“What do they use it for, then?” I asked, already dreading the answer.
Sulla shrugged. “Grazing. The locals imported thousands of sauropods from Harihowzen, and they just roam around chewing lumps out of the vegetation. Big as Titans, some of them.” Well, that was something of an exaggeration. I’d seen similar creatures before and most of them were barely half that size, but even allowing for an element of hyperbole the idea was enough to make my blood run cold.
The tyranids needed biomass to swell their armies, and they’d just discovered the motherlode. If Aceralbaterra fell, then Periremunda would fall right along with it. Far from finding a refuge, it seemed, I was about to be pitched into the most decisive battle of the entire war.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Aceralbaterra turned out to be just as uninviting as Sulla had made it sound in our earlier conversation, and I’d be lying if I didn’t admit to quailing inwardly as we approached it, flying low and fast to avoid the dense clouds of gargoyles flocking around the outskirts of Konnandoil, the plateau’s principal settlement. Unlike the villages the ’nid swarm had hit before, Konnandoil was a fair-sized town, and as we swooped in over it I could see signs of fighting everywhere, surging tides of claw and mandible being thrown back by the dogged resistance of the defenders, or, in all too many places, being swamped by it altogether.
“There.” I pointed to a wide-open plaza, fronting the aquila encrusted facade of what had evidently once been the main Administratum building of this benighted town. It was bordered on the other three sides by a colonnaded walk, which in happier times had evidently sheltered a scattering of brightly painted market stalls from the near constant drizzle.[1] Our pilot nodded, far from happy at the prospect, but astute enough to realise that the spot I’d picked was far enough away from the main bulk of the swarm to afford him a pretty good chance of getting away again before the hive mind recognised the presence of a fresh threat and turned to meet it. [1. Though barely high enough to receive much in the way of rainfall, the dense mat of foliage covering Aceralbaterra respired moisture constantly, which condensed almost at once in the thick, humid air.]
I’d prevailed on the authority of my office to install myself on the flight deck for the duration of our journey, which had the twin advantages of avoiding both Sulla and the effect that being airborne was bound to have on Jurgen’s physiology. Thus it was that I had something of a panoramic view of the plateau we’d come to relieve, and was able to form a remarkably cohesive picture of it.
As I think I mentioned before, our pilot, though merely a civilian inducted into Imperial service along with his shuttle, evidently had enough common-sense to have learned some basic survival skills. I can’t claim that a Navy veteran wouldn’t have been a whole lot sharper, but he did his best, bringing us in below the level of the plateau and popping up over the lip of it at the last possible second. I must admit to flinching a little as that vast spire of rock loomed closer and closer in the viewport, only to be pressed back in my seat by a sudden surge of acceleration as he tilted the nose up and shot us over the rim in an elegant parabola. Reflecting on the effect this manoeuvre would undoubtedly have had on my aide’s tender stomach, and thanking the Emperor quietly under my breath that I wasn’t there to hear him express his opinion of it, I glanced down, to find that we were skimming over the treetops of a jungle so lush it could almost have been Catachan itself.[1] [1. No doubt Sulla’s earlier mention of the verdant deathworld had stuck in Cain’s mind.]
My first impression of luxuriant foliage as far as the eye could see wasn’t to last for much longer, though. A few manmade structures broke the smooth flow of vegetation, a scattering of outlying hamlets, no doubt the habitations of the hardy souls who herded and processed the sauropods that grazed on its inexhaustible abundance, and the occasional road slashing through the trees and undergrowth, but for the most part the fecund flora seemed to hold unchallenged sway.
Indeed, to my surprise, it seemed Sulla had hardly been exaggerating about its vigour. In a couple of places the highways through the jungle were already choked with overgrowth, and I began to apprehend that in more normal circumstances keeping them clear would be a constant chore. One such blockage seemed to be surrounded by servitors, hacking and burning away at the encroaching vegetation with single-minded diligence, blissfully unaware that the world had changed irrevocably around them, rendering their efforts to restore order to it entirely futile.
