by Nick Kyme
‘With the support of the Astra Militarum, we’ve already succeeded in pushing the greenskins back,’ Demeter continued. ‘The xenos currently fester in a refinery square overlooked by the industrial plants’ ruins.’
The map of Shebat overlaid on Kastor’s visor display showed that they were less than a mile from the day’s primary objective – the Excelsior Arch.
It had been more than a Terran year since war had engulfed Shebat. For a while, when the port city of Melu burned and the greenskin forces had reached the outskirts of Ikara IX’s capital city, Kroten, it had seemed as though the planet would fall to the alien invasion.
Then the Fulminata, a Primaris demi-company of the Ultramarines Chapter, had been despatched, alongside the primary Imperial Navy subsector battlefleet, three Astra Militarum army groups and a conroi of Imperial Knights from House du Frain. Within five days, Kastor and his brothers had driven the xenos from the capital’s outskirts, then followed up by breaking the greenskin siege lines encircling Merkoro.
Two weeks ago the brotherhood had arrived outside Shebat. The Astra Militarum’s Third Army, commanded by Field Marshal Stefan Klos, had secured the slum sprawl and established three beachheads into the city proper. Now the drive to the Gorgon was underway.
‘Maintain fire protocols,’ Demeter said over the vox, his voice as calm and measured as it was during the company’s firing rites on board the Spear of Macragge. Intercessor squad Nerva had secured the main thoroughfare leading into the square, laying down bolt rifle fire as the orks charged them from all four corners. The open space allowed the trio of Voitekan battle tanks to spread out, their heavy bolters and battle cannons hammering shells point-blank into the oncoming mobs.
‘See how the Emperor’s wrath cuts them down!’ Kastor bellowed to the Astra Militarum infantry squads advancing out between their tanks, adding their las-fire to the barrage. ‘Keep firing! Not a single greenskin is to leave this place alive!’
‘Kastor,’ Demeter said, his tone full of warning. The Chaplain had begun to advance again.
‘They will not stand, brother-captain,’ he said.
‘And you will not present them with an easy target,’ the captain responded. Return fire broke out from the ruins around the square’s edges, more mobs of greenskins armed with crude sidearms flocking to join the battle spreading through the refineries. Their shooting was worse than inaccurate, but there was enough of it for Kastor to take two hits to his breastplate and another to his left greave in quick succession.
‘Lieutenant, bring your weaponry to bear on the refineries,’ Demeter said, the order routed to the commander of the Voitekan armour. A clipped affirmation coincided with the whine of turret hydraulics as the battle tanks switched targets.
They never got a chance to fire. The enhanced aural units of Kastor’s armour detected a high-pitched whistle, growing rapidly louder.
‘Incoming!’
Sergeant Nerva was the first to shout the warning, issuing it over his external vocaliser for the benefit of the Guard infantry.
The first shell hit the space between the leftmost and centremost of the three Leman Russ battle tanks. The Voitekan infantry squad there simply vanished in a hail of metal and rubble that battered the sides of their tanks, spattering the vehicles with tattered human remains.
Another five shells struck the square within three seconds of the first. Fire blossomed, the detonations ripping indiscriminately into greenskins and Imperial soldiers alike. One hit the ground barely a dozen yards to Kastor’s right. He felt his auto-stabilisers lock as the blast wave struck, accompanied by a storm of rubble and dirt. His armour blared with alarms, the auto-senses indicating shrapnel damage to his right pauldron and knee joint. When the smoke settled, however, he stood unmoved, his crozius shining bright with destructive energies amidst the haze.
‘Xenos artillery,’ Demeter voxed. ‘Coming from across the river. I’m routing the coordinates to Serxis, but it will be at least twenty minutes before the bombardment cannon is locked.’
‘Priscor and Quintillius have been hit,’ Sergeant Nerva added. ‘If we stay here, we die. We either go back or we go into them.’
‘Into them then,’ Kastor snarled, feeling his battle fury surging to life once more.
‘As the Brother-Chaplain says,’ Demeter responded calmly, as the air filled with the shriek of more incoming shells. ‘Primaris, advance.’
