Getting Warhammered [WH 40k Fanfic]
221 – Astartes – End?

Watch-Sergeant Varran moved with stoic efficiency, ejecting a magazine from his bolter rifle and sticking a new one in its place with careful, yet fluid movements. He had been using this very same rifle for the better part of the last century, even learning the rudimentary techniques from an engineseer to care for it when there was no tech adept of the Mechanicus nearby to do so. The movements were familiar, almost calming against the situation he and his Kill Team had found themselves in.

Lesser men would have been terrified. The threat of impending doom, of certain death approaching, was horrifying enough, he supposed, but worse was the waiting. The absolute silence was the only thing one could hear, which was their own heartbeat, their breathing, the whirling of servos, and other internal systems in one’s Power Armour. It was claustrophobic and dreadfully stressful … for lesser men.

Varran was one of the Emperor’s Angels of Death, as the common rabble liked to call them. Still, he was an Astartes, a Space Marine, the Emperor’s bulwark against the in unending terrors of the galaxy and beyond. He felt something that might have been fear, but he dismissed it, focused on his mission, and let it pass. 

He was a warrior. He had accepted the inevitability of his death long ago. He did not fear it, but nor would he give his life easily. Space Marine lives were precious, and Varran wouldn’t spend a single one in vain if he could help it, including his own.

“Something’s coming,” Drakk’s voice warbled over the vox. “I assume so, at least. There are dots, artefacts splattered across my sensors … things that would usually go unnoticed and be attributed to sensor inefficiencies and such, but we are in the void. Prepare for battle, Brothers. This wave will be the most dangerous one yet.”

The fact that the one among them who Varran had thought physically incapable of feeling uncertain was sounding as such unnerved him, but the Watch-Sergeant merely steeled his heart and tightened his hold on the grip of his rifle. 

Last stands were wasteful, and he was usually of the mind that retreat was more prudent than throwing valuable Astartes lives away in the hope of succeeding in a mission. Sure, there were times when something had to be killed posthaste and when risks needed to be taken, but he usually preferred it when accomplishing a mission was within the capabilities of a squad sent to do it. 

Relying on Astartes pulling through despite the odds, every time, was not tenable in the long term … still, statistics said Space Marines were outnumbered ninety-nine times out of a hundred when they went on a mission, though being outgunned was far less likely, but still a common occurrence. 

Retreat was not an option now, and neither was pulling back to a more defensible position, or escaping into the wilderness to wage guerrilla warfare upon a superior foe. Their only option was to stand and fight; all other avenues had been shut off by their foe, making use of their own gamble. 

Teleporting an empowered Pariah on top of a Psyker should have been a surefire way to kill them, no matter how strong they were. Greater Daemons trembled at the approach of far weaker Pariahs than the one currently locked in the metal coffin floating in the middle of their formation.

Varran had learned to expect the unexpected, but he didn’t know how he should have foreseen this. Teleporting objects through astronomical distances without also teleporting oneself was outrageous for a Psyker. Even just teleporting such distances was almost unheard of. The odds of it happening were so abysmally low that even if he had thought of the possibility, he would have dismissed it out of hand. 

His rifle held at the ready, lightning claws on each hand a mere thought away from activating, Varran took a long breath and let his instincts take over. These things hounding them were fast and stealthy, beyond his conscious mind’s ability to detect and react to, but his instincts were finely honed over centuries of bloody warfare. 

His other squad mates sported scars, even puncture wounds on their Armour, but he alone was mostly unharmed. He had some scrapes in places where he let the beasts’ claws slide across ceramite, but nothing compromising his Armour’s functions. 

Tarn was stab-prone, so it wasn’t a surprise that he sported a dozen puncture wounds across his body. Cassius was better off, but the old ex-Ultramarine still got nicked here and there by a viciously sharp scythe in the second wave. The other two, Drakk and Keir were big, slow and easy targets for any of the beasts that managed to get close enough despite the ridiculous firepower the Salamander and Iron Hand Marines were dishing out.

Varran sank into the depths of his psyche, instincts that he had painstakingly dug out of his geneseed taking the fore. His progenitor, the Primarch Corvus Corax, was well known for his distinctive ability: Wraith-Slipping. 

