Punishers - Bane of Hunters

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Biron Amadai – Master of Sanctity of the Dark Hunters at the time of the First Punisher Invasion.
Jonah Kerne – Captain of Mortai (Third) Company of the Dark Hunters.
Kharne Al Murzim – Chapter Master of the Dark Hunters at the time of the Second Punisher War
.Graes Vennan – Chief Librarian of the Dark Hunters at the time of the Second Punisher War.

The Punishers: A horde of heretical rabble, whose names we shall not utter here.

+++ Incoming transmission – Cypra Mundi Administratum
– Felix Galerius – URGENT –
attention of Kharne Al Murzim – Chapter Master Dark
Hunters – Adeptus Astartes – Phobos System – Finial
Sector: IMMEDIATE ACTION +++
Fleet belonging to Traitor Chaos faction known as
Punishers sighted in Finial Sector, Kargad System:
coordinates 22/394/J19. Fleet complement Dauntless class
or lighter. Contact lost with Imperial
detachments on Peronnen, Asranak and the Tellik
Asteroids. Intercept.
Interdict.
Destroy.
By the Emperor’s Will
Message ends
5.236.982.M41

He brought up the memory of the Ogadai, that vast starship which had been laid down before the Dark Hunters themselves had been founded. In its youth it had been part of the battle fleet of the White Scars Chapter. The Primarch himself, Jaghatai, had travelled in it, sanctifying the ship with his presence. And ancient though it was, it still possessed enough firepower to lay waste to a planet. Al Murzim spoke at last, in that quiet, even voice of his. ‘The last time they came, it was an invasion. They landed a quarter of a million in the first wave, and they had Emperor-class ships to back them up. It took the help of six other Chapters of our brethren to finally extirpate the Punishers from this system. ’‘Emperor bless them,’ Jonah said automatically. ‘Indeed. But for the Brazen Fists and the Dark Sons and the other four Chapters of our Adept, we would have been annihilated. As it is, even after a century and a half, we have not regained our numbers.’ Al Murzim sighed. ‘We are a poor Chapter, brother. Not for us the glorious campaigns of the Ultramarines or the Blood Angels. Three times in our three thousand years we have been reduced to a remnant.

Their relations were respectful, and proper, but Kerne knew that Malchai disliked him. He could not return that dislike. The man was too brave not to admire, and it had been Sergeant Kerne who had saved the Reclusiarch’s life when the grief-blinded Chaplain had refused to leave his master’s body to the Punisher hordes. Kerne and a single squad of Space Marines, the remnants of several companies, had fought around Amadai’s corpse and so preserved it from defilement.

Jonah knew Phospherran. He had fought there the last time the Punishers had arrived. ‘The population has recovered then?’ ‘Yes. The Kharne had whole populations relocated in the wake of the Punisher War, and they have bedded down well. Most of our people are from the border moons. Phorios never recovered, and is still uninhabitable. ’They had bombed the planet from orbit and seared it down to the stone, so deeply embedded had the Great Enemy been on that unfortunate world. Kerne had watched from a drop-ship, launched and then recalled when the extent of the invasion had become apparent. All possible resources had been withdrawn for the defence of Phobian itself, and the populated fringes of the Phobos system had been abandoned. He ground his teeth as he thought on it.

Nureddin, you were with me the last time we fought the Punishers – do you remember the odds we faced back then?’ Brother Nureddin’s grin died on his face. ‘I remember, Fornix. ’‘There were close to eight hundred battle-brothers in the Chapter at that time. We lost half of Haroun Company on the first day: forty battle brothers. But they bought time for the rest of the Chapter to organise a defence. That one company slew well over eight thousand of the Great Enemy before they were overwhelmed. ‘They were not fighting target drones, brothers. The cultists went down in waves, it is true, but behind them were warbands of the Chaos brethren, who had once been of our own adept. They wore power armour, wielded bolters and flamers and lascannons even as we do. ‘They had begun as Space Marines, my brothers, and whatever it was they had become, they had not forgotten how to fight. And they came in their thousands.

