by Gav Thorpe
‘We’ve nothing to worry about,’ said Menber, gripping her hand as he dragged her off the cot. ‘Whatever these interviews are about, just tell the truth. Remember that you are of the Adedeji and our ancestors were kings.’
She gave him a half-smile and a pat on the arm before she moved to join the others assembling around the lieutenant. She gave a last glance back to the banner pole that she had stowed between her cot and the wall. It was her badge of pride, her talisman of loyalty.
Surely she didn’t have anything to worry about from integrity officers?
Big guns never tire
Serration
News from the void
Katabatic Plains, assault hour
A lifetime of war had inured Forrix to the pound of heavy guns as much as it had the beating of his own hearts. Yet there was something majestic about the power unleashed onto the Imperial Palace by the Warmaster. The sky itself was blackened, a roiling storm of discharge and plasma, through which burning mass driver rounds crashed like meteors and beams of lance light strafed.
Perturabo had unlocked the secrets of the aegis that had warded the walls, exposing them to direct bombardment and assault, but the Sanctum Imperialis and surrounds were still swathed by energy screens. So too was the Lion’s Gate space port. The air about it shimmered with barely contained energies.
Great guns about the circumference of the space port prevented warships from lying-to in orbit directly above for fear of counter-bombardment. The risk of a broken starship crashing upon the landing docks they were trying to capture was too great a risk, which had been pointed out to Kroeger when he had sent request to their primarch for orbital support. Smaller weapon arrays – still dwarfing those carried by anything smaller than a Titan – ringed the port in bastion outcrops.
They roared now, spitting defiance down into the packed regiments of turncoat Imperial Army and devolved creatures. Anti-air batteries awaited their turn to bark rebuke, for Kroeger had not yet committed his aerial assets to the attack.
If Forrix had assessed the situation on what he could see, without knowledge of what was to come, he would have laughed off the assault as a piecemeal, uncoordinated affair with no chance of success.
It would have been a mistake. Kroeger was a straightforward warrior, raised in the best and worst traditions of Iron Warriors stubbornness and dogma. He lacked finesse, or even any desire for finesse, but that did not make him an idiot. He had explained his plan at length to Forrix and Falk, ensuring they understood their parts well enough as well as his overall objectives. There was nothing to do but enact Kroeger’s will or risk the ire of Perturabo, and so Forrix had accepted his allotted role without question. There was every chance that his directness was just the hammer needed to break open the lock of Dorn, as Perturabo believed.
Advancing with bolter in hand, a tide of soldiery and beasts around him, Forrix’s auto-senses picked up the first distinctive cracks of the siege train loosing its wrath. A dozen kilometres behind him, battery after battery of cannons coughed forth a cloud of shells. The muzzle flare of their anger lit the skies, silhouetting their deadly rounds. A rolling thunder of noise followed, a shock wave that swept over the advancing legionaries and auxiliaries, bending banner poles, fluttering top knots on Crusader helms and washing over the unarmoured masses with a hot wind that brought cries of astonishment and dismay. They howled as eardrums split and sinuses burst, those foolish enough to look upon the moment of firing left reeling as a flare brighter than the sun burned out their sight.
The noise of the weapons loosing was as nothing to the detonation of the defensive shields. The bombardment could not reach the highest sections, but was targeted at the middle layers, so that the space port seemed girdled by a ring of fire five kilometres high, arcs of power forking ten kilometres to the ground below. The release of so much energy created a counter-blast that flowed down the uneven flanks of the port like an avalanche, gathering roiling vapour and debris as it descended to smash into the first companies of auxiliaries daring the lesser guns at the base. Bodies by the hundred were picked up and dragged through the crushing cloud of shell shrapnel and fire, cutting a swathe through those that followed.
It was the single most powerful explosion Forrix had ever witnessed, and was yet the overture for the fusillade that was to follow.
