The First Wall

by Gav Thorpe

Zenobi slept fitfully, disturbed by the cold and a slew of disjointed dreams. She awoke as the engines of the train growled into life, fumes billowing from its stacks. Dawn tinged the horizon and she could see the silhouettes of the sentries atop the ridge to the east. Northwards the rising sun touched upon the snow-covered flanks of the mountains, but it was the continual shimmer of purple and blue from beyond them that caught the eye.

  Menber rolled out of his blankets and came over, following her gaze.

  ‘Do you think it’ll still be going on when we get there?’ she asked.

  ‘I don’t know if I want it to or not,’ he replied, expression pensive. ‘If it stops, that might mean we’re too late.’

  ‘But you don’t want to be walking into that storm…’ Zenobi finished for him.

  He nodded and looked at her. ‘I’d rather we had our chance to make a difference.’

  Movement behind her caused both of them to turn. It was Kettai, rubbing sleep from his eyes.

  ‘You think we will? Make a difference, I mean.’ He crouched and started to roll up his blanket, breath steaming the air. ‘Millions of soldiers. Titans. Legionaries. Starships. You really think the Addaba Free Corps makes a difference in all of that?’

  ‘Why not?’ replied Menber, fists balling. ‘In a close battle, who knows what would swing it one way or the other?’

  Kettai conceded the point with a nod and shrug, and started packing his belongings into his kitbag. Others were rousing, but the morning calls from the officers were still a few minutes away.

  The first they knew of the gunship was an explosion that ripped through the camp of Second Company, a few hundred metres west of where Zenobi gathered her stuff.

  The blast wave tossed bodies high into the air, tatters of burning bedrolls and shards of camp stoves hurled with them. The thud of the detonation rolled across the slumbering companies, a snarl of plasma jets growing louder in its wake.

  ‘Get down!’

  Kettai threw himself at Menber and Zenobi, tackling both of them hard into the frozen dirt. Zenobi felt something crack in her side as his weight landed on top of her. Past his sprawling body she saw the blunt-nosed gunship diving groundwards, ­cannons mounted atop the fuselage spitting shells. She could trace the impacts through the camp, those on their feet cut down while those still waking were tossed into the air like dolls by the ­barrage of explosions.

  The bark of the train’s guns joined the noise of the attack, ­blossoms of shrapnel detonating around the incoming aircraft. Smaller guns on its flanks opened fire, the flare of bolts raking more death through the fleeing and huddling soldiers of Addaba.

  ‘This way,’ said Menber as the gunship banked away, revealing a symbol Zenobi knew well – the Legion badge of the Luna Wolves, who had taken the name Sons of Horus just before the outbreak of the war.

  ‘Where?’ she asked, getting to her feet, Kettai and a handful of others joining them.

  ‘Under the train?’ someone suggested.

  ‘It’ll target the train next, I bet,’ said Kettai.

  ‘Split up.’ Lieutenant Okoye arrived with two other squads, some of them wounded. With him was an integrity officer, his uniform torn down one side, left arm a bloody mess strapped across his chest with a belt.

  The pitch of the gunship’s engines changed and it looped over, turning to bring its main weapons to bear again.

  ‘Spread out!’ bellowed Okoye. ‘Don’t give the gunners an easy target.’

  They broke like iron ants from a disrupted nest, running in all directions. Zenobi found herself heading in roughly the same direction as Kettai, the integrity officer and three others. They headed almost directly away from the roar of the attacking gunship. She almost ­covered her ears, wanting to block out the increasing snarl of its approach, wincing as she expected to feel a bolt in her back at any moment.

  She thought about the banner, left among the packs and sleeping sacks. She slowed, thinking to go back for it.

  Hesitation saved her life.

  A rocket exploded about twenty metres in front of her. She saw an instant of brightness, Kettai lifted bodily by the blast, two others engulfed by flames. The wounded integrity officer, alongside Zenobi to her right, turned away but she was caught looking directly at the detonation.