 

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‘Artillery,’ Fornix said beside him. ‘Ours, I think. Heavy guns. ’They could see the flashes up ahead through the murk and smoke. They seemed to be up in the air. ‘It must be the citadel batteries,’ Brother Malchai said. The Dark Hunters marched north across the broken wreck of Askai. They encountered shell-holes and trench lines full of the enemy, which were ruthlessly destroyed. At least a dozen heavy weapons emplacements were overrun. In some of them the Punishers were manning captured Imperial ordnance.

The Dark Hunters had a long memory of hatred to work off against these, their bitterest foes. The hordes of Punisher cultists, and the scattered squads of Chaos Space Marines which had been left behind to stiffen their ranks could not withstand that cold, clinical precision, that economy of death. All across the fifty-kilometre length of Ras Hanem’s ruined capital, all through the night and into the bloody dawn of the next day, the Dark Hunters did their work, and nothing could withstand them. And in the shadows, when the Chaos bands had broken and run, they found no shelter in bunkers or trenches, for the Scout Marines of Haradai harassed them without mercy, dropping Chaos champions with headshots from the long sniper rifles of their calling, picking off all those who tried to rally their fellows, bringing down the veterans who carried banners and heavy weapons, and banishing all notions of rest or safety from the bewildered enemy. Kerne lost nine battle-brothers in the first thirty-six hours of the city-wide assault, but the Punishers died in their unmourned thousands. They finally broke, and ran for the bridges, the gates. They hid in holes and half-ruined cellars. But they were burned and blasted out of every hiding place.

The skies belonged to the Imperium now. Finally, the last coherent elements of the Punishers made a grand, concerted effort to charge the citadel, out of sheer desperation if no tactical sense. On the ruined landing pads of the spaceport, Kerne’s warriors finally stood aside while the heavy Imperial guns of the looming fortress barked out a howling litany of hate, and immolated whole regiments of the Great Enemy, the last surviving formations of any size in the city. And when they were broken into ragged, bleeding ribbons, the citadel gates opened for the first time in many days. As the sun came up, a single Baneblade roared forth, followed by half a dozen Leman Russes and a few gawky Sentinels, spitting las-fire. They were all General Dietrich had left, but he launched them into the battle without hesitation. Inside the tanks the gaunt, red-eyed troopers of the 387th Armoured Regiment of the Imperial Guard loaded the main guns and the heavy anti-personnel weapons and set finger to trigger with the dark fury of men who have endured too much, who have lost all instincts save those of hate and destruction. The last of the enemy were ground to scarlet bloody paste by the armoured treads of Dietrich’s surviving tanks.

The enemy withdrew most of his best troops, leaving just enough here to keep Dietrich and his men bottled up.’Kerne was frowning with thought. ‘I’ve been in touch with Massaron on the Ogadai, and there are only scattered remnants of the Punishers on the rest of the planet, no more than marauding bands. And their fleet has fled the entire system. Or so it seems.’

‘Torpedoes two thousand kilometres out, impact in fifteen seconds. ’Gershon sounded as hoarse as a crow. ‘Countermeasures away.’‘Ogadai, this is Arbion – come in, flag!’ ‘Yes, Diez,’ Massaron said, calmly, but with eyes shut. ‘Sir, a massive enemy fleet has come out of warp eighteen thousand kilometres from the Dardrek moon. I am seeing heavy cruisers, Mars class battlecruisers, and dozens of transports. It is a Punisher fleet, sir, an armada the likes of which I’ve never seen before. ’‘Save yourself, Diez. Get home if you can,’ Massaron said quietly. And then: ‘Voidsunders, fire one and two. ’‘Torpedoes – brace for impact!’ Gershon shouted, eyes wide. The Ogadai bucked under their feet, and there was a series of titanic echoing booms that carried clear through the four-kilometre-long hull of the ancient ship. All over the boards, the scarlet lights began flashing up, a constellation of disaster.

