by Ben Counter
Orfos’s vision was whiting out and he could not move.
‘Here, brother,’ said Enriaan, putting Orfos’s remaining arm over his shoulder, and helping him towards cover. ‘You will live. We are victorious.’
As Orfos passed out, the last thing he saw was the pure, cold sky as it spun above him.
K-Day +11 Days
Operation Catullus
The night brought the real attack. Those that broke against the Temple of the Muses during the evening hours were probing the defences, looking for ways in. The horde that seethed through the dry canals around the temple seemed heedless of their own survival, but they were not led by fools. The men shot down by Subiacan lasguns and Imperial Fists bolters were sacrificed, and they now served to mark out the deadliest crossfires with the piles of their bodies.
The 91st Deucalian Lancers, infantry heavily supported with tanks and mobile artillery, reached the temple doors as the enemy were massing. Captain Lysander, who had learned siegecraft from the writings of Rogal Dorn himself, had the Imperial Guardsmen bristling the roof and windows of the temple with lasguns and the artillery lifted to the upper floors with chains hauled by gangs of Subiacan penal troopers. Tanks rumbled through the ground floor, setting up as gun emplacements amid the rubble of the earlier battle.
The 1179th Ground Support Wing of the Imperial Navy dropped cluster bombs into the canals and raked what enemy they saw with autocannon fire, but the enemy were well sheltered among the storm drains and bridges of the Wiseman’s Quarter. Castellan bombs scattered hundreds of mines across the murky sediment along the canal beds, and the stragglers and poorly sheltered died in their dozens to the explosive rain – but the enemy endured.
The Imperial Guard still spoke of the enemy as ‘the Aristeia’, the forces loyal to the ruling caste of Opis. But it was obvious even to many of the troopers on the ground that the Aristeia had not ruled Opis at least from the beginning of the Imperial invasion. More likely, the planet’s moral threats had been pulling the strings since before Lord Inquisitor Kekrops had arrived to hunt them down. Every soldier seemed to have sighted a formless monster, or a witch wreathed in lightning, from the windows of the temple. Daemons were said to be dancing among the enemy, and Guardsmen swapped their certainties that witch covens were piling pyres of bodies high and gates into the warp were being opened in shrines to dark gods beneath Rekaba.
The tide of fanatics broke cover after night fell. The guns of the Imperial Fists cut them down in such numbers that the next waves were wading through swamps of blood and torn bodies. The Deucalian tanks hammered explosive fire into the enemy.
Lysander ordered the Subiacan preachers to send in the penal legion troopers. A flood of combat drugs flowed into the veins of the Subiacans, and their entire strength swarmed out into the canals. They met the enemy in a brutal melee, a murderous crush with no way forward or back.
The Subiacans were the inmates of a prison world, and had been condemned for their crimes to fight and die for the Emperor. This was a fitting end for them, both a brutal punishment and a redemptive fate, and they bought back a few glimmers of the Emperor’s grace in death that they had forsaken in life. Captain Lysander, the Deucalians said, would do the same to every Guardsman on the planet if that was what it took. They crouched at their firing positions, watching the appalling bloodletting below, and thanked the Emperor that it was not their time yet.
The Imperial Navy craft shrieked over the canals and dropped enough incendiaries to turn the dry waterways into rivers of fire. Thousands of enemy militia and Subiacans died. By the time the fire died down, the remaining waves of enemy had little to do except rush through the ashes and get shot down by Deucalian lasgun fire.
The enemy withdrew. Some of them were too crazed to retreat, and wandered the scorched battlefield being picked off by Imperial Guard marksmen on the temple roof. A few strange sights were revealed in those moments – glowing-eyed, hovering creatures, witches or daemons shrouded in darkness, gathering the remains of their army and ushering them into the drains and sewers under Rekaba. Several Guardsmen swore they had seen a winged creature surrounded by a halo of silver lights overflying the battlefield, as if calmly taking a tally of the dead. Four gun crews were found dead on the upper floors, their eyes and hands later to be discovered heaped up at the foot of a gargoyle on the roof as if in offering. But the enemy were defeated at the Temple of the Muses.
