The First Wall

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The First Wall Page 13

by Gav Thorpe


  At an urge from the archmagos a servitor advanced, a length of sanguinaxial cable coiled in its hands. One end was tipped by a standard Imperial five-pin interface, the other fitted to a device that looked like the unholy offspring of an intravenous cannula and an ornamental dagger. Satarael snaked out a mechandenrite from beneath his battle­form, gently lifting the jagged end of the sanguinaxial cable while the servitor connected the other to the main console.

  ‘You need to appease me, first,’ said the hybrid-machine, drawing the arm away from Satarael’s approach. ‘This is the power of Chaos, there are forms and rituals to be observed.’

  ‘I understand,’ said the archmagos, though in truth his comprehension was limited.

  There had been nothing like Volk-Sa’ra’am before, and Satarael’s studies in the esoteric area of warp manipulation were shallow. It was only his self-recreating experience that gave him any insight at all – having rebuilt his consciousness from scattered parts he was best placed to convey a partial daemon consciousness into the systems of the Lion’s Gate space port.

  ‘I offer up fealty to the Powers that Wax and Wane,’ intoned Satarael, recalling the words imprinted to him via the Iron Warriors from the Word Bearers’ Neverborn experts. Truly this was an effort of the great new alliance that would shape the future galaxy beneath the rule of Horus. ‘Of the mortal we take, and of the immortal we give. Threshed to the soul of the warp, I steer the ship of will through the storm of need. Glory to the powers!’

  The mechadendrite speared out, plunging the sanguinaxial blade into the exposed arm of Volk-Sa’ra’am. Light flared at the contact, like sparks leaping from a broken wire, and travelled along the length of the cable. Blood seeped from the wound, quickly congealing around the entry point like coral accretion on a shipwreck, bubbled and blistered.

  ‘I feel the connection.’

  The voice came from a communications grille situated above a display screen cracked by bolter impacts. The monitoring station flickered into life, showing a horned face among swirls of static, teeth of lightning flashing in a grin.

  ‘I shall obliterate all.’

  Lion’s Gate space port, surface approach,

  eighteen hours since assault

  It had been twenty years since Bious, and Forrix had not previously thought of that world since its eventual compliance. But there was something about the unreality of this battle that took him back to that campaign. His auto-senses had overloaded within three minutes of the main assault beginning, reducing his hearing to that of his own enhanced ears, though muffled by his helm. Roving banks of smoke and gas swathed his view, so that his lenses constantly flickered between different spectrum images depending on where he looked, one moment bright with infrared radiation then ­sliding through the visible light and back again, before switching to dampened night vision and cycling back into ultraviolet. All was cut through by streaks of tracer rounds, continuous muzzle flare and the after-glow of plasma detonations.

  He couldn’t remove his helm: even his enhanced physiology would start to succumb to the mixture of toxins billowing among the ash and debris – toxins his own side had unleashed in the bombardment that now choked the Warmaster’s allies as much as they had devoured the lungs of the Emperor’s servants in previous weeks. The warsmiths cared little, driving hundreds of thousands of mortal chattels into the deadly mists and scything cannonade.

  Like an autoharvester’s spinning blades, battery after battery of anti-personnel and heavier weapons ripped hundred-metre-wide swathes through the snarling, wailing morass of troops. Staccato heavy stubber bursts rippled through the slower, deeper beat of macro cannons, whose every shell ripped open craters fifty metres across. Airbursts rained a razor-edged hail of shrapnel, leaving hillocks of rent flesh for following companies to toil across.

  Forrix heaved himself up one such mound, boots sinking into the bloodied meat of a beastman’s chest, bolter mag-locked to his armour so that he could use both hands to aid his ascent of the hill of the dead. Around him were mortal troopers – he had paid little attention when their commander had introduced herself and named their world of origin – nearly three thousand of them, armed with crude solid-shot pistols and axes. They seemed inordinately proud of the fact they had been chosen to deliver him to the Lion’s Gate, not understanding that their purpose was as a literal meat shield. Five hundred had already been cut down by long-range artillery, the others would be lucky to come within sight of the broken armoured portals in the southern slopes of the space port – gates that had been painfully wrested open by the proceeding five hundred thousand soldiers.