POLIXIS
‘Medicae!’
Polixis was already moving up along the street’s left-hand pavement when he heard the scream. Ahead, he could see a platoon of Namarian Imperial Guardsmen caught in a barrage of crudely aimed ork firepower, coming from a bombed-out residential block. He watched as the Namarian’s colonel went down.
Polixis kept to the side of the street, instinctively knowing that it was unlikely any of the orks’ shots would be coming his way when there were so many targets out of cover ahead of him. In just a few seconds, the Namarians had taken a slew of casualties. He saw the platoon’s medic – caught sprinting towards the fallen colonel – collapse in a burst of blood as he in turn was hit in the side of the head.
‘Medicae!’ came the scream again.
Polixis cursed. He considered carrying on through the haulage work yards to his left, to link back up with Squad Valorious. But with the Namarian colonel down, their entire advance was stalling, and the wider spearhead couldn’t afford that. Against his better judgement, Polixis cursed and broke from cover.
He ran from the street’s edge and crossed to the downed colonel, using his bulk to shield the man. Shots came cracking his way, but he was too busy assessing the Namarian’s injury to even notice. The man had taken a hit to the leg, probably an artery shot. Polixis spent precious moments slicing away his blood-drenched fatigues, trying to decide how to deal with the wound. His own equipment was far superior to anything carried by the Guard, but he had forgotten just how incredibly fragile humans were. It was only at times such as these, kneeling over the wounded soldier, that he properly appreciated the gulf between the Imperium’s fighting forces.
Arterial spray painted Polixis’ white gauntlets red. The Primaris Apothecary let out a slow breath as he tied off the torn femoral artery, applying a coating of counterseptic powder to the bloody gash in the colonel’s thigh. The Namarian screamed.
‘I have nothing for your pain,’ Polixis said gruffly. ‘Everything that will fortify my brothers would kill your kind.’ Polixis bound the wound tightly with a bandage pad taken from the man’s supplies and looked across at the Namarian platoon’s corpsman. He was kneeling on the pavement, hands and forearms as red and soaking as the Space Marine’s. His expression was an all-too-familiar rictus of concentration as he fought to tourniquet a leg torn almost in half by an ork slug round.
More hard rounds cracked past, one grazing Polixis’ shoulder. Namarian infantry were supporting a combat team from Intercessor Squad Valorious as they secured the haulage work yards of the refinery district, a slow, grinding battle that had been going on since dawn. It had put their sector of the assault behind schedule. Polixis had been drawn from the main spearhead by two injuries to Valorious, Brothers Vespasior and Gallus. Neither were fatal, but the same could not be said of the wounds the Namarians were sustaining.
The Apothecary’s heads-up tactical display lit with new information. The spearhead of the Primaris assault, driving directly for the Excelsior Arch, had suffered three casualties. The log scrolling past identified heavy shelling, and the guns’ thumping reports were audible from where he stood. He blink-clicked the company command channel.
‘This is Helix. Do you have need of me, captain?’
‘If not now then we will soon, Brother-Apothecary,’ crackled Demeter’s voice, overlaid by the crash of detonations. ‘Redeploy to our coordinates with all haste.’
Polixis sent an affirmation and moved to the side of the Guard corpsman struggling nearby. He bent down and grasped the bloody limb in one hand, yanking the tourniquet into pl
ace with the other. The wounded man wailed, slick with sweat, his face a wretched mask. He had the white eyes of a beast in pain, stripped of the intelligence and dignity of the human race. It was difficult to resist an impulsive sense of disgust at such a display. He is only a man, Polixis found himself thinking. Now was no time to consider the contrast between the Guardsman’s desperate, agonised expression and his own stark white battleplate and helm. He wondered whether the man’s terror was magnified by his presence. It would not surprise him.
‘I must go now,’ he said to the corpsman, who was looking at him with wide eyes. ‘Check to make sure it’s tight enough and tie off the popliteal. As far as I can judge your kind, the colonel is stable, but you must get him to cover. Remember your training and you will save lives here today.’
The man visibly struggled to find a response, staring at the giant, white-armoured warrior, but Polixis was already moving off, breaking into a run as he left the humans behind and headed south.