The Imperial Guard knew better than to celebrate.
A dozen battles of the same scale and severity took place across Rekaba that night. Twelve city blocks in the Orphan’s Ward collapsed into the natural caves and underground rivers beneath the city, delivering almost the entire Manikrave Hussars regiment into the hands of an enemy horde with pallid white flesh and blank, blind skin where their eyes should have been. A Naval landing field, hastily built among the playing fields of Rekaba’s university, was overrun by an enemy regiment who marched and fought in perfect formation and were led by a towering warrior in molten steel armour. For every victory in Rekaba, the Imperial forces suffered a catastrophic defeat. Rekaba was no more willing to give itself up than Khezal, and Operation Catullus was following Operation Requiem in becoming a grinding cycle of murder.
In the Temple of the Muses, two thousand Guardsmen from the Luthermak Deathworlders regiment arrived to reinforce the Deucalians. Together they patched up their wounded, carried off their dead, and tried to keep their thoughts from turning to what the next night would hold.
Gorgythion found Lysander in the Grand Reading Room, the lavish domed auditorium where Opis’s greatest scholars had once held court. Now the Imperial Fists were using it as their command post, with vox-net boosters bringing in information from the Space Marines elsewhere on Opis.
Lysander looked up from a parchment map of Rekaba that had been found among the temple’s library stacks. ‘Gorgythion!’ he said. ‘I thought you lost.’
‘Lost no longer,’ replied Gorgythion, ‘now I am among brothers.’
Lysander looked Gorgythion up and down. ‘Where is your weapon?’
‘She lies in flames, in the jungle,’ replied Gorgythion. ‘The last of her kind, and now there will never be another. But you speak of my boltgun, captain? That lies there too, along with the body of my battle-brother, Kebriones.’
‘He will be mourned,’ said Lysander. ‘As will the Sanctifier.’
‘And how goes the battle here?’
Lysander glanced through the archway leading into the main floors of the temple, where Deucalian Guardsmen were hauling artillery pieces into place and handing out power packs for their lasguns. ‘The enemy will try again tonight. And again, and again, until the defenders break. The Temple of the Muses will hold if the enemy numbers run out, but without any such end in sight it is the duty of these soldiers to bleed the besieging force of as many men as they can.’
‘Then Rekaba will become a quagmire,’ said Gorgythion, ‘when we came to Opis to take its cities in days.’
‘You speak most freely, brother,’ said Lysander. ‘As if you do not trust that victory will belong to the Emperor on Opis. Do you have some greater insight, which I and the Imperial commanders do not?’
Gorgythion held up a hand. ‘Forgive me. I have seen my brother dead, my mission failed and my steed fallen. I forget myself. But I do have intelligence that others do not. In the jungle, some way from Rekaba, lies an installation surrounded by defences well beyond the capability of Opis. It was these defences, an energy weapon, that brought down the Sanctifier.’
‘And what is this installation?’ said Lysander.
‘Something that someone wishes to protect against intrusion,’ said Gorgythion. ‘It destroyed my craft and those of the Aristeia alike. Someone who is neither a part of the Imperial force nor of Opis’s rulers places great value on something in that jungle.’
‘I see,’ said Lysander. ‘This must be thought on. Yours is not the only such evidence we have come across. For now, brother, join Sergeant K
irav and find a weapon. We will need every gun tonight.’
‘Captain, sir!’ came a voice from the archway. A Deucalian, with a badly wounded right arm heavily bandaged, stood there, evidently despatched as a messenger.
‘Speak,’ said Lysander.
The Guardsman looked terrified to be in the same room as a Space Marine. ‘The enemy are sighted. They are moving through the buildings adjoining, at every level!’
‘Another test,’ said Lysander. ‘They know how we will react to an assault in the open. Now they fight room to room. Gorgythion, find Kirav. He should be at roof level. Go!’
