The far side of the open space was now swarming with figures, a line several hundred metres wide advancing in such tight formation that it presented a mass of flesh. But the warsmith was blessed with the acute senses of his Legiones Astartes heritage, refined to preternatural sharpness by the gifts of the Ruinous Powers. He soon saw that the wave of defenders represented no disciplined counter-attack by well-prepared Imperial Guardsmen. Indeed, at least one in three of the figures carried no weapon and few wore a complete set of body armour.
‘Convicts,’ the warsmith sneered, his voice laced with hate. ‘They dare send penal troops against me…’
The air filled with the pounding of feet and a roar of maddened savagery as the penal legionnaires advanced into the open space. But the warsmith knew that ‘advanced’ was the wrong term. No, these wild-eyed scum were not advancing, they were being herded. Each wore about his neck a thick collar containing an explosive charge. At the first sign of cowardice the overseers would detonate a select few of these and make a grisly example the remainder could not fail to appreciate. In addition to the collars, the warsmith knew that it was likely that the convict-troopers were pumped up on frenzon or some other combat stimm, administered by implanted dispensers and controlled by those same overseers. In all probability, the penal legionnaires were in the grip of a chem-fuelled rage that would render them immune to pain and devoid of all sense of self-preservation.
A small part of Ironclaw approved of such tactics, for the Traitor Legions often fielded such auxiliary cannon fodder in a similar fashion. There was no shortage of lesser men driven to give their lives in the service of the warp, and the same was true of those fighting in the name of the Emperor. But another part of the warsmith knew the real reason the convicts were being herded forwards to their obvious doom.
‘God-machine,’ Ironclaw said into the vox. The Titan’s bale-eyed features turned in his direction, seeking out its master in the mass of tiny beings at its feet.
Following the line of buildings to the extreme left and right flanks, Ironclaw said, ‘Our enemies believe us fools to be so easily distracted by such an obvious target. The flanks,’ he ordered. ‘Open the unseeing eye.’
The Titan’s war horn sounded, deep and booming, its bass tone alone so violent it seemed as if it would bring the entire city crashing down. Even as the first, apocalyptic blast faded, a second, even louder one brought debris toppling down from already weakened towers.
Following its master’s order, the god-machine engaged its full array of sensors, from conventional augurs to sorcerous etheric inductors. The machine’s princeps, a once-celebrated hero of the Imperium long ago reduced to a drooling shell animated by the divine power of Chaos, imbibed the full range of sensor feedback and in an instant located what the warsmith suspected must be nearby.
‘Imperial armoured battlegroup,’ the princeps’ voice gurgled over the vox. ‘Descending at battle speed from the south.’
At last, thought the warsmith. An enemy worthy of my attentions.
‘Constituting?’ Ironclaw replied.
The princeps did not answer straight away, the god-machine’s systems, an unclean hybrid of silicon and cranial matter, working to refine the signal stream flooding in from its sensors.
‘Three super-heavies…’ the phlegmy voice bubbled over the vox. ‘A dozen battle tanks. Numerous lighter vehicles.’
The warsmith was thrilled that three super-heavy tanks might be about to join the battle, but he could hardly miss the disappointment in the princeps’ voice. Clearly, the god-machine desired to match its power against one of its erstwhile brothers in the Titan Legions. Ironclaw could well understand such a desire, though he had little time or inclination for empathy. With countless frenzon-driven penal legionnaires screaming across the open ground, and the real threat pushing in from the south behind the cover of the ruined city, he had very little time at all.
In the span of time most men take to decide to flee, the warsmith formulated his response, as he had in so many equally pressing battlefield situations throughout his long tenure as commander of an Iron Warriors grand company. Memories of the Triumphal Gate at Argent Rex smashed asunder surged to the forefront of his mind, but he repressed them savagely lest his senses became dulled on the glut of past glory.
‘Iron Warriors!’ the warsmith bellowed, his voice amplified over the roar of the oncoming horde and the thrumming systems of the Titan at his back by his numerous machine augments. ‘Forward by squads, wipe them out! Stain the ground crimson as we did upon the moons of Lemuria!’