Then, in a second, the landscape altered completely. Great ragged gashes had been torn through the carpet of undergrowth, bare earth showing where the ’nid swarms had scoured their way through the once verdant jungle, forming an arrow-straight highway from wherever they’d clambered up the precipice straight to the heart of the town. The scattered remains of gigantic bones showed where a herd of sauropods had been too slow to escape the tyranids’ relentless advance, and as we neared our destination I saw another of the luckless behemoths overwhelmed by the scuttling horde. Despite its huge size, almost as big as our shuttle, it was brought down in seconds, engulfed by a remorseless mass of talon and mandible. Scores of the things died beneath its massive feet, or were shredded by jaws that could have bisected a Leman Russ, but the sheer number of gaunts that swarmed over it told in the end, and the gigantic creature vanished entirely within an instant, becoming nothing more than a spasmodically twitching mound of chitin, which began to diminish rapidly in bulk.
“Emperor’s bones.” The pilot’s face was ashen. “Did you ever see the like?”
“All too often,” I said, keeping an eye out for a suitable landing site. Remembering my duty to boost morale, and mainly to take my own mind off the ghastly sight we’d just witnessed, I gave him an encouraging smile. “But we’ve got more guns than the lizards.”
“I guess.” The pilot didn’t seem any more convinced than I was, but returned his attention to the flight controls, which was one source of worry out of the way at any rate. I began to study the approaching town a little more carefully, making a mental note of all the hotspots, and trying to form an overall view of the battle to defend it.
The tyranids had evidently struck Konnandoil in a single mass, overwhelming the outlying districts on the side they’d attacked from in an unstoppable tsunami of cold malevolence. The PDF garrison had responded by setting up a defensive line on the fringes of the outer hab zone, giving the no doubt terrified civilians who lived there time to flee deeper into the town centre, where they could ultimately be eaten in a more salubrious environment.
There seemed to be little prospect of evacuating any survivors in the foreseeable future so far as I could tell, all our available air transport assets being fully engaged in ferrying more troops in. Nevertheless the line had held for a while, before the few surviving local PDF troopers had fallen back to join the second layer of defences, which had been hastily established by the first reinforcements to arrive, another PDF troop from a nearby plateau.
By the time we arrived the same grim dance had played itself out yet again, the surviving local units from around half a dozen scattered plateaux having consolidated at the third or fourth perimeter, which now encircled no more than two thirds of the besieged community.[1] Gathering from the sporadic local vox traffic that the vast majority of civilian survivors had been herded into the local temple, presumably in the hope that the Emperor would look after them as everyone else was too busy, I concentrated the bulk of my attention on the area roughly equidistant between it and the defensive line in my search for a suitable landing site. (If the ’nids did break through they’d head for the temple with the single-minded determination of Jurgen spotting an “all you can eat” buffet, giving us a chance to flank them, I hoped.) [1. Cain is presumably writing with the benefit of hindsight here, since, although the concentric rings of hastily prepared fortifications would be visible from the air, he would have had little detailed knowledge of the course of the battle up to this point.]
Spotting the plaza of the bureaucrats I directed the
pilot to it as I’ve already related, and left the flight deck to retrieve Jurgen and clamber aboard our Salamander. It had somewhat belatedly occurred to me that having been the last to board the shuttle our sturdy little scout vehicle would be poised at the top of the ramp, effectively blocking anyone else from getting off before we did, which as you’ll appreciate was a far from ideal state of affairs from my point of view. Nevertheless, there was nothing else for it, and at least I’d done all I could to make sure we’d be put down as far from the ’nids as possible, so I resolved to make the best of the situation.
And make the best of it we did, Jurgen flinging us down the metal incline like a sump rat abandoning a waste pipe, while I clung on to the pintel mounted heavy bolter I always like to have installed on my personal transport as a bit of extra insurance, trying to give the impression of leading from the front and being ready for anything.[1] Sulla’s command Chimera followed us, and the troop transports fell into formation behind her, barrelling across the open space, which had been paved in an intricate pattern of multicoloured tiles before our shuttle’s landing thrusters and the treads of our vehicles had made rather a mess of it. [1. An impression certainly received by Jenit Sulla, whose prolonged description of Cain’s “noble bearing in her account of the deployment is gushing in the extreme.]