The Temple of the Muses was suddenly wound up for war. The Deucalians were at their firing positions, leading one another in prayers for deliverance from the enemy or calling on the Emperor to guide their guns. Many of them ignored Lysander as he walked among them, wrapped up in their thoughts and fears of the coming action. Already the sounds of war, a constant dim thunder from elsewhere in the city, were growing closer. Squad Ctesiphon was stationed on the lower level, and the Deucalians there offered thanks to the Emperor that they would fight in the presence of the Adeptus Astartes.
‘Ctesiphon,’ ordered Lysander, ‘man the lower floors. Form up for volley fire. Fall back to the fountain room if you are surrounded.’
‘Understood, Captain,’ said Ctesiphon. His tactical squad, ten bolters strong, was the best line of defence the Imperial forces in Rekaba had.
Lysander ascended a spiralling marble staircase that led to the temple’s upper floors. They had escaped assault in the earlier battle. That would not be true for long. The enemy was acting in the way that all besieging forces with superior numbers would act – using their great numbers to test the defences, seek weaknesses at every level with repeated attacks, even if just to drain the ammunition and will to fight of the defenders.
The upper floors held museum and gallery rooms. A few of the portraits had been torn down or stolen, a few display cases of royal jewels and regalia smashed open and looted, but most remained. What looter had anywhere to take them?
Kirav’s squad were up here, among the rafters of the temple, along with the spotters for the Deucalian artillery and a few Imperial Guard snipers.
Brother Stentor was leading the pre-battle rites. Each of the squad had his bolter laid on the floor in front of him, gleaming from the wargear rituals that kept them in the best working order. Each man’s armour had been cleaned of the inky filth of the morning’s battle – even the white trim of their golden power armour shone, to denote their status as veterans of the First Company. Stentor’s words were Rogal Dorn’s, taken from one of the many volumes of battle speeches he had left to the Librarium of the Chapter. Every battle-brother knew them by heart, but when they were spoken before battle, they all heard them as if for the first time.
‘There is no enemy,’ said Dorn, his words relayed through the ages by Brother Stentor. ‘The foe on the battlefield is merely the manifestation of that which we must overcome. He is doubt, and fear, and despair. Every battle is fought within. Conquer the battlefield that lies inside you, and the enemy disappears like the illusion he is.’
‘Amen,’ said the battle-brothers of the squad, their heads bowed.
‘Captain,’ said Kirav, looking up. ‘What are your orders?’
‘Hold the rooftop,’ said Lysander. ‘I will be with you.’
‘Then we shall do as Dorn did on Terra!’ said Brother Beros. ‘We will cast the enemy from the battlements!’
Through the rips in the roof, Lysander could see the skyline of Rekaba picked out in the dying light. The parade ground nearby was burning, with Imperial Navy fighter-bombers on fire beside the improvised landing strip. Guardsmen were already swapping stories about the daemons conjured there, leaping monsters who bled flaming blood and hung their captives from gibbets of twisted thorns. The Butchers’ Vale, where thousands of tiny workshops and forges cramped over one another along mazes of narrow streets, was a dark, seething mass obscured by the smoke from dozens of fires. There the enemy were sheltering almost impervious to Imperial artillery, and several thousand Gathalamorian Guardsmen were manning the barricades to keep a cordon around the whole district. The Stadium of the Amethyst burned, a lake of fire from which incandescent winged shapes flitted up towards the sky. The spiralling dome of the Tower of Rats was half-collapsed, covered by a seething caul of mobile darkness. The city of Rekaba was devolving into a hundred battles, each one a grinding drain of manpower.
This was not a battle that could be won, because the enemy did not want to win. The battle was an end in itself. The enemy objective in both Khezal and Rekaba was simply to fight. They were not trying to expel the Imperial forces, just draw them in and keep them battling over every street and building. Lysander had seen enough sieges, and learned enough from the volumes of battle-lore Rogal Dorn and countless Imperial Fists heroes had penned, to see that.