Thus ended the Ogadai, the flagship of the Dark Hunters, whose decks had once been trodden by the Primarch Jaghatai himself. Four thousand years of history and endeavour and service were gone, and with them, the lives of some twenty thousand men and women for whom that venerable vessel had been home. The huge Punisher battleship powered through the debris, pieces of its adversary clunking and scraping against its hull. It moved implacably towards the bright planet ahead with fires still sparking and flaming along its hull, and at its leisure, it took up station in high orbit, a dark looming giant peering down upon a world now at its mercy. And upon the battle-bridge of the immense ship, a creature stood in the pale-painted power armour of the Adeptus Astartes, that holy armour now out of place amid the Chaos symbols and grotesque battle-trophies which surrounded it, and the thing smiled. ‘Brothers,’ it said, ‘it has been a long time.

 

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‘Just do it, brother. The Punishers, if they take this world, will make it into a base, from which they will seek to conquer the rest of the sector, system by system. That is why they chose Ras Hanem – there are enough raw materials on this planet to resource an entire crusade. ‘The longer we deny them possession of those resources, the more time the Chapter has to come up with a riposte. But the Chapter has to know what we face here.’

Out of this thundercloud the troop-carriers arrived. Close on the tail of the bombers, they came shrieking down at high speed, deployed thrusters at the last possible moment, and slammed into the rubble and broken stone of the city below them like slab-sided meteors hurled to earth. They dropped their ramps, and mobs of huge armoured figures boiled out of them like a tide of giant cockroaches, barbed, lit with hellish eyes, roaring. The Stormbirds kept coming. They lost one in three of their number, but never hesitated. Many careered through the sky, half shot-to-pieces, then belly-flopped in the midst of the city and were broken open like tin cans. Incredibly, after these crashes, dozens of their occupants still crawled forth, and began fighting with whatever and whoever they found around them Perhaps five thousand Punisher troops were landed in that first wave. They fanned out, and began making for the gates in the surrounding blast-walls of Askai – the invincible adamantium gates which stood intact after all the months of warfare, and which had not been opened since the beginning of it all. The Punishers assaulted the bunkers and strongpoints which guarded the gates from within the city, and began chewing them up, pouring over the terrified Hanemite Guard who manned them. These unfortunates, the living and the dead, were dismembered, and the Punishers took their limbs and heads and gnawed on them, laughing, then daubed their black and yellow armour with the blood. They clambered over the locking mechanisms of the gates like lice seeking warmth, and began to hammer here and there in a bid to open them, ignoring the volleys of lasgun fire that sizzled in the air around them. At the main western gate a group of six shadows, bulky but swift, flowed along the ruined street towards the gatehouse where dozens of the enemy stood, garbling amongst themselves, shooting at the sky, and bickering over the remains of the dead defenders like dogs quarrelling over meat.

But one Punisher got lucky. A champion of their kind with the head of a human soldier hung lifeless and staring round his neck for decoration, he stood firing his plasma pistol after the running Dark Hunters in endless bursts until Brother Terciel cut him down.

One thing became clear as the night went on, though. The Punishers might have landed many thousands of warriors within the unbroken circuit of the city walls in the aerial assault, but the main body of the enemy was being set down outside the city, on the plains to the west where the Dark Hunters Thunderhawks had destroyed the airstrip upon their own arrival. The gates of Askai, those indomitable bastions of adamantium, therefore became key to the city’s initial defence. In the first war they had been bypassed and left intact, then ignored; the city had fallen without the need to cross the walls. But this time around, there were Adeptus Astartes defending the city, and it would seem that the Chaos commander, whoever he was, wanted to bring heavier metal to bear within the perimeter. To do that, the gates must be opened. The anti-aircraft fire from the citadel had taken a huge toll on the Stormbird squadrons, and these were now withdrawn. The fighting rolled out along the ground in waves of death and fire, while on the western plains the heavy vehicles of the Punisher armoured companies formed up for attack. All across the city, companies of the enemy assembled and began fighting their way to the western gates. And as they struggled westwards through the night, the Dark Hunters were waiting for them.

For fully twelve kilometres through the ruins of Askai, the Dark Hunters held the line along with Dietrich’s men and Te Mirah’s eldar. As unlikely a combination of allies as had ever been seen on the battlefields of the Imperium, their positions ebbed and flowed along with the assaults made by the Punisher warbands. The Imperium-held ground resembled an hourglass in shape, the top being the citadel, which although heavily bombed by air attack and artillery was still capable of dealing out an enormous amount of punishment.