  A hot wind lifted her from her feet, carrying her several metres before she landed hard, her back catching against a jut of rock, gouging through coat and coverall into the flesh of her right side.

  For several seconds she thought she was deaf and blind, her world nothing more than ringing and blackness. Through the sensory static emerged other sounds, her name being called. Her vision started to fuzz back into something recognisable – the face of Kettai.

  Blinking hard, she pushed herself up, feeling pain slash through the side of her face as the skin stretched. She lifted a hand and blood came away on the fingertips of her glove.

  ‘Just a gash,’ said Kettai. ‘You’ll live.’

  Part of his left ear was missing, crimson dribbling down the side of his neck. There was a burn mark on his coat near the left shoulder too.

  ‘Look here.’ One of the third squad troopers was standing over something a few metres away. He had his lasgun in his hands, pointing down at the integrity officer, who lay crumpled and unconscious at the man’s feet.

  Zenobi’s eye caught a glint of metal in the light of the flames from the rocket. She stooped and pulled the wounded officer’s pistol from the melting frost.

  ‘This is the one that took Seleen,’ the trooper said, his finger moving from the lasgun guard to the trigger. ‘Nobody’s going to miss this bastard.’

  ‘What?’ Zenobi took a step. ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘I’m done with this,’ the trooper said. Zenobi remembered his name was Tewedros. ‘These integrity officers will kill more of us than the enemy.’

  Zenobi was aware of the weight of the pistol in her hand. She lifted it, aiming at Tewedros’ right eye.

  ‘Put down your lasgun,’ she said.

  ‘Why? You’re not going to choose me over him. What’ve they ever done for you? This type would have been grinding you about slacking on the line. Bullies, nothing more.’

  ‘There’s too much at stake to fight among ourselves,’ said Zenobi. ‘Did you hear what happened about the voxcaster?’

  ‘So what? So what if someone tri–’

  ‘It’s all or nothing! You’re either for the cause or you’re the enemy. Jawaahir is right. They’re all right. Look at you, thinking to kill your own.’

  ‘They’re not our own! This one wouldn’t give your body a second look. You don’t know anything, barely old enough to work the line. We don’t need them to know what we’re fighting for.’

  ‘I’ve worked the line,’ said Zenobi. ‘And my family worked it. I worked since Horus started this war, so don’t tell me I don’t know what we’re fighting for. It’s not so we can turn on each other. This is our chance to fight for our future.’

  She saw the look in his eyes, the tightening of the skin as he grim­aced, and knew he was going to pull the trigger.

  She pulled hers first.

  The las-bolt hit him in the cheek, searing through flesh and bone in an instant. He fell, folding in on himself like a worker exoskel­eton suddenly powered down.

  Her hand started to shake, until she felt strong fingers closing around her own, another hand gently lifting away the pistol. She turned her head, numb, and looked at Kettai.

  ‘Your first one,’ he said.

  ‘First what?’

  ‘First kill.’

  She looked at Tewedros’ body, a trickle of blood leaking from the neat hole in his face. The moisture in his eyes was already glistening with ice.

  ‘Didn’t think it would be one of our own,’ she said quietly, lowering her hand.

  ‘It wasn’t,�
� Kettai told her.

  She couldn’t take her eyes off Tewedros. Who knew the enemy would look so much like her friends and family?

  Give no ground

  A tense ascent

  The long walk

  Lion’s Gate space port, mesophex skin zone, six days since assault

  As though it were the fist of Dorn himself, Rann’s counter-attack punched deep into the oncoming companies of Iron Warriors. Hall by hall, conveyor by conveyor, they drove back into the Starspear, while assault companies bounded from level to level, scaling the skin of the space port to fall upon the enemy from without.

  While they waged a fresh offensive into the Starspear, the Imperial Army surged from Sky City into Low District.