As the last after-shimmer of the void shields dissipated, the cannons spoke again, this time accompanied by the hiss of fifty thousand rockets and twenty thousand missiles. This fresh wave of brutality smashed into the labouring shields just half a minute after the first. Purple and blue coruscated through the air a few hundred metres from the armoured skin of the space port. Explosions wracked its surface, hurling chunks of plate and showering burning rubble down its mountainous slopes – not from impacts but void shield generators that had torn themselves apart under the strain of resisting the gigatons of rage unleashed upon them.
And again the great guns of the Iron Warriors fired.
Lion’s Gate space port, surface approach, Highway Four,
one hour before assault
It was almost impossible to think, much less hear, under the force of the bombardment. The ground shook constantly, while dirt rattled down from the rafters of the gun pit. Trooper Alijah Goldberg cupped a hand to his ear to listen to what Sergeant Kazhni was shouting to the squad. He was standing at the vox hard-line from the headquarters fortification and had been silently nodding for the last sixty seconds.
‘It’s our time!’ The sergeant hung up the vox-receiver and gestured towards the two support guns mounted in the firing slits. ‘There’s no tractor, we’ll pull the lascannons ourselves.’
‘This is ridiculous!’ Goldberg shook his head and pointed to the intermittent flashing of shell bursts outside. He cupped his hands so that he could be heard. ‘They want us to give up a nice, safe bunker and go out in this?’
‘You can stay here and wait for half a million mutants, traitors and beastmen if you want,’ the sergeant replied.
Goldberg considered his options and sighed and pushed himself to his feet.
‘Do we have to take them?’ asked Trooper Kawar. ‘They’ll slow us down and the space port has got plenty of big guns.’
‘We take them,’ Kazhni said decisively. ‘I don’t want to be shot by my own guns tomorrow.’
The squad busied themselves making the lascannons ready for moving, locking them onto the metal trails, securing the energy cells and detaching the breaking pins so that the rubberised wheels touched the floor. They had started with three, but a third of their small battery had been taken out by a rogue piece of shrapnel through the firing slit three weeks earlier, along with Trooper Sabbagh.
Goldberg and Kosta lifted the trails of the closest lascannon and hauled it towards the ramp out of the gun pit. Closer to the opening the bombardment was even more shocking. Blast waves washed hot wind over his face and he blinked against the fire and detonations.
‘Where are we going?’ he yelled to the sergeant.
Kazhni waved a hand directly through the doorway.
‘Just head for the space port and keep going.’ The sergeant looked around as the second lascannon trundled up behind him, Kawar and Adon at the lifting bar. He pulled out a laspistol, though Goldberg had no idea what it would be used for. ‘Everyone ready?’
They all nodded and set their backs to the task, a slow pull becoming a steady walk as they mounted the crest of the ramp. Goldberg glanced up to see the heavens dancing with blue and orange fire, coruscating over the screen of the void shields. Despite the energy fields, stray rockets and shells fell to the ground, cratering the broad ferrocrete strip of the highway and its muddied surrounds, tearing bloody holes into the tide of soldiery pouring back to the sanctuary of the Lion’s Gate space port.
The heavy weapons squad picked up pace as they hit the flatter surface of the road, joining thousands more Imperia
l Army troopers. Alongside, halftracks and flatbed trucks bobbed and swayed as they picked their way over the shell-rucked earth, carrying the wounded and those that deemed themselves too important to walk. Above one mud-spattered transport Goldberg saw the huge banner of Colonel Maigraut, bright scarlet and edged with gold braiding. It seemed incongruously colourful among the mud and drab uniforms.
Everyone looked as tired as Goldberg felt. Some trudged with a half-vacant look he had come to know well, uniforms of grey and green splashed with blood – their own or others’ – and dirty from the long siege. Faces smeared with grime, bandaged, arms in slings or showing other wounds, they became a river of humanity flowing together along Highway Four.
Goldberg barely flinched when a shell detonated a few hundred metres to his right, turning an armoured carrier into a flaming wreck that pitched down a slope away from the roadway. His back burned with effort as they broke into a slow jog, feeling the crowd around them moving faster.
Nobody was counting exactly, but everyone knew that the enemy would be at the defence line in minutes, if not there already. At any moment las-fire and bullets might start chasing them up the highway, far deadlier than the rage of the artillery being expended on the void shields above.