He had been able to go truly invisible, almost imperceptible, and if the legends were to be believed, merge with the shadows themselves. 

His sons had since been hard at work replicating the feat, to more or less success. Today, Wraith-slipping was a combination of mental discipline and martial art. The process of "wraith-slipping" is to take advantage of one's surroundings to conceal one's presence. This was not a psychic power but rather a collection of disciplines and techniques that the Raven Guard used to conceal their visual and aural presence despite their use of power armour.

Or at least, for most of them. Some managed to reach higher, get just a little bit closer to the original power wielded by the Raven Lord. 

Varran was one of them. He couldn’t track the incoming foes, he couldn’t hope to react to them, and much less keep himself out of their sights. And yet, he felt the attention of three separate creatures focusing on him. 

He couldn’t describe the feeling, nor convey how he achieved it through words. He just knew they were watching, and his body moved almost by itself to shake off their attention. 

He couldn’t go invisible or anything of the sort on his best days, but he could move silently and remain out of sight with eerie precision. He could move through an army in such a way that he remained in the blind spots of as many foes as physically possible. 

There was something more to it, something he had hoped to figure out before his death … but it seemed like he wouldn’t live to see the task done.

No matter. Rare as his level of proficiency was, there were more talented Marines of the Raven Guard around. He hadn’t even been elite material.

He felt one of the beasts’ attention slip off of him, leaving only two. These were more intense, and he could almost feel their murderous intent aimed at him. 

His mouth twisted into a grim frown, reaching deeper, searching for those who had some of their attention on him. Peripheral, partial, or the like. This was vague, the numbers much less certain, but he felt there had to be at least more than ten foes approaching.

“Ten or more,” he said into his vox, speaking no more as he used a hint of his precious jet fuel to give himself some extra momentum.

Jets of fire shot out of the ankles of his Power Armour, sending him crashing into the beast just as he felt its killing intent spike. 

His conscious mind wasn’t even truly aware of what his body was doing, and yet, a lightning claw intercepted an incoming slash aiming to cut off his head, while the other let go of his rifle and jammed a hissing claw deep into the body of whatever was in front of him. 

He flared the power of the right claw lodged deep in the monster’s body, sending a surge of electricity on a rampage through its softer interior. Then he kneed the monster in the chest, tearing his lightning-claws out of its body and kicked it just so it smacked into the next foe’s body. 

For a blissful moment, Varran felt no attention to himself; the not-quite-yet-dead monster’s body had robbed the second one of its line of sight. 

His rifle came up in a blink, levelled at the monsters his eyes couldn’t even see, and he pulled the trigger without hesitation or even a sliver of doubt in his instincts. 

The recoil sent him sailing back towards the others, while the fired bolter round blasted into the stealthy monsters. Blood and gore exploded on contact, bursting forth from beneath the concealing carapace and giving him the first glimpse of the things he was fighting. 

They were strange creatures with a pair of arms ending in blades and a dome-like head, and without legs, as far as he could see. How they moved, he had no idea, but he was no Magos, so he wasn’t too interested in it either, beyond being disappointed that there was no obvious weak point on the body he could target. 

Not that it seemed like their defence would be a problem, seeing how easily his rifle and lightning-claw tore through them. Hitting them was the problem. 

He spun to face the next foe, ready to come to the aid of his squadmates, when he saw something that made his blood run cold. Something smashed into the Pariah’s metal coffin from above, ejecting it out of their formation so fast he could only swipe at the place it had been moments ago, not even catching what must have been one of the cloaked beasts. Behind it trailed the chain that should have kept the thing in place, but now it was cut through cleanly, the other part of it now dangling from Drakk’s waist freely. The damned things must have cut it while the Marines were occupied.

“Drakk!” Varran shouted over the vox, somewhat unnecessarily as the Techmarine was already on the task of retrieving their most important tool.

An arm extended towards the rapidly departing coffin, a rocket shot out of his wrist, trailing after it a heavy-duty metallic cord. 