At their warsmith’s order, the squad leaders led their warriors forwards to meet the onrushing horde, their advance implacable as their bolters spat mass-reactive death in disciplined staccato bursts. Yet, Ironclaw had more orders to give.
‘God-machine,’ he addressed the Titan, its weapons already tracking towards the as yet unseen armoured battlegroup. ‘Target the intact building with the statue of Saint Arxades upon its façade. Sustained beam, but only upon my express order, understood?’
The Titan’s only response was a grating howl of feedback as its torso rotated with the titanic grinding of vast gear wheels. Its turbo laser levelled upon the target building, but as ordered, the princeps held his fire.
Before the warsmith could proceed, a warning bark from one of his nearby Chosen brought his attentions back to the open ground. The Iron Warriors were pressing forwards, and those penal troopers equipped with ranged weapons were returning fire. Their aim was so badly awry they could only have been dosed with a lethal amount of frenzon, making it clear that the legionnaires’ overlords held no expectation of them surviving. But then, Ironclaw knew, that was not the point.
In the final moments before the two opposing masses of troops crashed together, the warsmith barked a series of clipped orders. So well disciplined were his warriors that the force reacted as if it were an extension of his own body, each squad a limb, each of their weapons his own.
At the centre, boltguns spat a continuous stream of fire, each shot aimed and deliberate, though the enemy were so densely packed that the Traitor Marines could scarcely miss. As the range closed still further, the Iron Warriors stowed boltguns and drew weapons more suited to the butchery of close combat. Chainswords screamed as their motors were gunned in eager readiness to cleave the flesh of the enemy, while bolt pistols barked well-aimed shots that sent severed limbs arcing through the blood-misted air.
In amongst the ranks of the Iron Warriors strode other elements of Ironclaw’s command. Hulking Obliterators, each half as tall again as a Chosen Terminator and twice as broad, formed walking gun-phalanxes, unleashing a devastating torrent of fire, gunning down dozens with each blast of the weapons that grew from their twisted metal flesh. A pack of howling Possessed, each once an Iron Warrior and now the vessel for a fell daemon of the warp, were the first to plunge headlong into the melee, their distended, claw-tipped limbs thrashing about so violently that each was soon wading through a flood of gore and viscera.
With a savage grin, Ironclaw braced himself to receive the convicts’ charge. An instant later the torrent of bodies broke upon his line, and the battle was truly joined.
The press was so great that individual enemies seemed to melt into a screaming, surging mass of limbs. Lasguns wielded as clubs thudded against his armour while stray shots whip-cracked all around. Within seconds the warsmith was covered with grasping foes, his Terminator-armoured form taking on the appearance of a hulking prehistoric predator assailed by numerous lesser creatures, each hanging from an ironclad limb as they clawed for some weak point in his armour.
They would find none, for the only exposed part of the warsmith’s body was his face, and despite appearances, even that was protected. The bone of his skull had long ago been transmogrified to ceramite and his tendons replaced with unbreakable plasteel cabling. The bodies of the penal legionnaires were not so fortunate, however.
With a machine-flesh nerve impulse, the warsmith activated the generators in his matched lightning claws, the serrated blades spitting arcs of searing light. Flexing the blades once, he lashed out in a wide arc, and in a second everybody within a three hundred-and-sixty-degree arc was eviscerated. Even before the spilled guts of the dozen and more foes he had struck down had hit the rockcrete ground, the warsmith brought the metallic tentacles that were his mechatendrils whipping about. One was tipped by a flared flamer nozzle burning with its baleful blue pilot light.
The mechatendril lashed about and its weapon-tip vomited a searing blast of alchemical fire. A circle of foes still wider than those the warsmith had eviscerated was transformed into a wall of flaming bodies, a hideous screech erupting all about. Only those legionnaires clinging tightly to the warsmith’s Terminator armour had avoided death, their fellow convicts scattered and burned in a wide circle about him.
A desperate trooper, his face alight with frenzon-induced bloodlust, hauled himself onto Ironclaw’s massive shoulder as another wrapped his body about the warsmith’s leg. Twisted and blackened limbs grasped upwards from the body-strewn ground, the combat stimms driving the fallen to fight on through what should have been unbearable pain and mortal wounding.
