resemblance to the nautilus beasts of Talassar’s deep ocean. Waving tentacles, kilometres-long, probed the void from cavernous maws and frills of undulant flesh rippled upon their cliff-like flanks.

Another ten days would bring this splinter fleet within striking distance of Talassarian system space. Sicarius’s birthworld had suffered the touch of the Thrice-Born’s daemon-wrought. He had sworn a mighty oath upon his Tempest Blade that its people would not know the horror of the Great Devourer.

Valin’s Revenge was a ship of the Second Company, but Severus Agemman had named the hulk, as was his right as senior captain. Three squads drawn from First Company’s finest warriors had been added to Sicarius’s order of battle. Their inclusion came at the behest of Lord Calgar, but Sicarius sensed the hand of Varro Tigurius in its origin. The mind of the Chapter’s Chief Librarian was an ever-shifting labyrinth that looked in a thousand directions for threats to the Chapter and the means to counter them. If he and Lord Calgar had decided the warriors of the First were needed, then Sicarius was not about to gainsay them.

Killing tyranids aboard space hulks was what Terminators did best, but the warriors of the Second would be first in the fight.

The lightless axial corridor was thick with beasts, scores of leaping, screeching killers of the hormagaunt genus. Sicarius’s command squad cut them down with disciplined volleys of mass-reactives. Explosions lit the way onward with strobing muzzle flare.

At the head of the Lions of Macragge, Sicarius met the tyranid charge head on. He went low, ducking

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