A deeper, longer rumble sent a tremor along the road. Some troopers cried out, living their waking nightmares; others called warnings and broke into a run, ignoring the shouts of sergeants and officers.
‘That’s not a bomb,’ said Goldberg, looking back. The others stopped with him and turned.
In the distance, a couple of kilometres back, a wall of fire spread behind the line of retreat, following the arc of the last defence line. More detonations stretched the flames further and further, every trench, gun pit, bunker and foxhole turned into an inferno.
Adon laughed and patted the barrel of the lascannon.
‘We’ll be waiting for the survivors.’
Goldberg spat in the dirt.
‘Burn, traitor scum!’ he shouted. ‘You can all burn!’
Lion’s Gate space port, surface approach,
Highway Four, assault hour
Traitor corpses were piled so high they formed a bloody rampart in front of the Imperial Fists shield wall. The enemy continued to press on regardless, scrambling over their own dead, to be picked off by heavy weapons and marksmen as they crested the ridge of cadavers about twenty metres ahead of Rann, silhouetted against the fires that continued to rage along the former Imperial Army positions.
A line of yellow-armoured warriors stretched almost from one promontory of the outer defence to the next, half a kilometre wide, a solid bank of power armour and boarding shields as inflexible as a plascrete rampart.
The line was unmoving, a last obstacle to be overcome should any foe survive the storm of fire that roared over their heads from support squads and Dreadnoughts, as well as the bastions of the space port itself.
Here and there a mutant creature or turncoat army trooper staggered almost impossibly through the cannonade, only to meet the solid wall of Imperial Fists. The smallest partition allowed a bolter to fire with deadly accuracy, taking off the traitor’s head or ripping apart their chest with a single bolt. The line would close again, as though nothing had happened.
Rann watched through the visor of his shield for any threat, as alert two hours into the battle as he had been the moment he had led the counter-attack from the armoured bastion. So far the Iron Warriors continued to direct their fire against the space port, mostly ignoring the force of Space Marines that had sallied forth. The shorter-ranged artillery that supported the attack had so far been kept at bay by the extended defence screen. Rann glanced up to see an aurora of gold and green above, rippling beneath the impacts of rockets and airbursts.
Should any enemy gunner feel like encroaching within the dome of the fields, a whole flank of lascannons and multi-launchers were poised to greet them with counter-battery fire. Similar precautions had been prepared for aerial attack. Even so, Rann expected to hear the telltale whistle of a descending shell, ready to abort the armoured attack and withdraw his force the instant the murderous barrage of the IV Legion started to fall upon his warriors.
‘Commander, this is Verdas, on the left flank,’ his vox crackled, the message from one of the Dreadnoughts assigned to support the First Assault Cadre. ‘Lines of fire are getting very narrow. The dead are blocking our sight beyond thirty metres. Suggest an advance to establish a new base of fire.’
The phrasing was so respectful, it made Rann smile, coming as it did from a Terran veteran of the Chapter who had served longer than he had.
‘Understood, Verdas. I’ll give you more room.’ Rann switched the vox-channel to contact Lion Primus. ‘Status report on armoured attack.’
‘Preliminary bombardment underway. Gates opening now, commander. Estimate contact with the enemy in three minutes.’
‘Inform the lieutenant-commander that I am moving forward our battlezone by fifty metres.’
‘Affirmative, recalculating safe zone for air and artillery strikes, commander.’
A mutant ogryn shouldered its way through a narrowed part of the carcass mound. It was clad in pieces of angular armour, a bladed helm strapped across its misshapen head. In its hands it carried a length of metal topped with a lump of ferrocrete: a broken lumen pole from the highway partition. Bolts exploded off its makeshift war-plate, and those that found flesh did not hinder its advance in the least.
Five more seconds and it would be on the line. The risk of even a single breach was unacceptable and Rann responded instantly.
‘By threes, target front, converging fire,’ he told his Huscarls, finger slipping into the trigger guard of his bolter. ‘Single round. Fire!’