A claw grasped for the warsmith’s face, the fingers spread wide like an animal’s talons. Even before he could react, a thumb dug into his eye socket up to the knuckle in a vain effort to blind him.
A metallic growl surging from his throat, the warsmith bared his sharpened metal teeth and plunged them savagely through the wrist of the hand seeking to extract his eyeball. Blood spurted across his vision as the wrist was entirely cut in two, the hand remaining in place until the warsmith shook his head, dislodging the thumb from his eye socket and clearing the blood from his vision. Thanks to his Legiones Astartes heritage and the numerous blessings of the warp, the trauma barely made an impact on the warsmith’s eyesight.
His attacker was equally unmoved by the ruin done upon his own body. The man was so dosed up on frenzon that he was barely slowed by the loss of his hand. Even now, he was attempting to bring his other hand to bear as the assailant clinging to Ironclaw’s back grasped down towards his bare head.
‘Enough,’ the warsmith growled, lashing out with both lightning claws with such fearsome speed that the legionnaire had no chance to see his death coming. The steaming chunks of his ruined body splattered across the ground.
The attacker upon the warsmith’s back was lifted high by a pair of snaking mechatendrils, one coiled about his neck, the other around a foot. With a brutal thought-impulse, Ironclaw tore the man in two and cast his still-thrashing remains into the surging crowd.
Now the two forces were merged into a chaotic, seething ocean of death and rage. Each Iron Warrior fought his own war against any enemy who dared approach within his reach, and certainly, none cowered from doing so. The legionnaires numbered in the hundreds and they were utterly fearless. Men fought on even with limbs torn away by screaming chainswords, and refused to die even when mass-reactive bolt-rounds exploded their guts across the ground. Ironclaw’s perceptions shifted to that timeless state of mind only attainable in the boiling cauldron of battle, where blood sung and the powers of the warp gibbered and writhed but a thought away.
Ever had it been thus, since the earliest days of Ironclaw’s existence. Even before the bitter days of the Great Betrayal, he had mastered every form of death. He had fought across a hundred warzones before the Warmaster had mustered at Isstvan, from frozen wastes to boiling death world jungles. He had fought beneath the ammonia seas of Ixacta Luminus and across the anti-grav extractor platforms in the upper atmosphere of Newton Prime. But always, in moments such as this when his steel-lined veins sang with the glory of battle, he was back at Tallarn, fighting across the oozing remains of that once-verdant world. Whatever enemy he was facing, that enemy was the Tallarns. Whatever general commanded them was always the Caliphar of the Crescent City, and his champion was always that whirling cyber-berserker who had been so blessed as to die at the hands of the mighty, proud IVth Legion.
But ever were the foe too little of a challenge for one who had bestridden the battlefields of the galaxy for countless centuries. There was only one foe Ironclaw truly felt honoured to confront…
An ordnance shell thundered overhead and the warsmith’s consciousness snapped back to the murderous reality of his surroundings. The enemy piled up at his feet were not the forces of the Caliphar, nor that other, hated foe. They were the penal cannon fodder of the defenders of the Bastion Primus, and they were on the verge of achieving what their brutal overseers had meant of them.
‘God-machine!’ Ferrous Ironclaw bellowed, his machine-augmented voice carrying over the raucous clamour of war. ‘Now!’
The Titan made no answer to its master’s order – not a vocalised one, at least. Instead, it braced its massive limbs and opened wide its plasma couplings. The power of a captive sun cascaded through its conduits to feed the turbo laser mounted at its left shoulder.
Forewarned of the impending blast, the Iron Warriors engaged protective armour systems, for to do otherwise would have left even such mighty warriors blinded. The penal legionnaires were not so fortunate, however, and as the air turned white, hundreds of them suffered their optic nerves burned to ash. Hair and clothing flash-ignited as the laser blast lanced overhead in a continuous stream, accompanied by a sound as of a star screaming in rage.