But in that last cold hour before sunrise, the enemy finally seemed to catch wind of what was going on, and in the space of a few minutes they attacked all along the line, a dozen companies of their heavy armoured infantry leading the advance. Finding no resistance, they came on with a will, enraged to find that they had been tricked. Their sudden rush brought them through the deserted Imperial positions all the way up to the walls of the district itself, and there they raged, foiled by the looming defences. More and more of the enemy were being roused out of their positions all over the west of the city, and being sent forward by their champions in teeming masses. They came on in their thousands, a massive, beetling surge of roaring warriors hell-bent on murder. On top of the district blast walls, a squad of Haradai began picking them off with their sniper rifles, but it was like throwing pebbles at the sea.

A blood-drenched squad of Khornate berserkers charged through the withering fire, and for a moment she held out a hand and the power streamed out of her, holding them in place, their feet digging uselessly in the dirt. She skewered one with her rune-bright spear, and her people cut the others down, the tiny shuriken wafers slicing them to dismembered meat and metal. More leapt forward, bearing heavy power axes, gilt horns adorning their helms. Their armour was scarlet with paint and blood, bright and garish compared to the livery of the other Punishers, and they charged with a snarling savagery that eclipsed even that of their fellow traitors. Jonah Kerne raised his ancient bolt pistol and carefully shot the first two through their eye-lenses, then shouldered aside a third, its axe fizzing near his head. He plunged the chainsword down into the thing’s neck, felt the blade grind its way through the vertebrae, and the head rolled free.

But the moment passed. The exaltation faded. The Punishers advanced over heaped lines of corpses and kept on coming, bellowing like the beasts they were. And to the rear of the infantry the warped crab-like hulks of half a dozen Chaos Dreadnoughts were coming up. Jonah Kerne collected himself, and looked around.

This is not how I want to die: cornered in a cave. Twenty-six days of this. They had beaten off raptor-landings on the very slopes of the upper citadel, had seen the governor’s palace reduced to ruin by endless bombing. The blast doors of the gun-caverns were plastered with fire every time they were opened, but they had taken a terrible toll all the same.

Kerne walked away from his brethren and stared up at the tall gates. They had been shored up from within time after time, and rockcrete had been poured around the massive hinge-supports, but outside the Punishers had brought up two colossus cannons and they had been pounding the citadel unceasingly.

‘Their colossus guns are void-shielded,’ Malchai said, frowning. ‘Even our gunships would be unlikely to damage them, captain. ’‘I did not speak of gunship attacks, Brother Malchai. I intend to lead a team of our brethren outside in person to spike those guns.’

But on their second pass the Punishers had collected their wits and began to return fire. The sky became alive with the fiery blossoms of anti-aircraft ordnance. Lascannon beams sizzled skywards, pale in the growing sunlight, and a hail of bolter rounds were flung up from the ground by hundreds of the foe.

Instinct and training took over. The enemy warriors in their loathsome approximations of Space Marine armour crashed roaring into the Dark Hunters like an avalanche of unadulterated murder. So intent were the Punishers on coming to grips with their foes that they were getting in one another’s way.

 

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The Astartes smiled, though the effect was less humorous than ferocious on that massive, brutal face. ‘Those who brought us here were the enemies of Man – a Chaos faction my Chapter has been charged with eradicating for decades now. They call themselves the Punishers. They meant to take over your world and use it as a bridgehead to conquer the rest of the system. My brothers and I saved you from that fate. ’‘You destroyed my world,’ the boy said, high and shrill with anger. ‘You didn’t save anything – you burnt us to ash!’ The giant regarded him gravely. ‘Yes, we did. But I promise you that the Punishers would have done worse, had they been allowed. Your people would have been cattle to them, mere sport for the vilest appetites imaginable. Those who died quickly would have been the lucky ones. You will rebuild your world – it may take twenty years, but you can do it. Had it been tainted by Chaos, there would have been nothing for it but to scald it down to the very guts of the planet, and leave it an airless cinder. ’The man grasped his son’s arm. ‘He’s young – he knows nothing. ‘Well, consider this part of his education,’ the Astartes snapped. ‘Now find me something we can use to splint my leg – and something to lean on that will take my weight. I must get mobile – and I need a weapon.’