“Fourth squad, with me.” Sulla’s voice was crisp in my comm-bead, every bit as efficient as she usually was when deploying her troopers, and for a moment I wondered if I should have hitched a ride in her command vehicle after all. That way I could have taken advantage of the vox and auspex systems onboard it to keep track of the ebb and flow of the battle, and maximised my chances of staying out of harm’s way. I’d also have been surrounded by armour plate; the Salamander was open topped, and uncomfortably exposed by comparison. On the other hand the sturdy little vehicle was faster and more agile than anything else in our inventory, and I’d outrun a tyranid swarm in one before (albeit when there’d actually been somewhere to go), while hanging over the auspex in person would have meant being stuck in a large metal box with Sulla for the duration of the battle. On the whole, taking my chances with the ’nids seemed to be the marginally less irritating of the alternatives. The equine lieutenant went on. “First and second, sweep out to the left. Third and fifth, you’ve got the right.”
A chorus of acknowledgements echoed in my comm-bead, and I leaned over the lip of the driver’s compartment, raising my voice over the racket of our engine and the screaming of the shuttle’s fusion jets as it rose over our heads and banked sharply away in the direction we’d come from.
“Stick with the lieutenant,” I told Jurgen, and he nodded once, accelerating smoothly to slot us in alongside the command Chimera. If I was going to have to rely on Sulla to keep me out of the jaws of the tyranids, I wanted to be where I could keep an eye on her, and prevent her from doing anything too rash. A brief flurry of vox traffic in my ear told me that Faril was down too, and meeting a little resistance in his efforts to link up with the PDF elements we’d been sent to reinforce.
“Nothing we can’t handle, though,” he informed us breezily, “just a few gaunts. Our heavy bolters are chewing them up nicely.”
“Glad to hear it,” I told him. The data-slate I’d brought with me from Hoarfell bumped gently against my hip as Jurgen bounced us over the central island of a gyratory road junction, and an idea belatedly occurred to me: I didn’t have to manage without access to the tactical displays just because I wasn’t inside the command vehicle after all. I fished the portable cogitator out of my pocket, removed it from the anonymous Guard issue protective case, and muttered the litany of activation as I pressed what I hoped were the right keys. It had been some time since I’d needed to patch a slate into a local datanet myself, and I’d got used to having a regimental enginseer around to delegate that sort of thing to. Fortunately my memory proved to be accurate, and in a moment the icon I’d been hoping to see appeared on the little pict screen. “Sulla, can your vox op[1] download the tactical display to my slate?” [1. Vox operator, a common abbreviation among Guard personnel.]
“No problem, commissar,” her familiar eager tone reassured me, and a moment later a detailed plan of the town appeared on the screen, overlaid with tiny moving icons showing the disposition of our forces and the dull, amorphous mass of the tyranid swarm. I noted with approval that Faril appeared to have joined up with what was left of the left flank of our defensive line, and that the ’nids’ advance there appeared to have halted as a result, while the centre was holding on nicely. Indeed, our forces seemed to be gaining a little ground in that spot if anything, which was not only a welcome surprise, but also quite astonishing for mere local militia. Recognising the icon for the main command unit, whoever that was, I directed Sulla to join it.
“Good idea,” she said, apparently under some sort of illusion that I gave a frak what she thought. “If we come in on their right we can broaden the salient. Otherwise they’re going to get cut off, if they keep advancing at that rate without consolidating.”
“You’re right,” I said, zooming in on the image on the tiny screen to get a clearer view of that section of the front line. With the larger, more detailed image of the portable hololith aboard the command vehicle to consult, Sulla had spotted what the reduced scale of the handheld display had made less obvious to me.
