Instantly, he felt his weight increase, his limbs become leaden and his armour exert an almost insurmountable attraction to the ground. Graviton generators buried beneath the wall were warping the local gravity field, making even the smallest movements an immense effort.
Kroeger roared and pressed himself to the wall, hauling his body upwards with a combination of brute strength and fury. The generators’ fields could only reach a few metres from the ground, and with every hauling movement up the textured wall, he felt their grip on him loosening. Behind his faceplate, he grinned as he felt his natural weight restored, and sprang up to the next handhold.
Behind him, three hundred warriors of Lord Harkor’s 23rd Grand Battalion knelt in covering positions or set up heavy weapons. Only a very few had the strength to overcome the graviton generators, and these were the bloodiest, meanest and most devoted of the warsmith’s killers. And of those men, Kroeger was the bloodiest, meanest and most devoted.
Servitor-crewed weapon turrets emerged from armoured blast shutters midway up the sloped wall and swept the ground with a mixture of heavy shell cannons and lighter infantry cullers. Explosions marched along the base of the wall as weapons and ammo caches exploded. Defenders at the ramparts poured their own fire down the face of the wall where the turrets could not reach.
Lord Harkor’s artillery had ceased firing, wary of inflicting friendly casualties, but the Imperial Fists had no such concerns. Plunging fire was pounding with earth-shattering force on the rock and the warriors clinging to the wall, wreathing the summit of the mountain in acrid smoke, flames and airbursting shrapnel.
Kroeger heard the long bray of an autocannon, its shells raking left and right wherever Iron Warriors clustered in groups of three or four. A long-barrelled melta-lance immolated a cluster of boulders with an ear-splitting screech of burned air, and individual blasts of lascannon fire hailed down like neon comets as they stabbed from narrow-gauge focusing muzzles.
Khamer went down, his chest a fused ruin of exposed bone where his innards had instantaneously cooked to superheated vapour, and Tumak was cut in two by a sawing blast of shell-fire. Ulgolan was hurled to the ground by a sudden growth of silicate stone that pummelled him from his climb. Another extrusion burst from a repairing gash in the wall, a barbed skewer that impaled Purdox like a corpse on a gibbet. An overhang grew above Straba, forcing him into the sheeting fire of a lascannon that sliced him in two.
Others fell, warriors whose names he didn’t care to know and never would.
Anger doused him at the thought of a single company of Imperial Fists and a few thousand mortal soldiers keeping them out, and he pressed himself to the wall as the storm of fire from above intensified. This was always the bloodiest part in any assault, the moment where the true worth of a warrior was measured, the last fifty metres in the open. A commander could have all the planet-killing weapons at his disposal, the most sophisticated fortress, the most advanced countermeasures, but he still needed men of flesh and blood to cross that last scrap of open ground to get to grips with the enemy.
Warsmiths like Forrix and Toramino viewed this stage of a battle with distaste, as an unpleasant necessity within the gracefully choreographed sophistication of fire plans, bombardment schedules, approach saps, parallels and line upon line of perfectly angled siegeworks. Warsmith Harkor was an Olympian of the old ways, a warrior who knew the value of occasionally strengthening the mettle of his subordinates by plunging them into the fire and beating them upon the anvil of war.
Kroeger had little taste for the logistical mechanics of a siege, though he was competent enough in their execution. Better to let others do the digging, the planning and the building. His home was in the thick of battle, where boldness was a virtue and fury a killing edge.
Warriors emerged from the hellstorm of explosions and scything fragments, searching for handholds beside him. They followed his example, knowing that where Kroeger led, the blood of the enemy was sure to flow. Fire and noise burst around him as he climbed higher and grenade dumpers ejected their payloads in tumbling cascades, but the enemy was running low on explosive ordnance and there were too few to do any real harm. Shrapnel whickered through the ranks of the Iron Warriors, but encased within layers of ceramite warplate, only a handful were blooded.
Vannuk climbed next to him, his burnished armour pitted with small arms impacts, and his helmet scored with heat burns. He had his bolter in one hand and loosed a short burst of fire. A scream, and a torn-up body fell from the wall.