 

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‘Hold! ’The voice rang out clear across the battlefield, as loud as a clap of thunder. The ranks of Punishers seemed to shudder. They stopped, and their insane yowling died down to a low rancid muttering. Incredibly, the mob that surrounded the Space Marines lowered their arms, and the pressure slackened – they backed away. The ring about the Dark Hunters opened up. The battlefield fell almost silent. ‘What new trick is this?’ Kerne said quietly to Brother Kass. The Librarian was stooped, breathing hard. ‘He’s here, the leader. He has come. ’‘Excellent,’ Fornix said. ‘Things were becoming a little tedious. ’‘Reload, brothers,’ Jonah Kerne told them. ‘Whatever happens next, we must be ready. ’They changed magazines in their bolt pistols. One of them, Brother Galen of Novus Company, picked up the heavy bolter from the ground and checked the belt. Finn March scavenged for ammunition, and Brother Kass bent slowly and lifted a flamer from the hands of the dead. The ranks of the Punishers parted in two waves, the warriors jostling each other, still muttering in that low insane tone. There was fear in the noise, but also a kind of expectation, as though they were children about to witness a marvel. And what came striding up through their opened ranks was, in its own way, a marvel indeed. It was a Space Marine in shining white, red-chased armour, taller than Jonah Kerne. The armour was of ancient design, a Mark V suit such as had been used during the Great Heresy thousands of years before. It was covered in molecular bonding studs, and the chest of the wearer was ringed with cabling. The approaching warrior wore no helm. His face was stern, even noble, and his head was shaved save for a single scalp-lock which fell over one ear. As he drew close, they saw upon his cheeks the ritual scars of Mundus Planus, home of the White Scars. But noble though his countenance was, as the newcomer halted before them, Kerne and his brethren saw that his eyes were entirely black, filled with the darkness of the warp.

‘My brothers,’ he said, and he held out his hands as though to welcome them, ‘how did it come to this?’ His voice was low, melodic, and beguiling. Elijah Kass gripped the flamer he held until the metal of the weapon creaked in his fists. ‘Abomination,’ he hissed. ‘I know you. I know what you are. ’‘You know nothing, little Elijah. I have tracked your mind since first you came to this world, and I have mapped out every vestige of mediocrity within it. Hold your tongue and let your betters speak.’Kass swayed. ‘Captain – it is a daemon–’And then he ground his teeth and shut his eyes. ‘He is mistaken,’ the strange Space Marine said. ‘I am no daemon, captain Jonah Kerne, oh my brother. I am one of you. I was born a White Scar. I fought with my Legion for years uncounted. I was there when that Legion was made into Chapters, and when the Dark Hunters were born I was already old. The genes of mighty Jaghatai are buried in me, as they are in you. We are brethren, captain. ’‘Who are you?’ Kerne asked. ‘I was once called Gull Khan. I have other names now, but there was at ime when I, too, commanded a company of Legiones Astartes. Back before my children called to me–’ he spread his arms, smiling, and around him the vast host of the Punishers growled like beasts.‘And now I am come here to this system, to claim a home for myself and my orphans…’ He looked up at the sky, almost as though he had lost the thread of his thought, and a frown creased the calm imperturbability of that face. ‘He is false,’ Kass rasped, as though every word he uttered were an agony. ‘Do not listen to him, captain…’‘I applaud your broad thinking, Jonah Kerne,’ Gull Khan went on. ‘There are not many of our kind who would have indulged the machinations of the eldar to the degree you have. Did you know that it was they who were jamming all your vox transmissions? We tried also of course, but they are so much better at it. And I take it they exacted a price for relaying your messages back to Phobian… how very clever of them – and how obtuse of you.’Kerne said nothing. He did not know if this thing uttered truth or falsehood or a blend of the two, but something in him flared up in outrage all the same.