The unit gaining ground ahead of us, whoever they were, was advancing with a reckless disregard for their own safety, pushing deeper and deeper into the densely packed mass of tyranids facing them. Unless the flanking units followed, and started gaining a little ground too, the ’nids would be able to exploit the gap they’d opened up and surround them. More to the point, there was a more than even chance that part of the swarm would be able to sweep the other way too, gushing through the hole in our own lines that the gung-ho idiots had ripped open, wreaking Emperor alone knew what havoc in the streets behind us before the next batch of Guard troopers arrived to mop up the mess: assuming anyone could once our defences had been breached. “Follow up and reinforce, while I try to rein in those frakheads before they invite the ’nids round for tanna and florn cakes.”
“You can rely on us, commissar,” Sulla assured me, happy as ever to have something to shoot at, and began issuing orders to her troops. “You all know the drill. Advance behind the Chimeras, use whatever other cover you can, and watch each other’s backs. Concentrate your small-arms fire on the largest creatures you can see when you get the opportunity, but don’t let the little ones get too close while you’re doing it, especially the ’stealers. Heavy weapons concentrate on the big ones, and try to disrupt their formations.”
“And don’t advance too far,” I added. “If that reckless idiot out there gets too far ahead, leave him flapping in the breeze and pull back to hold the line. Our highest priority has to be protecting the civilians.” Not to mention my own tender skin, but it would hardly be tactful to say so over the comm net, and I knew from experience that practically the only thing likely to keep Sulla on the leash once she started dealing out damage to the enemy was an appeal to her overdeveloped sense of duty.
“Understood,” she said crisply, and went on issuing more detailed instructions to her squad commanders.
By now we were approaching the battlefront, the streets around us beginning to show clear signs of damage, while the unmistakable sounds of mortal combat wafted towards us through the moisture thick air, mingled with smudges of smoke and the rank smell of charred flesh. The Valhallans would find these humid conditions extremely uncomfortable, of that I had no doubt, but I knew them well enough to be sure that they’d fight just as effectively here as they would anywhere else, with the possible exception of a glacier field, where nothing or no one could challenge their superiority.
Jurgen slowed us a little, steering round a puddle of something viscid and greenish, which stank to the golden throne and seemed to have dissolved part of the roadway. As we skirted it I noticed a few pieces of metal in the middle of
the mess, which looked suspiciously like the remnants of lasguns, hissing quietly as they sublimed into goo. More splashes of bio-acid had eaten through the facades of a couple of nearby buildings, and I breathed a silent word of thanks to the Emperor that whatever had vomited them up appeared to be long gone.
Leaving Sulla to continue her advance, and spotting a handful of PDF troopers in a rather more practically drab version of the local uniform than most of them seemed to favour,[1] I decided to speak to whoever was in charge and get an up-to-date assessment of the current situation. Tactical displays are all very well, but if you really want to know what’s going on at the sharp end, it often pays to ask the troopers dodging the lasbolts how things seem from their perspective. Most of the troopers looked up in a desultory fashion as Jurgen slewed us to a halt with his usual vigour, raising a small hailstorm of pulverised roadbed from beneath our tracks as he did so, regarding me through eyes hollow with exhaustion as I hopped down from the Salamander to greet them. [I. Every plateau’s militia hat! its own colour scheme, generally as garish as the civilian fashions Cain noted earlier. The Aceralbaterrans, for instance, favoured orange fatigues under green and purple striped body armour, while the defence forces of Principia Mons appeared to prefer a combination of bright red and iridescent blue. As the tyranids generally rely on scent and vibration as much as sight to detect their prey, this bizarre predilection probably added less to their casualty rates than would have been the case with most other foes.]
“Commissar Cain,” I said, injecting just enough of a parade ground snap into my voice to get the nearest man’s attention without antagonising him needlessly. He had a corporal’s chevrons pinned to the collar of his midnight blue fatigues, which were the only signs of rank I could see anywhere. The dark grey flak armour on his torso bore the unmistakable gashes of genestealer talons. “Attached to the 597th Valhallan.”
[Ciaphas Cain 05] - Duty Calls Page 21