  Rann led from the front. The deployment of the First Assault Cadre on open ground had been something of an oddity, although highly effective. Their specialist equipment and tactics were intended for warship-to-warship boarding and defence, as well as combat in close urban environments. The confines of the Lion’s Gate space port were perfect ground, with broad areas linked by narrow choke points he could easily defend, or tight channels and passages along which his troops could advance with near impunity behind their boarding shields. In their wake, several thousand more Space Marines consolidated their hold on the reclaimed territories, guarding against counter-attack and flanking forces.

  Siegecraft was no mystery to the IV Legion traitors. Their specialist wall-breakers and assault companies had been landed en masse across the Starspear. Having swept away the remnants of the standing defence force, whose efforts had been much hampered by the lack of environmental protection, the Iron Warriors had secured several wide bridgeheads around the highest landing decks of Sky City and were bringing in squads by the dozen to reinforce any contested position. In a few more hours they would be able to meet up with the enemy force at large in the Sky City core, undercutting almost half of the Imperial Fists’ offensive.

  Rann was determined to retake at least one of the docks, cutting off the reinforcements at source and giving the Iron Warriors cause to think twice before sending another wave directly into Sky City. From across the nearby commands he pulled together the breach companies of the assault cadre. A steady slew of transports moving along the inner ringway brought in many, others arriving on foot from closer postings.

  ‘It’s just a matter of time before they have so many troops, we can’t hold them back,’ Rann explained to Sergeant Ortor.

  ‘Attack is the best form of defence, lord?’ the veteran laughed. ‘Nothing to do with you not wanting to be sitting in the strategium looking at screens rather than running about with an axe in your hand?’

  ‘I resent that implication,’ the commander replied with a grin.

  The four hundred-strong assault cadre gathered ten levels below the extent of the Iron Warriors’ furthest advance. Pockets of Space Marines from the IV Legion had established themselves across the upper tier, but seemed reluctant to advance into Sky City, as though waiting for something despite the advantage gained by their rapid and unexpected advance.

  ‘They should have pushed on for the bridges,’ Rann continued, marching at a steady pace with his warriors. Three hundred of them made their way to the great loading conveyors in the skin of the Starspear, while a hundred-strong force under Lieutenant Koerner had been sent ahead to make a long climb by stairwell. Koerner’s force would arrive a few minutes before the main attack, sowing some discord among the Iron Warriors, who undoubtedly had strong cordons across the rapid transit shafts and docking elevators.

  Haeger’s periodic updates painted a grim picture. The technophagic invasion continued to intermittently play havoc with the scanners, vox-network and transportation systems. Even with the assumption that many of the augur readings were false positives acting as a mask for the true location of the enemy, there were several thousand Iron Warriors in the Starspear while ten times that number were reinforcing the attack at the base. It was unimaginative, a simple pincer assault on the vertical rather than horizontal, but the traitors did not need to be sophisticated. They had orbital supremacy and the advantage of numbers. Rann was only thankful that it seemed the World Eaters and Emperor’s Children were reluctant to join the attack in force without their warp-twisted primarchs. If the psychic shield failed and the Neverborn appeared, as they had during the latter stages of the void war, there was likely nothing short of the Emperor Himself that could hold the space port.

  ‘It’s time,’ he told his companions, signalling Sergeant Ortor towards the control panel between the two massive conveyor gates. Ortor plugged in the device supplied by Magos Deveralax, which contained a cipher devised by the magos to override any lingering technophage. It could only be introduced to systems locally and physically at the moment, but Haeger had assured Rann in the last update that a more widespread cure was being created.

  ‘Hope this works,’ said Ortor, pushing the call buttons. The clamour of arriving troops echoed around the loading bay.

  ‘What is the worst that could happen?’ joked one of the assault veterans.

  ‘This doesn’t work and the enemy override the emergency protocols so that we get dropped ten kilometres straight to the bottom of the shaft,’ the sergeant replied gruffly, his usual humour stifled by the tension that was building among the legionaries.

  ‘This will also mask our arrival,’ Rann broadcast, seeking to find something more reassuring for his warriors to think about. ‘Unless someone’s stood looking down the shaft, they’ll have about thirty seconds warning before we arrive.’