‘You were fooled twice, captain,’ Gull Khan went on. ‘Once by us, and once by the eldar witch who is now safe in the fortress at your back.’ He looked up at the smoking ruins of the colossus cannons, their barrels bent back like the petals of shattered flowers. ‘But you are certainly enterprising, all the same. I did not expect this move.’ Something in his face flickered just for a moment – it was a kind of doubt. Once again, he looked at the bright morning sky, as though he expected something to appear in it. ‘I give you a choice, now, brother.’ He came closer, and the Dark Hunters raised their weapons. ‘Join us,’ he said simply. ‘Just you, Jonah Kerne – join us now – walk across that line, and I will spare your remaining brethren, and whosoever else you wish to save. They can walk out of Askai with their weapons and their lives, and go whither they wish. I have no use for them, and no need to kill any more of your prized Mortai Company.

‘Take my hand now, and I swear by the Ruinous Gods that you shall have the highest of ranks in my armies, and you shall be treated with honour and respect.’Jonah Kerne laughed, a genuine laugh of surprise. ‘Do you take me for a fool?’ Gull Khan’s eyes narrowed. ‘You must know that you have no hope. Even if by some miracle you were to prevail on this world, do you think that your Imperium would then forgive and forget? You allowed the eldar to spirit away a priceless relic of their race, one which, if delivered to your Administratum, might have held the key to their eradication. In fact, you handed it over to them freely, when it was in your actual possession. You will not be forgiven for that, captain. They will break you for it. ’‘Then let them break me when I’m dead,’ Kerne told him with contempt. ‘You mean to kill us all – get on with it. I have had enough of this pantomime. ’And he meant it. He was ready. Gull Khan had not told him anything he did not already suspect in his hearts. It was why he had led this forlorn hope. Brother Malchai had known that. Gull Khan shook his head sadly. ‘You refuse my offer then. ’‘I do. ’‘Such a waste, captain.’ The tall, pale-armoured warlord drew a sword, a bright, wicked blade that sprang into crackling life as it rose in his hand.‘I will indulge you with death at my own hands then, Dark Hunter. My children will hold back, if yours will. We shall engage blade to blade with honour.’‘Very well.’ Kerne raised his battered chainsword and thumbed the power so that the engine coughed into life.‘He is lying to you, captain,’ Elijah Kass said. ‘There is something else he is concealing from us – he is parrying every attempt I make to reach out. ’‘Do not fight him alone, Jonah,’ Fornix urged. ‘Let us all go into the dark together. ’‘Not this time, brother,’ Kerne said. He set a hand on the arm of his first sergeant, his brother, his friend. ‘Today, Fornix, I must go into the dark alone.

 

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They walked towards one another, two Space Marines: one in beautifully made damascened armour which was marked by hard combat and painted crudely with cameleoline, the other in perfect white purity, unmarked by blade or bolter, armour as unsullied as the day it was made. As they drew closer, so their pace quickened, until they both broke into a run. A massive roar went up from the Punisher host which surrounded them as Jonah Kerne and Gull Khan came together in a ringing crash .Elijah Kass shut his darkening eyes and bent his head. His hood glowed with sapphire light. Fornix took a step forward, his power fist cocked as though he meant to punch something in the very air before him. But he stopped as the Punisher warriors around them levelled their weapons, a hundred bolters aimed at his chest. ‘Emperor, bright Lord of battle, help him now,’ he muttered, and stood stock-still, watching. The blades swung, Gull Khan’s power sword describing an arc o blinding light. It clinked off Kerne’s shoulder as he ducked, and left a smoking scar on the ancient pauldron. The Dark Hunter wheeled, his chainsword licking out to bite on empty air as his adversary jerked back. They circled each other. ‘I know you, Dark Hunter,’ Gull Khan said. ‘I know your kind better than they know themselves.