‘First blood to me,’ grunted Vannuk.
Kroeger’s bolter was still mag-locked to his thigh, and would likely stay there until he’d reached the rampart above.
‘Who cares about first blood?’ said Kroeger. ‘So long as there’s blood.’
Vannuk paused to take aim at another target, but Kroeger felt the wall beneath him tremble with substrate activity and punched his fist into a crack in the wall. He spread the fingers of his gauntlet to support his weight and swung out to grip a handhold over to his left as the wall ripped open in a leering slice, like the maw of an ambush predator. Vannuk barely had time to scream before he was swallowed. Oozing tendrils of liquid rock webbed the gap in an instant, drawing the seams of the wall closed again.
‘Idiot,’ was all Kroeger had to say on Vannuk’s demise, and pushed himself onwards.
He climbed with random leaps and surging effort, evading spikes of glistening rock and hails of gunfire with a mix of skill and luck. A turret slid down the wall in flames where he had been climbing only a moment before. The mangled wreckage trailed its cybernetic crewman on ropes of cabling before slamming into the rock below. Its armoured panels tore open as it exploded. Flames belched, and corkscrewing contrails ripped in all directions as its shell hopper cooked off.
A shell burst hit the wall next to him, and Kroeger flinched as the impact caused his visor to darken momentarily. He looked up to see a long line of frightened faces looking down at him and grinned. They feared him and they were right to.
‘Death is coming for you!’ he yelled at them. ‘This iron without will soon be iron within!’
Sporadic blasts of fire beat on his armour, a mixture of lasfire and solid rounds. The shots spanked from his pauldrons, but didn’t penetrate. Kroeger reached down and freed his bolter from his thigh. He swung the weapon to bear and squeezed off a three-round burst of shells.
One man’s head simply vanished, the impact trauma enough to tear his skull from his spine. Another soldier exploded from the chest up as Kroeger’s round detected enough mass to trigger the warhead’s detonation. The third man fell back screaming, his face torn up by bone shrapnel from the dead men beside him. It was wasteful to expend mass-reactives on mortals, but the sheer mess it made of their fragile bodies was too satisfying to ignore. Clamping his bolter back to his thigh, Kroeger hauled himself up, hand over hand, grinning beneath his iron visor as he saw the chewed-up battlements within reach. The wall’s integral defences were dead here, and now there was nothing to stop him.
He took hold of a twisted length of protruding rebar and hauled himself up, rolling over the broken-toothed remains of the wall. Shell fragments were embedded in the stone, and even as he dropped to the rampart, he had his bolter unclamped again and was searching for targets.
Only two Iron Warriors came over the wall with him: Vortrax and Ushtor, from the patterns on their helms and shoulder guards. Kroeger saw an Imperial Fists warrior turn towards them, a captain by the look of him. His face registered surprise, and he shouted a warning to another two Fists squatting in the midst of a company-strength of frightened mortals.
‘No helmet?’ hissed Kroeger, aiming and firing in one fluid motion. ‘Stupid.’
The captain went down, but Kroeger was irritated to see that his shot had merely grazed him. The other Imperial Fists rose to his defence, moving apart and firing at their attackers. The mortal soldiers loosed panicked shots at random.
Vortrax fell back against the ruined wall
, his breastplate hammered by concentrated bolter fire. Spasming detonations and a crack of mashed bones told Kroeger he had been pulped inside his armour.
Ushtor traded shots with the Fists, but these warriors were too cool under fire to be caught out by such undisciplined salvoes. Kroeger took his time and pulled his gun hard into his shoulder. He sighted on the leftmost of the Imperial Fists and put two carefully placed shots though his helm. The warrior dropped instantly, the back of his head a hollowed out shell of dripping brain matter and scorched bone.
Where the mortal soldiers had turned their attention to the fighting on the ramparts, two Iron Warriors gained the wall. Bolter fire hammered the mortal soldiers, ripping arms from shoulders, torsos from legs like bodies caught in the flailing blades of a threshing machine. Their screams were pitiful, and Kroeger took little satisfaction in their meaningless deaths.
The Fists were the true prize here.