Every third warrior hinged his shield to the left, allowing the Space Marine on their right to fire through the gap. Fifty bolters, Rann’s included, barked as one, engulfing the monstrous aberration in a storm of detonations. Shards of metal and hunks of flesh flew from the welter of bolts, leaving a ragged mess to flop to the floor, the lumen pole crashing down beside it. As swiftly as the line opened, it closed again, shields crashing back into place alongside each other.
Rann didn’t believe in the concept of ‘overkill’. Whatever it took to ensure the target went down he considered proportionate. Even fifty bolt-rounds for a solitary ogryn.
He checked the chronometer. Ninety seconds until the armour columns hit. That too might be considered more force than necessary, but he was determined to send a message to the Iron Warriors that Dorn’s sons were not at this battle just to take punishment.
The IV Legion would be following on the heels of their expendable horde and the last reports had detected both Fulgrim’s and Angron’s warriors moving in support of this offensive. It was nearly time to withdraw to counter the approaching Traitor legionaries coming at the Lion’s Gate from the north and south. Rann forced himself to wait a further thirty seconds, ensuring they drew in as many of the traitor scum as possible for the armoured attack.
‘Cadre to attend,’ he voxed his entire command, hearts beating faster in anticipation of action. ‘Huscarls prepare for serration and advance. Echelon squads to give support fire.’
He took a deep breath, holding himself for just another two thunderous heartbeats.
‘Three, two, one. Serrate!’
Starting with the warriors either side of Rann, every other Imperial Fist in the front line lifted his shield and advanced five strides. Two warriors from the rear ranks followed on the heel of each, one firing left, the other to the right, sweeping the ground before them with a welter of bolt-rounds. No sooner had the first serration planted their shields than the remaining front-line legionaries lifted theirs and advanced ten paces, each also joined by two support warriors. Rann advanced with them, measuring his stride, and then drove his shield down into the filth of mud and gore that soaked the ground.
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Again and again the line advanced, pushing with fusillade and shields into the charging enemy, the Huscarls like a saw cutting into the heart of the attack while any foes that tried to circle behind them were mown down by fire from the flank squads and supporting Dreadnoughts. Twenty metres at a time, through ten times their own number, they pushed onwards.
‘Echelon squads advance, hourglass attack. Huscarls, link for breach.’
Flank squads withdrew behind the shield walls to allow the enemy to flow to the left and right of the line. Rann judged the moment, waiting twenty seconds, then gave the command for the advance by spear point. Like a wedge through dirt the Imperial Fists forced their way onwards, using their shields as a bulldozer’s blade, pivoting outwards to trap the flanking foes against the spur walls, treading over the slain as they did so. The support squads held the centre with rapid bolter volleys and heavy weapons, until the line hinged together again. Dead eyes stared at Rann from the ridge of bolt-cratered bodies and broken bones.
Rann felt a swell of pride at the discipline of the manoeuvre. It had been simple enough to sketch it on the tactical display, but the precision of his lieutenants and sergeants was a thing of beauty to him. He wished Lord Dorn had been present to appreciate it.
With the full line advanced as far as it could, the Huscarls clamped their bolters and took up their close-combat weapons – chainswords, for the most part, a few with axes like Rann. As they had with the serration manoeuvre, they alternated hewing at the dead and living alike, while their companions pushed forward with their shields, pressing into the mounds of tattered flesh. Rann heaved, angling his shield slightly so he could chop at limbs and bodies as though cutting through tree branches across a jungle track. Pieces of corpses were trodden into the muck as he moved forward.
Push, step, hack. Push, step, hack. Push, step, hack.
The dead were heaped deeper than he had realised, nearly fifteen metres of flesh to hew through before his warriors broke clear, forming up once more on the far side of the charnel mound. Still the enemy did not give in, rushing at the Imperial Fists with hoarse yells and shrieked invocations to their dark masters. Volleys of bolter fire cut down scores of traitors at a time. The Huscarls battered with shield and slashed with blade, dismembering and decapitating any enemy that reached the line.