He checked the visor display again as he went. One of the three wounded sigils – Ovido’s – had flashed from yellow to red. He was flatlining rapidly, the vitae signs on Polixis’ diagnostor helm fading. The Apothecary picked up speed, servos whirring, boots pounding debris-strewn streets as he used the burst map uploaded to the shared tac-display to navigate along the rear of the ground taken in the morning’s assault. The orks had been driven from their positions across the city, yielding four miles in barely an hour and a half.
The Gorgon was almost within touching distance.
Polixis’ map turned him westwards, back onto the leading edge of the assault. Staying behind the immediate front line would take too long – he would have to skirt through it. Passing a trail of injured Astra Militarum troopers and stretcher-bearers in the pelts of the Tmaran Scalp-takers, he headed down a side street away from a gunfight that appeared to have broken out in the smelter work yard of a refinery primus. The tribal warriors cringed back at the Space Marine’s passing, averting their eyes from a being Polixis knew they likely deified. He barely even acknowledged their presence, instead activating the vox.
‘Prime Tertiary, be advised, I am inbound on the rear of your position.’
‘Acknowledged, Helix,’ came the reply from Lieutenant Samson. Polixis pounded into the work yard, taking a sharp right into cover behind a conveyance belt for mega smeltry blocks. Terrified-looking Tmarans scrambled to make way for him as heavy slugs cracked overhead. As he entered, he saw that the far wall had been demolished and appeared to be acting as a strongpoint for a greenskin mob that had entrenched itself in the neighbouring ore warehouse.
There were two other Primaris in cover behind the heavy conveyance belt, Brothers Cypran and Caius.
‘The lieutenant?’ Polixis asked over the external vox. Caius gestured towards the doorway of the main manufactorum building. Outside it a haulage lifter had toppled over, providing a length of reinforced plasteel that sheltered more Guardsmen. Samson was among them.
Polixis broke from behind the conveyance belt and vaulted the lifter’s fallen crane, slamming into the gravel beside Samson. The lieutenant didn’t look up from the fresh ammunition drum he was clipping into his auto bolt rifle.
‘Just passing through, Helix?’ he asked, using the Apothecary’s battle cant signifier.
‘Yes. Your situation is stable, lieutenant?’
‘Keeping the beasts’ attention on us,’ Samson said, nodding to Cypran and Caius, the latter of whom leant over the conveyance belt to ease off a burst of bolt rifle fire. ‘Faustus is taking a combat team north around their flank. We should be moving on within the next ten minutes.’
‘I’m needed with the captain,’ Polixis said, glancing once more at the tactical display. Brother Ovido’s vitae signs were crashing.
‘Fastest way is to the right,’ Samson said, nodding to the work yard’s north wall. ‘Covering fire on my mark.’
Polixis broke from behind the crane as the thunder of bolters filled the work yard. The sudden fury seemed to only encourage the orks, who returned fire with a chorus of howls and roars. Shots sparked around Polixis, but none touched him as he hammered pauldron-first into the red brick wall. The masonry gave way with a crash. He carried on through the broken rubble and dust, finding himself in an alley running parallel to the work yard, presumably the same one taken from the manufactorum by Faustus en route to the greenskin’s flank.
He took the first right, into a grimy, deserted inner-city hab street. An ork scrap-truck lay at the far end, burning, surrounded by an indiscriminate litter of greenskin and Guard dead. The bodies were brutalised, the full savagery of the two races’ antagonism clear in eviscerating blows and point-blank weapon blasts.
The air filled with a familiar, furious shriek as a cruciform shape shot overhead, dangerously close to the jagged tops of the ruined refinery stacks. The Imperial Navy Lightning fighter was pursued by a crude ork aircraft, its autocannons blazing. The contrast between the two races could not have been clearer – the sleek, war-ready Imperial machine and the brute, ramshackle xenos engine, its ugly form riveted and bolted together in haphazard fashion. The mere sight of it stirred Polixis’ disgust. Both flyers were out of sight again in an instant, a scattering of hot brass falling around Polixis as ejected cartridges sprayed across the street. The Apothecary paused briefly to assess his map, continuously updated with feedback from the linked auto-senses of the rest of the company spread across the city. The distant shellfire was now altogether closer, and he could see a haze of smoke rising above the hab units directly ahead.