The grappling hook smashed into the metal coffin in a blink, or at least it seemed like it did from Varran’s perspective for a hopeful instant. Then one of the cloaked creatures dropped its camouflage, revealing itself hundreds of metres away with the grappling hook lodged into its chest. 

The coffin continued its flight, while the beast merely started circling them, seemingly intent on using the cord connecting it to Drakk to make a nuisance of itself for the others. Which the Techmarine was prevented from detaching the cord from his wrist and letting go. 

“That might be a problem,” Drakk said dispassionately, watching the coffin turn into a grey dot in the distance.  

Varran didn’t let himself despair, even knowing that the moment that Pariah’s protective Null-field was gone, all of them would be left vulnerable to the ridiculously powerful Rogue Psyker. 

He launched himself at another beast, one embroidered in a brawl with Cassius. The ex-Ultramarine had one of its scythes locked under his armpit and was in the process of pummeling the creature’s head in with his fist. 

The Watch-Sergeant was already in motion, intending to quickly relieve his Battle Brother when he saw Cassius’s helmet snapping back, a dark spike the size of a human forearm sprouting from his cracked crimson visor. 

The creature the Marine had been brawling with didn’t take his foe’s apparent death for granted, and with a swing of its arm, separated head from body. 

A vindictive fire burst to life within Varran’s heart, making him lunge at the beast that cut one of his men down. He knew they were all dead, any second now the Psyker might just teleport over and make his head pop open like an overripe fruit. All he could do was make their death as costly as possible, and so he fought with a fervour he rarely showed, joining the battered Tarn in savaging as many of the monsters as possible. 

The next one to fall was Keir, the man was large even for Space Marines, but without any of Drakk’s mechanical enhancements that made the Techmarine so durable. The latter sported a dozen spikes jutting out of his body in various places, but he moved without any apparent difficulty, while Keir’s arm hung loosely by his side when a beast latched onto his chest and ran him through with both bladed arms at the same time. 

Varran wanted to shoot the creature in that instant, but his rifle had been the unfortunate victim of a wicked spike itself and was made into scrap metal as a result. All he was left with was his body and lightning-claws, but that would have to be enough. He was a weapon, forged in the fires of battle, upon the anvil of war — as the now dead Kier used to say — he didn’t need tools to kill the enemies of Mankind.

He fought with his instincts in charge, using his paltry stores of jet fuel sparingly as he dashed between foes, relieving whichever of his men seemed to be the next one on the chopping block. He felt like he had killed dozens of the monsters, like he had been fighting for hours upon hours. Astartes were supposed to be able to fight on for twenty-four hours without rest, and yet Varran felt exhaustion starting to seep into his bones, sapping the strength from his muscles and dimming the clarity of his mind. 

Growling inwardly while cursing his advancing age, he tried to fight it, tried to dismiss it … but then he saw the others of his group flagging too, showing clear signs of exhaustion. That immediately struck him as wrong. Tarn was more beast than man in battle, and could literally fight for days on end while his battle rage lasted; meanwhile, Drakk was more machine than man, and so he was even less likely to show signs of weariness, especially just hours after starting the fight.

Something was wrong. Perhaps the spikes were laced with some slow-acting poison that insidiously crept up on them, hoping to lie beneath notice for long enough to seal their fate? 

Without a thought, he moved to command his Power Armour to flood his veins with anti-toxins and combat-stimms that would make sure he stayed awake. It should have taken him a mere thought, a mental command to his Power Armour’s trusty Machine Spirit.

Instead, the mother of all headaches slammed into his mind, making his ears ring and his thoughts grind to a sudden halt. He screamed, unable to so much as think, or understand the regal, feminine voice that inexplicably whispered into his ears.

“Sleep now, little raven.”

The headache spiked, sending a jolt through the old Space Marine’s body as the command reverberated through his mind. It was inevitable, inescapable. His mind was strong, a fortress unto itself that had sheltered and protected his psyche from the insidious whispers of Chaos and Psykers alike for centuries. That same fortress evaporated in front of the power of that one, simple command, like it never existed, its sheer weight obliterating all defences a lowly Space Marine could have in an instant.

Then, Varran, Watch-Sergeant of the Deathwatch, knew only darkness.