Angel Exterminatus by Graham McNeill

Author:Graham McNeill
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Black Library
Published: 2012-10-24T16:00:00+00:00

FOURTEEN

Here be Monsters

You Wounded Me

The Circle is Complete

The impacts were deafening, filling the superstructure of the Sisypheum with ringing echoes of metal on metal. Interior bulkheads crumpled like sheet foil with the force of the boarding torpedoes slamming into the wallowing ship’s flank. Layered steel and ceramite broke apart as the blunt snouts of the torpedoes tore into the greatest void within the Iron Hands ship: its embarkation deck.

Magna-melta blasts exploded from the torpedoes’ frontal sections, and assault launchers scattered cones of red-hot shrapnel before them. Little additional damage was caused, as Cadmus Tyro had ordered the deck emptied of trans-atmospheric craft in anticipation of such an attack. The rotating razor-cogs of the boarding-torpedoes ground to a halt and their locking bolts blew off in sequence.

Vermanus Cybus issued the attack order with a synapse pulse through the MIU implant in his skull. No sooner had his orders been received than the blast shutters at the edge of the embarkation deck slammed up into their housings, and two dozen Rhinos of ebony and iron raced towards the boarding torpedoes. Cybus would mount no static defence of his ship, but a stinging counter-attack.

He rode atop his heavily modified command Rhino, secured in the cupola by the magnetic clamps on his mechanised lower body. He mashed the firing triggers of the pintle-mounted storm bolters, sending chugging streams of contrails playing over the worm-like maws of the torpedoes. Streams of bolter shells blistered the scorched outer armour of the torpedoes as shielded storm-turrets rotated clear of their housings and returned fire.

Up-armoured and driven over the debris of the torpedoes’ entry at engine-shredding speed, none of the racing vehicles were stopped. Internal blast shutters blew out from the torpedoes and a roar of animalistic hatred echoed from within, like the hideous, cave-dwelling ferro-drakes of Karaashi. Cybus slewed his Rhino to a halt as the snouts of the torpedoes fell away and assault ramps slammed down onto the blasted deck plates.

‘Incoming!’ he yelled across a variety of wavelengths. ‘The iron endures!’

The crew doors of the Rhinos slammed back and black-armoured warriors disembarked from their vehicles, nearly two hundred battle-brothers moving forwards to occupy positions of cover amid fallen stanchions, ruptured deck plates and toppled bulkheads.

A howling mass of twisted flesh and sutured armour vomited from the interior of the torpedo that had impacted first, a hundred or more… things that were unlike anything Cybus had ever seen. His artificial eyes were capable of rendering visual information in multiple spectra and with incredible clarity, but right now he wished they were not.

No two of the monsters were alike, hybrid things of glistening flesh, distorted anatomies and swollen muscle. Their limbs were elongated, bladed and chained with whirling hooks. They moved with astounding speed, some on limbs like organic piston springs, others with the ruddy haunches of powerful beasts of burden. Like wax effigies left too close to a heat lamp, their plasticised bodies were molten amalgams of a hundred conjoined anatomies, genetically manipulated abominations that should never have been given life.

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