The Flight of the Eisenstein Read Online Free PDF

freezing into blue-white halos where the cold kiss of space had followed the invaders in. Through his helmet's breath screen Garro drew a rough inhalation that tasted of metallic salts. Nearby, he saw Grulgor kick angrily away from his lander and snarl out a command.
    There on the shore, pointing with his manreaper, was Mortarion. The sight of the primarch was enough to send Garro's blood racing, and he stormed forward through the shallows, his bolter held high. 'Count the Seven!' called the captain, and he did not need to look behind him to see the elements of his company follow in formation.
    Garro advanced from the deployment point with Hakur's veteran squad at his side, joined by Decius and Sendek for support. Around them, the chaotic crash of gunfire and blades on blades rippled over the gentle landscape of the lakeshore. Hordes of Astartes met the xenos in deadly, furious conflict.
    The alien force was quickly in disarray. Even in non-humans, Garro could sense the motion and shift in the character of a battalion when they lost their nerve. Groups broke apart and reformed, milling and confused, instead of drawing out and away in any semblance of order. Butchering them would not take too much of the Death Guard's energy.
    It was clear the jorgalli had understood too late that the objects on a course towards their world-ship were not massive munitions but actually manned craft. The near-suicidal manner of such a boarding operation had shocked them and they were unprepared for the brutal fury of the Death Guard incursion. Their mistake had been compounded by errors in the deployment of their combatant enhanciles. The jorgall cyborgs standing on the banks of the chlorine lagoon were massacred, their keening cries echoing over the shallow, sandy dunes surrounding the landing zone.
    In the back of his mind, the battle-captain was already thinking ahead, considering how they would secure the breach point before the companies split to attend their individual objectives. Garro led his men in a thrust through a nest of spindly, whirling dervishes, fighting past sweeps of dull steel glaives and placing double-tap bolt shots through the ribs of every jorgall they saw. The Astartes expanded outward from the lake in a ring of off-white armour, the advance rolling over the defenders.
    Moving and firing, Garro's troop crested a dune of crystalline granules that crunched loudly beneath their boots and found some close combat kills. A phalanx of jorgall swept and turned to them, caught in mid-flight, daring to stop and engage the Astartes. Weapons barked on both sides of the fight, the heavy roar of bolters drowning out the hissing clatter of electrostatic arc-fire from the implanted projectors of the enemy.
    Decius, who favoured the blunt trauma of a power fist, slipped into the midst of the aliens and punched one to the powdery dirt, over and over, slamming its long neck and oval head into a ruin.
    'Has he forgotten what I said already? I told him to aim for the torso for a quick kill,' said Sendek.
    'He hasn't forgotten,' said Hakur.
    With a peculiar, ululating cry, two of the larger xenos coiled and leapt directly at Garro. In mid-jump, they came open like spreading petals on a flower, their tri-fold legs and arms wide. He saw glitters where whole portions of limbs had been replaced with dull metal and black curves of carbon. In one swift motion, the captain let his bolter drop away on its sling and drew Libertas, a blue glow of power shimmering across the blade. In a wide, double-handed sweep Garro cut both the creatures in half, the sword whispering easily through their scaly tissue.
    Hakur grunted his approval. 'Still sharp, then?'
    'Aye,' Garro replied, shaking droplets of deep red from the blade. He paused momentarily to examine his work, viewing the severed limbs with the same dispassion he had the static intelligence images on Sendek's data-slate.
    In their natural, fully fleshed state, a jorgalli adult was perhaps four and a