’He parried a blow, side-stepped and kicked Kerne in the back of the knee. Jonah staggered, then threw himself backwards to avoid the bright blade which swept through the air inches from his head. For a second the chainsword churned through the muck of the ground, throwing it up in a brown spray that speckled Gull Khan’s pristine armour. The Punisher warlord stepped back, and let his opponent rise. ‘The Dark Hunters thought they knew better than their parent Legion –they evolved new tactics, found new ways to fight–’ Gull Khan lunged in close. His blade caught Jonah Kerne on the hip, sank into the ceramite and smoked there a half-second before he jerked it free. Kerne knocked it aside, the chainsword teeth scrabbling on the smooth supercharged metal. Smoke rose from the engine at his weapon’s hilt. ‘They sought to perfect the art of war as they saw it. They sought to survive, above all else.’ Gull Khan grunted as he leapt forward again. He feinted with the sword, and then punched Kerne on the side of his helm, a heavy blow that knocked the Dark Hunters captain sideways. Kerne rolled in the mud while the bellowing triumph of the Punisher hordes rose around him. With preternatural speed he found his feet in time to parry another blow, but it knocked him backwards. The Chaos warriors who ringed the struggling duo stepped back, raising their weapons above their heads and cheering madly, as though this were sport laid on for their amusement. Kerne rolled again as the power sword stabbed into the earth where he had been. Never had he moved so fast, and yet Gull Khan was faster still. He kicked Kerne in the back, so hard that a cable from his powerpack was dislodged.

Red sigils sparked up on Kerne’s helmet-display. He rose to his feet, and charged forward again, launching a flurry of blows which drove his opponent back. The chainsword laboured and sparked – it scored a dark line in Gull Khan’s armour and carved off one of the shining studs which adorned it. ‘Your brothers sought to do no more than my children do,’ Gull Khan went on, backing away slowly, the power sword in front of him, mud sizzling off it, burning. ‘They sought to perfect themselves and their calling, to live and thrive in a terrible place–’ He dived in, his thrust parried, and he brought up the hilt of his sword to smash into Kerne’s helm, full in the pointed snout. The Corvus helm was smashed clear off Jonah’s head, the neck-joint cracked and broken. Kerne staggered, lashed out blindly with the chainsword, his head swimming. ‘To perfect one’s own abilities, to follow one’s calling with all the skill one can muster – that is a beautiful thing,’ Khan said. He watched as Kerne found his footing and shook his head clear. ‘It is the way of Slaanesh, who is my lord, and guardian. My god.’ Gull Khan advanced again. ‘Look what he has made of me, captain, and see what your Emperor has made of you. ’

He charged in close again, knocked the chainsword aside with his armoured forearm, and sliced down with the power blade. The long shining length of it came down with shattering violence upon Jonah Kerne’s shoulder, burning through the ancient armour that Lukullus had once worn, slicing through ceramite and adamantium layers, finding the flesh within, carving the Dark Hunter’s arm from his body. Kerne fell to his knees, blood ribboning out from his severed stump. Around them, the Chaos host yowled and shrieked with pleasure, firing their bolters into the sky. Fornix howled with them, but in despair and grief. Finn March held him back as Mortai’s first sergeant tried to lunge forward. Kerne looked up at the Punisher warlord, and his eyes were clear. He smiled.‘At least I die true to my Lord and my faith,’ he said, gasping. ‘You are nothing but traitorous scum, and your god is an abomination.’

For the first time, Gull Khan’s face changed. Anger flooded it. His mouth opened in a snarl, and as it did it seemed his features altered, blurred, revealing something else behind them. There was a glimpse of a contorted, bestial countenance in which broken fangs sprouted and snapped. Then the Punisher closed in, sword raised. Kerne threw his chainsword at his adversary. It struck the power sword and knocked it askew even as Khan loomed in. Then he drew Biron Amadai’s bolt pistol from his side, and let himself fall flat. He rolled underGull Khan’s legs, and raising the pistol he fired as fast as his failing strength could pull the trigger. The rounds pounded up into Gull Khan’s armour, and the Punisher warlord shuddered with their impact. He stumbled, lurched to one side, and as he did Kerne followed him with the muzzle of the ancient bolt pistol. He put the last three rounds of the magazine into Gull Khan’s head, the muzzle of the weapon so close to his foe’s skull that it blackened the skin. The Punisher’s skull disintegrated, blown apart. The black eyes were destroyed, blown from their sockets, and the lower jaw fell open with nothing above it but broken bone and mangled meat. Jonah Kerne collapsed, chest heaving, beside the white-armoured corpse of his enemy. He lay on his back, listening as the stunned, disbelieving silence of the Punishers gave way to a vast roar of baffled fury. He looked up at the sky. It is a good day to die, he thought.