  Bious had been what the adepts of Terra would later designate a death world. A single brood organism, utterly inimical to other life but for the sole advanced human society that had made their home there. A whole world and populace bent upon destroying those it deemed interlopers. An advanced people and an eco-system coupled together in shared purpose. Now he faced similar opposition, but there was a single mind directing that enmity, a figure whose intent was written in the strewn bodies and scouring cannonades – the Emperor. And as with Bious there would be no surrender, no chance of compromise. Only total extermination would see the IV Legion to victory.

  Cresting the mound of the dead, booted foot snapping the curling horn of a mutant slave, Forrix paused for half a second to gaze left and right, before continuing down into the ragged crater on the far side. Ahead of him, about three hundred metres away, a rapid series of explosions tore the ground apart, hurling body parts high into the air. How the minefield had not been triggered by previous waves was a mystery – or perhaps the mines had been deliberately left dormant until now – but as body parts fell in a grisly shower Forrix veered left, the troopers around him turning as well like shoaling fish, angling towards ground chewed over by thousands of earlier footfalls.

  The drone of jets drew his eye to the heavens but he could see nothing through the smog of battle. His chronometer told him that the aerial attack had begun, the second front in Kroeger’s simple plan. As he watched, it started to rain, but on magnification the rain turned out to be tumbling bodies. Tens of thousands of them, falling through the cloud cover, glittering with ice and trailing shards like human comets.

  He watched the first hit the side of the space port about four kilo­metres up, a strange combination of shattering and splattering as frozen heads, limbs and torsos scattered like broken glass while their warm interiors smeared down the ferrocrete flanks. Bodies descended like hail, smashing into gun batteries and ricocheting from cannon barrels. Corpse after corpse, until the flank of the space port was carpeted in a compacted mass of flesh and congealed blood. Even Forrix was taken aback by the sight of tens of thousands of the IV Legion’s victims tumbling, splitting and bouncing off the metal skin of the Lion’s Gate facility.

  The Iron Warriors’ auxiliary horde was about half a kilometre from the armoured barbican that had protected the southern approaches, the structure now a smoking ruin of metal and blasted ferrocrete. Ahead, protected by directional power field generators, siege tanks with dozer blades carved paths through the ruin of masonry and flesh, while pioneer teams with flamers and phospex missiles cleared the remaining bunkers of the outer ring.

  Funnelled by natural ridges and the projecting walls of the space port, the assault wave slowed as it reached the defences, a sea of living creatures pressed closer and closer while fire raked down from above and mortar shells dropped in constant bombardment. With enemies to the front and sides, and the guns of their masters threatening equal ruin behind them, the vassal regiments poured on, each warrior trusting that some form of providence – or perhaps warp-spawned patronage – would see them survive when millions of others had fallen.

  If the Iron Warriors had been able to call upon such unquestioning, endless hordes at Bious, the campaign would have lasted weeks, not months. It was the crudest use of raw power, typical of Kroeger’s thinking. But
in the midst of the incalculable carnage there was a kernel of brilliance. Kroeger was not a master strategist, not in the mould of Forrix or Perturabo, but he was a brawler, a street fighter that cared nothing for honour or the forms of combat. As Kroeger had put it, reflecting perhaps a youth that Forrix did not want to know more about, sometimes a shiv was more effective than a broadsword if it was pushed into the right place.

  He’d continued by explaining some tradition of his people on Olympia, something about eating the grubs found near their city. Most were harmless males but the females had hidden stings, indistinguishable from the males except during one mating season. It was a time-honoured assassination method to hide a few females in the meal of an enemy. Via this drawn-out analogy, Kroeger had told them of his plan to get a thousand Iron Warriors into the space port, hidden amongst the living debris of the vassal troops.