The object of the Titan’s wrath was the building the warsmith had indicated, but its true target lay beyond the shattered mass of statue-decked masonry. The lead super-heavy, its commander hoping to approach the Iron Warriors under cover and to catch them mired in the open killing ground, was about to crash through the ruin. The turbo laser blast obliterated what remained of the building, passing through its atomised fabric with no appreciable loss of power, and lanced into the frontal armour of the oversized tank behind it.
Incredibly, the tank’s glacis withstood the searing beam for several seconds before the armour turned to molten lava and the beam punched through the turret and into the engine deck beyond. The tank’s plasma reactor was obliterated and the roiling energies contained within set free in an instant.
The resulting explosion left nothing whatsoever of the target, the ground torn into a ragged black crater several metres deep. The blast crippled the second super-heavy, its frontal armour torn to shreds and its crew flash-boiled alive at their stations. The third was raked by a pressure wave that rocked its titanic mass back on its suspension and buckled its main cannon. Of the other, lighter armoured vehicles that followed in the wake of the super-heavies, nothing but smoking wrecks remained.
The area between the walls and the city proper was indeed the killing ground it was designed to be, but not for the attackers. The defenders were in utter disarray. The penal legion, herded forwards to mire the Iron Warriors in the open so that the armoured battlegroup might gun them down, was all but dead, the turbo laser blast fired scant metres overhead having seared the meat from the bones of hundreds of combat-stimmed troopers. Of those that remained, it appeared that bitter reality was slowly asserting itself as the frenzon washed away. Though most were blinded by the laser burst, the survivors were stumbling away through the human wreckage strewn across the open ground, finally more scared of the invaders than of their cruel overseers.
Burning debris scything down all about him, Ferrous Ironclaw was suddenly aware that night was closing in. The city was now alight with raging fire touched off by the turbo laser blast, the roiling clouds overhead underlit flickering orange like some mad remembrancer’s vision of damnation. Shattered buildings were silhouetted black against sheets of fire dozens of metres tall, the figures of fleeing defenders darting across them intermittently.
‘And now begins the true battle,’ Ironclaw snarled, blood rising in expectation of what was to come. The breaching of the walls had bee
n performed according to principles of military science long ago perfected by the Iron Warriors and their genius primarch; the next phase would be something altogether different.
An air of tense expectation descended upon the Iron Warriors. Each of them was smeared in gore and dirt, their normally shining armour dulled by war. Visored helms scanned the flame-wreathed ruins and weapons tracked slowly back and forth. Time slowed as the warp pressed in about them, the eyes of its unknowable denizens turned towards these ultimate betrayers of all they had been created to be. Such destruction had been wrought this day that the soul-thirsty beings of the empyrean were even now watching with that curious mixture of cruel approval and rank jealousy.
Sensing the pent-up fire burning in the soul of each of his warriors, Ferrous Ironclaw bared his teeth in a feral leer, the blood of his last attacker smeared across his features. The pressure of the warp increased exponentially, until it could be resisted no longer. The Iron Warriors were no longer assaulting the Bastion Primus, and neither were their foes the defence forces of Bellum Colonia. Now, each and every one of the Traitor Marines believed with utter conviction that he was closing on the inner fortress of the Caliphar, the Crescent City burning around them.
Even as reality stretched to breaking point, the warsmith gave the signal. As one, the entire force started forwards. The mighty god-machine strode across the killing ground in but three steps, a vast mechanical foot passing directly over the warsmith’s retinue in its eagerness. Dreadnoughts and Defilers pounded the rockcrete to dust as they surged forwards, smashing aside the ruins as they surrendered to the fury within. Forgefiends and Maulerfiends, the daemon-engines bound to the Iron Warriors’ service by unspeakable pacts, now sought to claim what was rightfully theirs, their daemonic preysight latching on to the flaring soul-light of their foes.
But most terrible of all were the Iron Warriors themselves. Each of these veterans of the Long War was a brutal tyrant, a slayer of worlds, a champion of the Ruinous Powers and the doom of mankind. They bestrode the burning city like gods of war, their ceramite tread crushing rubble, their power-armoured shoulders crashing through tottering walls, and their relentless bolter-fire gunning down any enemy they encountered amongst the ruins.
Treacheries of the Space Marines Page 15