And even though the enemy wanted him to fight, he would have to oblige them. For across the rooftops adjoining the Temple of the Muses were leaping a host of mutants, their bodies long and loping, whooping and shrieking as they bounded from gargoyle to chimney stack. They stuttered through the air, their unstable forms skipping across reality in impossible trajectories. They carried two-handed swords and axes looted from some Aristeia household’s armoury, and they were followed by bright trails of blood and sparks. Their skin was stretched haphazardly over altered skeletons, and tiny wriggling creatures swarmed from their ribcages.
Lysander swung himself up onto the roof. He could hear the orders of Sergeant Kirav and the cocking of bolters. He took the Fist of Dorn in both hands, ready to drop into a guard or lunge into a strike.
The enemy closed.
The farce would have one more scene before the Imperial Fists could strike out and find the truth. If Lysander had to lose himself in battle for a little longer, then that was what he would do.
The mutants shrieked. The closest had a contorted, elongated parody of a face, cackling imps spilling from its grinning jaws.
Lysander swung the Fist of Dorn into it, and took comfort in the breaking of its bones.
K-Day +11 Days
Intelligence collation ongoing in support of Operation Requiem
Deiphobus read their thoughts this time not by tearing them from the prisoners’ minds, but by letting them come to him. The lower level of the Merciless’s brig lacked the psychic defences of the cell where Filthammer had been kept, and the inmates were captured militia and mutants without psychic abilities. Nevertheless the first sight of them illustrated how dangerous they were. One vomited a constant stream of biting insects, which were now captured and drawn off by the drain installed in his cell. Another had oozed through his bars when first imprisoned, and was now sealed in a transparent cylinder with no opening through which his malleable form could escape. Perhaps the most striking had brightly patterned skin like that of a venomous lizard, which was appropriate given that his blood was highly poisonous, flammable and rather radioactive. He was welded into a voidsuit normally used for operations in a vacuum.
Two dozen militia were imprisoned on this brig floor. Most of them had crept to the back of their cells when they had seen Deiphobus. A few had pushed against the bars of their cells and hurled insults and threats at him.
Deiphobus sat in the centre of the brig corridor, on the steel floor. He bowed his head and allowed the first doors of his mind to open. For this exercise he constructed in his mind a fortress, with Imperial Fists standing on the battlements and a great black gate. The walls were hundreds of metres high and impossible to scale, and the foundations plunged down further than anyone could dig. The gate was the only way in.
The minds of the prisoners were outside the fortress. Deiphobus controlled which ones he let in and which he forced to remain outside. He imagined them lined up outside the gate and himself as a castellan on the battlements, looking down on them and judging them.
None of them was completely human. Even t
hose who looked outwardly normal had deformed, discoloured minds. Some he instantly turned away, for they were roiling, mindless bundles of anger and fear, and they would tell him nothing. They thrashed about in protest, so Deiphobus threw cages of black iron around them and sank them into the ground. They were banished from his mind, and would find no way in.
Others stood proud and fearless. Deiphobus discarded them, too. They did not fear him. Fear was one of the greatest weapons a Space Marine could wield. Whole worlds had surrendered when they saw the strike cruisers of the Space Marines hovering in orbit. The fearless ones were irretrievably insane and would try to confound Deiphobus with lies. They were useless to him, too, at least until their souls were broken.
The rest, the desperate and miserable, the terrified and the crushed, he let in. The black gate swung open just wide enough for them. In the gunsights of his mental guardians the captives filed in, heads bowed.
Manacles constrained them. The walls closed in and held them fast. The floor dropped away and they were held, suspended, as Deiphobus walked among them. The image he created for himself was a fusion of man and machine, a tall, muscular creature with limbs altered to incorporate every tool of interrogation that could be imagined and many that could not. He glided on a dozen segmented legs beneath a skirt of skin. His eyes were huge and multi-lensed, so he would miss nothing. As he bent over the captives, he could see their fear.
On one level, the fear was a particular configuration of brainwaves, picked up and interpreted by Deiphobus’s psychic talent. On the level he envisioned, it was blood that ran from their eyes, a physical manifestation of a mental injury.
‘Tell me everything,’ said Deiphobus to the first captive. Then he went to each of them in turn, bending over them so they could see all the surgical tools he carried and the infinite depth of his eyes.