  It seemed to be working.

  Forrix was one of only a thousand Iron Warriors hidden in the tide of the attack, his armour on minimal systems and coated in gore, vox-silent to reduce the chances of detection. Only close manual inspection would pick him out from the churning wave of mortals, and only the indiscriminate barrage that assailed the horde might take him by chance.

  Las-fire joined the projectiles of the larger weapons as they came within a hundred metres of the broken rampart of the barbican. The lower levels of the space port yawned beyond, full of smoke lit by an inferno raging within, as though they stormed the mouth of some ancient hellscape.

  The ground shuddered with impacts and recoil, causing those around him to lose their footing. He scrambled and crouched and staggered his way forward among them, trying not to reveal himself amidst their struggles.

  Mouth dry, hearts beating like an Olympian forge hammer, he came into the shadow of the broken gates, towering forty metres above him. Grenades flashed and the screams of the dying added to the din, but he paid them no heed. Troglodyte mutant ogryns, larger even than a legionary, smashed at side doors with gleaming mauls and hammers, while hundreds of lesser mortals streamed into the firelit innards, only to be scythed down by volleys from platoons of ochre-uniformed defenders.

  The siege-breaker mutants crashed through their objective, ripping open the emergency access doors adjacent to the courtyard within the barbican. The troopers flowed on, bearing down the lines of defenders with sheer numbers, while Forrix and scores of others turned towards the new avenue of attack.

  A shiv indeed, he thought, pounding down a side corridor into the dark of the space port’s maintenance labyrinth.

  Update from the front

  Apostle of Chaos

  The Utterblight

  Karachee Flats, sixty-nine days before assault

  Stepping out from under the huge train, Zenobi had been expecting it to be night-time and so was surprised to discover a strange twilight greeted the disembarking troops. Her immediate surrounds were devoid of illumination except for the gleam of the train’s reactor vents and a few hooded lumens stretched out on cables strung between high poles that led away from the tracks. Others were shuffling slowly forward, eyes cast upwards, and she looked up with them, mouth dropping open at what she saw.

  The night sky was alight with colour – bursts of red and purple, searing arcs of green and blue. Shooting stars were a constant flicker of movement across the vault of the heavens, beyond which a shifting miasma of glittering dust blotted out the stars.

  ‘Debris,’ said Menber, and Zenobi knew he was referring to the falling sparks.

  ‘Void war.’ She uttered the two words in an awed whisper, scarce believing that she was witnessing such a thing.

  ‘Keep moving,’ Lieutenant Okoye bellowed from behind. ‘Others have to get off the platform!’

  Still looking up, Zenobi joined the shambling horde of troopers that made their way down the dimly lit track, just one of a crowd of distracted onlookers moving more by mass consensus than individual volition.

  ‘Look!’ Someone ahead thrust a finger towards the smudge of orange dusk light. A flare of bright white burned across it as a crippled starship plunged into the atmosphere, trailing more sparks as its hull disintegrated. A chorus of gasps greeted the sight, like a crowd watching the celebrations on Unification Day.

  ‘Horus is in orbit…’ This came from Sergeant Alekzanda, betraying his normal stoicism. ‘The Warmaster is nearly here.’

  ‘If he’s winning,’ replied Kettai. ‘There’s a lot of ships and guns between him and Terra.’

  ‘Remember what Jawaahir said – we have to assume the ­Warmaster’s armies will land,’ said Zenobi.

  ‘Not here,’ replied Kettai. He pointed north-east. The sky beyond the horizon was a constant fluctuation of colours, the intensity of the space battle like an artificial aurora. ‘Himalazia. The Imperial Palace.’

  ‘It might be over before we get there,’ said someone behind Zenobi.

  Zenobi’s head turned one way and then another as she tried to see everything, almost falling as her toe caught in a rut on the unpaved path. The near-fall brought her mind back to the present and their surroundings.