He sped down a side alley, over a carpet of blackened, shrivelled bodies that had been caught in the promethium gout of a flamer. Ahead of him, the refinery square opened up. It had been reduced to a wasteland, pockmarked with craters and the strewn wreckage of human and alien corpses. He passed over a female Voitekan with her ribcage split open by shrapnel, side by side with a greenskin whose head had been half-demolished by a bolt-round. Beyond them, another human and alien lay intertwined, a Voitekan’s bayonet impaled through the beast’s eye while its fists remained clamped around the dead man’s throat, both bodies frozen in their death throes.
The battle had swept through the open space and continued now on its western side – Polixis could see Ultramarines and Voitekan infantry to his left fighting together, engaged in a close-quarters firefight with greenskin mobs that had spilled over into a violent melee on the corners of adjoining streets. To his right, a Leman Russ battle tank lay near the start of a street leading off to the east, gutted by what looked to have been a direct shell strike, flames blazing from the twisted wreckage. Another had made it halfway across the square before a further hit had thrown one of its treads, leaving it slewed to one side and immobilised.
Brother Priscor lay against the tank’s flank. Polixis crossed the square at a run, the air around him resounding with the fury of the combat playing out barely fifty yards to his left. Priscor’s vitae signs were dropping steadily. The Apothecary saw why as he approached – the Primaris had lost both legs, presumably to a close-range shell strike. They’d been severed just below the knee plates, two nubs of ripped muscle and skin, blood and stubs of bone. A smear of red on the sooty flagstones of the square marked where he’d dragged himself to the battle tank’s protective bulk.
Polixis dropped down beside the wounded Ultramarine. Priscor’s helmet turned towards him.
‘Brother-Apothecary. You’re a welcome sight.’
‘Remain still, Brother Priscor,’ Polixis said, speaking with the brusque tone he fell into automatically during field surgery. ‘This will not take long.’
He plugged a prognosticator into Priscor’s left tasset dermal node, linking his armour with that of the wounded Primaris. Polixis’ visor display blinked as it updated with fresh data, the diagnostor helm providing him with a full readout of Priscor’s body readings.
‘Your Larraman cells are working to cease the blood flow,’ he said as he uncapped the plasma node latch
ed to his backpack and linked it through the port in Priscor’s vambrace. ‘But you will bleed out before they are able to heal the wound sufficiently. I am providing you with a transfusion, followed by a cell acceleration stimm to hasten the process. That will stabilise you until you can be moved.’
‘Bastard greenskins,’ Priscor spat, but said nothing more. Polixis noted the strain indicated on his visor display from the Intercessor’s left gauntlet, where Priscor was still gripping his bolt rifle.
The Apothecary activated the transfusion pack, the clear plastek of the plasma node turning a deep red. As it pumped fresh blood into the downed Adeptus Astartes, he slipped the multisyringe from his medicae webbing and flicked the adapter to the coag-stimm. Priscor made no sound as Polixis jabbed the needle into the port in his right tasset and depressed the plunger. Not for the first time the Apothecary wondered at the strange torture entailed in the existence of a Space Marine – while his genhanced metabolism meant that pain was more often than not reduced to little more than a dull ache, the changes wrought also ensured that he would remain fully conscious and coherent except in the direst of circumstances. A human warrior who had suffered similar injuries would have been left barely conscious, but Priscor would be afforded no such respite.
‘Your vitaes are stabilising,’ Polixis told him, glancing at the display readings as the stimm set to work. The pulse of blood from both stumps had been reduced to a slow ooze, congealing around the great scabs that had begun to blotch the hideously torn muscle tissue.
‘Your secondary heart should provide sufficient circulation,’ he went on. ‘But do not try to move. I have tagged your armour with a retrieval sigil. Provided we do not lose this position you will be evacuated within the next half an hour.’
‘You have my thanks, Helix,’ Priscor said, helm turning to look towards the battle raging along the square’s western side.