Engines of War Read Free Page A

– but it felt as if it was burning.
    He heard a scraping, snuffling sound, and turned. Two creatures were clambering over the wreckage behind him. They were only a few feet tall: squat, misshapen horrors that looked as if they had been moulded from filth and excrement. The folds of their stomachs undulated as they moved, and their oozing cold sores left slime trails in their wakes.
    Chelaki guessed that they had been searching the crash site for carrion. One of them had been poised to spring at his neck and shoulders.
    He planted his hand in the ashy ground beside him, rolled away from the muck-creatures and to his feet. In the process, he drew his chainsword and thumbed its activation rune. Its engine roared, its whirling blade shrieked, and the creatures baulked as their intended victim proved himself less helpless than he had seemed.
    Chelaki took a step towards them and swung his blade. It sliced through the nearest of his attackers, but coughed and sputtered indignantly as great globs of the creature’s feculence adhered to its teeth.
    The second muck-creature must have known it couldn’t outrun a Space Marine. It flew at Chelaki instead. A spiked tongue lashed out from inside a ring of teeth and flecked his armour with rancid green and black spittle.
    It hit him in the stomach, extruding filthy, rope-like tendrils to bind itself to him. It was squirming its way towards Chelaki’s wound, as if attracted by the newly formed scab. He tried to block its questing, slobbering tongue, but it simply oozed its way around his gauntlet. He felt it clawing, tearing at his exposed flesh.
    Disgusted, he thrust the edge of his blade into the creature’s formless mass and tried to scrape it off him, striking furious sparks off his own armour in the process.
    He must have hit a vital organ inside the creature – presumably there was something in there somewhere – because it shrieked and suddenly released its grip on him.
    It smacked into the ground at Chelaki’s feet, and he stamped on it with all his strength and armoured weight. The creature popped like a festering boil, and he was spattered up to his chest with its pus.
    A third muck-creature was watching him from amid the wreckage. He had almost missed it, but his motion sensors had detected its presence.
    It must have been hanging back, waiting for an opening to strike, or perhaps just a chance to share in its fellows’ spoils. It had witnessed the fate of those fellows and was trying to slink away. Chelaki knew that, if it did, it would reveal his presence here to its Death Guard masters. He snatched his boltgun out of its holster and squeezed the trigger, but the weapon didn’t fire. Its chamber was cracked; an explosive round was jammed inside it.
    He cast the bolter aside – he would retrieve it later if he could; for now, he couldn’t take the risk of it detonating in his hand – and he started to run. He rounded the downed gunship just in time to see the muck-creature slithering through the mangled frame of the cockpit canopy on the other side.
    It tried to scamper away from him but Chelaki caught up to it easily and despatched it with a single sweep of his blade. In the wake of his exertion, however, he was left with a pounding heart and heaving lungs. He could feel sweat prickling his brow.
    He took a moment – the first chance he had – to get his bearings.
    He saw the crack in the sky, the warp rift, pulsing hatefully. If anything, it looked even wider than it had before. He knew that Fort Kerberos – what remained of it – lay directly beneath that crack, hidden from him for the present by an intervening rise. The air above the site was clogged with dust and smoke – but, with his augmented eyes, Chelaki could make out darker shapes flitting through the miasma. He remembered the huge flies and their hideous riders, and he fell back to the wreck of the Stormtalon and squatted in its shadow.
    He had a chance – one final chance – to strike a blow