 

[MolotovKraken]

Kerne could not speak. Even his enhanced biological systems could not cope with the massive loss of tissue. The power sword had taken off his arm at the shoulder and continued deep into the side of his chest, ruining a lung, clipping one of his two mighty hearts. He was drowning in his own blood. Fornix levered his captain into a sitting position. ‘Do you see them, Jonah? Watch with me, my brother. They have come –our brethren have come, and others with them. They’re dropping into the city in their thousands. Do you see them, Jonah? ’He did. They were the last thing he saw, a glorious sight. Hundreds of drop pods were landing all around in the ruins, and out of them stormed a mighty host of the Adeptus Astartes, in Hunters blue and the livery of the other six Chapters. The Dark Sons were there, having left the Wendakhen campaign in obedience to their oath. And he could see the badges of the Brazen Fists, the Doomsayers, the Shadowhawks, and yet more. Hundreds of Space Marines were pouring across the ravaged face of the city, slaughtering the leaderless and bewildered foe. And in the skies above them, Thunderhawks appeared, dozens of squadrons spitting fire, burning the enemy into the ground. Thus did the Dark Hunters and their allies return to purge the world of Ras Hanem, in the Kargad system, in the nine hundred and eighty-second year of the fortieth millennium.

 

[MolotovKraken]

A wall of flame, through which the enemy charged heedless of pain and fear. Their champions, tall behemoths in power armour, drove them on like twisted shepherds. The Hanemite troopers engaged in close-quarter combat with burning, shrieking shapes that swept through the line of Chimeras like living torches. Von Arnim strode along with his personal squad keeping pace to either side. His chainsword hummed as the monomolecular blades spun too fast to see.‘That one is mine,’ he said, pointing with the sword at a Chaos champion who had lifted a wriggling trooper into the air, impaled on the wicked blade which was affixed to his bolter. He tossed the screaming man aside as though flicking an insect from his arm, and roared with maniacal laughter, his teeth clashing, scoring his own flesh. He paid no mind to the flameswhich licked round his armour. The assault had ridden over the enemy trench line, cutting it into knots and gobbets of struggling men and things which had once been men. In the light of the flamer-blasts, shadows capered in milling mayhem, bolts of las-fire searing flesh which was already charred. A team were kneeling to one side, the gunner’s mate crouched with a heavy weapon perched on his shoulder while the gunner emptied the magazine drum in long, deafening bursts of fire, blowing waves of cultists apart, and then zeroing in on one of the towering Chaos champions, chewing up his armour, blowing chunks of flesh and metal from his bones, finally reducing him to some unrecognisable charnel-frame of meat and metal .Von Arnim confronted the champion he had picked out of the enemy ranks. ‘Ho! Abomination! Come meet death!’ he cried, and there was on his face a wide grin of mingled rage and joy as he raised the chainsword.

The tall Chaos champion tossed aside another broken corpse. He had bitten through the trooper’s throat and blood was black and shining on his face from the nose down. It slimed his pestilential-looking armour and added a new gleam to the ceramite plates. ‘A commissar – a true believer!’ he gargled in recognisable Low Gothic. ‘Come, little man, meet the reality of belief. Let me show you a vision of the true faith!’ He bounded forward, and the scrum of fighting figures seemed to open up for him and Von Arnim as the commissar leapt to meet him. Ismail ducked the skull-crushing swing of the bladed bolter and rolled, and as he did he sent the chainsword licking out in a swift jab. It bit into the champion’s shin, the blade groaning, screeching as it churned through ceramite – and then Ismail was on his feet again. He snapped off a shot from his laspistol, which missed but threw the champion off balance, and then the chainsword flicked in again, this time slicing at the hand which held the bolter. The champion roared and lunged forward, his hand lopped off at the wrist, the bolter falling to the ground, and Ismail stepped aside, like a man dodging an angry bull. The chainsword stabbed upwards once more and this time it dug deep, deep into the side of the champion’s neck, and Ismail held it there a moment, savouring the feel of the spine splintering and severing under the busy blades, until he let the sword complete its work and the head fell free .The great armoured form of the enemy slumped inert, another broken carcass amid thousands, another piece of carrion – and Ismail spat upon it.