  ‘Where are we going?’ Other than the faint lumens overhead and the bulk of the train behind them, there was nothing to see. She thought about the platforms, simple raised slabs of rockcrete, seemingly in the middle of nowhere. ‘I thought this was Karachee?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ answered Menber, shaking his head. He looked around and shook his head again. ‘I don’t see anything.’

  ‘Did you see what happened to the others? The ones that left the company?’

  ‘Nothing, they were long gone by the time we got off the train.’

  Zenobi lapsed into agitated silence and followed the huge herd of troopers. Tens of thousands of them were tramping across this feature­less wilderness; perhaps even those at the front didn’t know their destination. After a few minutes the light poles stopped and the only illumination came from the orbital pyrotechnics that continued to shine down in rainbow sprays of laser and plasma.

  As the minutes became half an hour and then an hour, the sense of unease grew. The cold was starting to bite and the troopers struggled to get heavier coats out of their kitbags whilst still pressed together and moving. Lieutenant Okoye cut his way through the mass to help them, organising them into trios that would assist each other in turn, two holding bags and equipment while the third pulled on their coat. Zenobi had the additional burden of the standard, which she briefly relinquished to the care of Seleen and Sergeant Alekzanda but retrieved the moment she had buttoned up her coat.

  ‘I thought this was just a transfer, bana-lieutenant,’ said Zenobi. ‘We’ve walked kilometres by now.’

  ‘Just keep walking, trooper,’ the lieutenant replied, but it was clear from his manner that he had no more idea of what was happening than any of them.

  They walked on, dispersing slightly more as the group spread from the main line of advance. Zenobi heard shouts as dynastic ­enforcers barked at those they judged to be wandering too far from their ­invisible course. There was no sign of Captain Egwu nor the ­integrity officers, but now and then Zenobi thought she heard the grumble of motor engines and assumed that some form of transportation had been secured for the upper ranks. She certainly couldn’t picture Jawaahir trudging through the seemingly endless dust bowl.

  ‘Lights!’

  The call echoed along the column from the companies at the front, but Zenobi couldn’t see anything at all and her enquiries with her taller companions yielded nothing. It was only after a few more minutes’ advance that Menber spoke up.

  ‘Lights. They look like… Vehicles. Searchlights?’

  The column slowed and then stopped, though for those any ­distance from the front the reason for the halt was unseen. Slowly, platoon by platoon, they started to shift again, edging forward only a few paces every minute, until finally First Company of the 64th could
see another railhead a few hundred metres in front. It was far less imposing than the great station where they’d been ­deposited by the heli-transports. Just a maze of connecting tracks and ­dozens of multi-chimneyed locomotives – far smaller than the one that had brought them here, though each still pulled a snake of ­carriages several hundred metres long. Interspersed between transport compart­ments were armoured wagons with gun turrets on their roofs and smaller firing ports along their lengths. All was illuminated by the headlights and mounted lumens of a score of halftracks. When a train was filled it groaned away beneath plumes of exhaust smoke, each a machine serpent near three hundred metres long. ­Company by company the troopers from Addaba were funnelled into the waiting transports and shipped east, towards the brightness of the orbital battle.

  A cabal of company officers waited by the trackside. Zenobi was relieved to see Captain Egwu among them.

  ‘The orbital blockade has collapsed,’ the company commander announced. Zenobi heard the collective intake of breath around her, her own gasp lost among the reaction of her companions. ‘Forces of the Warmaster broke into the atmosphere four hours ago. Karachee has already been subjected to sporadic orbital bombardment and so we are avoiding the transfer stations. Landings are expected across Terra, but our destination and purpose remain the same.’

  An integrity officer – a lean-faced man named Oyenuzi assigned to Alpha Platoon – held out a handful of paper sheets as Egwu continued.

  ‘Squad leaders will each take one of these and disseminate the information to their squad. They detail specific orders and behaviour to minimise detection by orbital scan and aircraft overflight. There are far larger and more important targets than half a dozen trains crossing the Arabadlands. Even so, we have several days’ travel ahead of us and the less attention we draw, the better.’

 

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