The fallen captain rose with a bared sword that blazed with golden light as he leapt towards the two Iron Warriors. First one, then the second died, carved up with powerful strokes aimed at the weakest points of their armour. The captain kicked them from the wall and turned to face Kroeger.
‘Come at me and die, traitors!’ he yelled, his face a mask of blood from where Kroeger’s shot had torn a finger-deep furrow in his skull. Kroeger shook his head and shot him twice in the chest.
Beside him, Ushtor collapsed, his armour blown outwards by the force of shell detonations. Kroeger ignored the dying warrior’s grunts of pain and loped towards the Imperial Fist who’d killed him.
Another warrior without a helm. Did Dorn’s weakling sons want their heads blown off?
The Fist backed away, ejecting his bolter’s magazine and slamming home a fresh clip.
‘Nowhere to run,’ said Kroeger.
‘I’m not running,’ answered the Imperial Fist. ‘I’m waiting.’
Despite himself, Kroeger’s curiosity was aroused. ‘Waiting for what?’
‘For them,’ said the Fist.
Hammering impacts spun Kroeger round, and he felt the pain of lacerating wounds punched in his side. He dropped to one knee, seeing at least two dozen Imperial Fists charging towards him. They fired from the hip, but suffered no loss in accuracy. Two more shells struck him before he could scramble to cover: one in the shoulder, one in the centre of his chest. Warning icons flashed to life on his visor, and he coughed a wad of blood through the vox-grille of his helmet.
Kroeger fought to get off a last volley, but his arm hung uselessly at his side and his bolter lay in pieces before him. He hadn’t even realised he’d lost the weapon. He looked over the edge of the wall, seeing only a handful of Iron Warriors clambering towards the rampart. Hundreds of mortal soldiers opposed them with explosives and massed fire. There would be no help from that quarter for now.
How demeaning to be kept out of a fortress by such dross.
Kroeger stared down at the dark blood pooling in front of him, its bright gleam and iron tang curiously pleasant even as it leaked from his numerous wounds.
A cold shadow fell across the bloodied ramparts, and a roaring blast of jet-hot air blasted downwards from screaming retros. Kroeger’s spilled blood boiled in the heat and mortals screamed as their uniforms erupted in flames. The Imperial Fist with whom he’d traded words fell as the ammunition in his bolter exploded and transformed his wrists into charred stumps of flesh and nubs of fused bone.
Something fell from the sky, monstrous and cold.
It landed in the heart of the citadel with the booming clang of a funeral bell – the Olympian master of battle, a demigod in burnished warplate, a hammer-wielding avatar of thunder.
Perturabo, the Lord of Iron.
With the arrival of the primarch, the battle was over.
The outcome of the siege, never in doubt, was finally decided by his indomitable presence.
Perturabo came to rest on bended knee, one arm angled before him as though swearing homage to an unseen master, the other extended from his body. In the outstretched hand, he held a hammer the length of a mortal man, its haft fashioned from an alloy that was as unbreakable as it was unknown, patterned like marble, veined with lightning and capped by an amber pommel stone set with a slitted eye of jet. The head of the hammer was steel and gold, its rear razor-spiked, the killing face flat and murderous.
This gift from the Warmaster himself was no hammer for smithing, no tool of the forge and no symbol of unity.
Forgebreaker was a killing weapon, an instrument of death and nothing more.
A mantle of interlocking steel leaves draped from Perturabo’s broad shoulders like the hide of some great silver-scaled dragon, and the primarch’s raised gorget threw a ruddy light across his chiselled features. Eyes of the coldest blue, like ice-burned steel, glittered in the half-light of the day, and his scalp was shaven bare, pierced and threaded with dreadlocks of tightly wound cabling.
The Imperial Fists who’d come to kill Kroeger, seeing this most sublime chance to wreak harm on the personification of their hate, ignored his blood-wracked frame and took the only chance they would ever get to attack an enemy primarch. Kroeger had marched with his Legion since the great muster at the columned glory of the tyrant’s palace, but he could count on one hand the times he had been privileged to witness his primarch make war.
Each time had been from a distance, and always it had been war made at range.
This marked the first time he had seen the Lord of Iron kill in person. It was a moment he would never forget.