  ‘We’re treating this as a bridgehead engagement, even though technically we’re defending,’ said Ortor, reiterating the briefing Rann had given them all half an hour earlier. ‘We break through the first defence line and then set up for hit-and-run raids across the neighbouring grid zones. We’re the shield for the companies that are following. Ten thousand of our brothers are ready to counter-attack, but they’ll get nowhere if we don’t keep the enemy off the transitways and conveyor shafts.’

  ‘Deployment is critical,’ Rann told them over the vox. ‘The conveyors are large enough to carry the whole force between them, but if we get stuck on the exit we can’t bring numbers to bear. Lead squads will take hits but we need a fifty-metre zone of control within ten seconds of arrival. Use your shields, advance under cover fire. You’ve done this a thousand times.’

  He almost said, It’s just another battle, but chose not to at the last moment. This wasn’t just another battle; his warriors knew it and would see such a speech for the platitude it was. Rann took a different approach.

  ‘We’re going to be in the battle of our lives in about three minutes. Lord Dorn and the Emperor are depending on us to hold this space port for as long as possible. No pointless heroics – we fight for as long as we can and make them pay for every pace they take on our world. They advance ten metres, we’ll drive them back five. You look after your squad-brothers, keep tight and trust in one another.’ He took a breath, and in the pause heard the rattle of the approaching conveyors. ‘This is why we are here. This is what we were created for.’

  With a squeal of metal and crunch of braking gears sliding into place, the two massive platforms arrived. The command overrides keeping their approach secret had shut down the motors for the doors, meaning they had to be manually cranked apart. Four legionaries apiece started on the lock wheels that flanked the gateways, like sailors of old on a capstan. Nearly thirty metres high, a metre thick, each sliding gate weighed several hundred tonnes. Step by step, boosted by their armour, the legionaries worked the wheels, the doors creaking apart a few centimetres at a time.

  When the gap was wide enough for a Space Marine to pass through, the squads started to board, pushing on into the cavernous interiors, boots echoing as though in some grand hall.

  ‘These are just the small service shafts,’ Rann remarked to Ortor. ‘You can fit tanks or Kni
ght walkers in here, but it’s the mega-conveyors in the core that we really need to hold. They’re the Titan-lifters.’

  ‘Couldn’t we disable them, lord?’

  ‘Lord Dorn has made it clear that the facilities for a strong counter-attack must be maintained.’

  The doors were about ten metres apart and Rann joined the cluster of warriors pressing through the gap, shield on one arm, axe in the other hand. His bolter and second axe were clamped to the inside of his boarding shield, which was as big as a tank hatch. Ortor joined him, the magos’ electronic key-box in hand.

  ‘We’re going to use the door motors at the top, aren’t we?’ the sergeant asked.

  ‘Yes, sergeant, we are.’

  When the last of the assault force were aboard, the door gears were disengaged and counterweights rattled past the conveyor, pulling the gates shut. The crash of the closing portals shuddered through the immense cage, echoing up the shaft.

  ‘Just another bang,’ Rann assured his warriors. ‘There’s about ten megatonnes of ordnance hitting the port every second, nobody’s going to care about one more bang.’

  The floor vibrated as the conveyor motors kicked in, juddering at first as the weight was taken up by immense chains and gears, becoming smoother as the mechanism found its pace. Rann ignored the urge to look up. He knew there was no ceiling, just empty shaft above where chains swung and clanked. Instead, he turned and focused on the doors. The rest of the company followed suit, an about-turn that had them all facing the way out when they arrived. Lead squads jostled past those assigned support duties, bringing their shields to the fore, while others readied their bolters. A few had more exotic weapons – flamers, graviton guns, plasma guns.

  Mentally counting off the levels as they passed, Rann calculated that they were forty seconds from arrival. In ten seconds the noise of the conveyor would be too loud to miss. Thirty seconds ago the stairwell force should have begun the attack. Everything had to be timed; the technophage interruptions to the vox meant anything but almost line-of-sight communication was likely to fail or, worse, be intercepted.