Perturabo slew the first Imperial Fist before Kroeger was even aware he’d moved, spinning on his heel and letting the hammer slip through his grasp until he was holding it at its farthest extension. The killing face struck the first warrior, obliterating him in an explosion of meat and bone and shattered plate. Perturabo’s silver cloak sliced out, its razor-edged scales cutting through the armour of a second warrior and leaving his shorn halves bisected so cleanly that it looked to Kroeger as though they could be put back together without effort.
A third warrior managed to reach striking distance, but never got the chance to even raise his weapon. The Lord of Iron extended his right fist and a storm of lightning-shot muzzle flare stabbed through the Imperial Fist. A dozen or more shells detonated virtually simultaneously, tearing him apart as surely as if a demolition charge had exploded within his chest cavity. What little flesh and blood remained of Dorn’s warrior fell to the ground in a sticky red rain.
And then the Iron Circle slammed down around Perturabo.
Six hulking figures in heavy plates of gleaming iron and gold, each one breaking the ground apart with the force of an artillery strike. They straightened with a whine of pneumatics and a flicker of target acquisition protocols. The Colossus battle robots formed up on Perturabo, raising heavy siege hammers and monstrously oversized storm shields as their combat wetware took the measure of the foes arrayed before their master.
Gunfire streaked towards Perturabo, but the Iron Circle braced themselves in an impregnable shieldwall of iron, each shot deflected or ablated. The shields parted and Perturabo charged into the mass of Imperial Fists, his hammer looping around his body in deadly arcs, smashing armour, breaking bodies, crushing skulls, lopping limbs and ending lives. The Iron Circle advanced at his side, their siege hammers hurling shattered bodies from the walls with the force of their swings. They bludgeoned enemy warriors into the stonework, protecting Perturabo’s flanks as Forgebreaker battered the Fists into boneless pieces and his gauntlet-mounted bolters tore the remains to shreds.
Death surrounded the Lord of Iron and he was its messenger.
Kroeger forced air into his lungs in short, awed breaths as the last Imperial Fist died. Forgebreaker smashed into the stone of the rampart, gouging a crater like the aftermath of a high-explosive bunker killer. Powdered rock-dust billowed around Perturabo, settling on the plates of his armour like flakes of windblown snow.
Almost thirty Space Marines dead
in the span of five heartbeats.
The blood leaking from Kroeger’s ravaged body was already sluggish, his flesh hot to the touch with the healing mechanisms of his post-human biology. He pushed himself to one knee and bowed his head as he felt Perturabo’s gaze turn his way. Heavy footfalls approached and the sticky edge of the primarch’s hammer touched the underside of his helmet. Gentle pressure lifted Kroeger’s head, and he looked up into his primarch’s eyes, the black, oversized pupils reflecting the crimson light of his gorget. Kroeger trembled beneath Perturabo’s gaze, but it seemed the primarch’s wrath had been spent on the Imperial Fists.
‘Remove your helmet,’ commanded the primarch, his voice like glaciers grinding together.
Kroeger nodded and reached up with his good arm, undoing the seal on one side. It wasn’t easy to undo the other, but the catch eventually released with a hiss of pressure equalisation. He lifted his helmet clear, blinking as he adjusted to seeing the world without the filtering effects of his enhanced optics. The air here was warm and heavy with dust, scented with a metallic tint of the ferrous deposits beneath the surface and the sheer amount of blood spilled over the stone of the citadel’s ramparts.
Perturabo in battle against the sons of Dorn
A halo danced around Perturabo’s head, motes of dust and powdered stone caught in the ionising energies of his cranial interfaces. His features were pale and waxen, bleached of colour after months of seclusion, but the low sun was already triggering melanin production and imparting a leathery texture to his skin.
‘You are Kroeger, aren’t you?’ said Perturabo.
For a terrifying moment, Kroeger couldn’t think of his own name, but the primarch’s question was purely rhetorical.
‘I remember you from Isstvan,’ continued Perturabo, speaking as though each word was begrudged. ‘You’re one of Harkor’s brawlers, an attack dog with a taste for blood.’
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