by C Z Dunn
The dull thud of the hellhammer cannon reverberated around the tank’s command compartment, the sound dampeners and recoil suppressors fitted by K’Cee keeping the noise down to tolerable levels. The jokaero, who had not accompanied Tzula back to Atika, loped around the cabin, checking instrument banks and adjusting settings and configurations. Despite all of the enhancements the hairy creature had already made, the tank was still very much a work in progress for him.
More of the disease-carrying monstrosities shambled up the steep approach to the stronghold, seemingly impervious to the las-fire from the assorted Catachans and militia arrayed behind rocks and barricades close to the entrance. In the wake of the daemons, power armoured figures ascended the slope, Black Legionnaires and unidentified crimson-clad traitors using the horned beasts as a shield of warp-tainted flesh. Sporadic bolter fire forced the human defenders to seek cover, allowing the Chaos vanguard to gain yet more ground.
Ordering his crew to hold until the last possible moment, Strike waited until the front ranks of rotted daemon flesh were within range of all of the Hellhammer’s weapons systems before ordering, ‘Fire all weapons.’
Flamers and heavy bolters seared and eviscerated the gangly cyclopses, unholy howls heralding them back to whence they came. Lascannons and autocannons targeted the Traitor Astartes, pinning them back and felling several under the withering barrage. Without the enemy’s suppressing fire to contend with, the Catachans and delver militia leapt from cover, setting about any foe not killed outright by the Hellhammer’s onslaught. In their diminished state, the fallen daemons were still a formidable threat, slashing away with corroded swords that instantly melted the flesh of anything it came into contact with. One particularly pernicious beast slew nine men before succumbing to its numerous wounds.
Observing from the turret hatch, Strike saw the Traitor Astartes on the move again, clambering from rock to rock on the hillface, using them as cover to reach their objective while the humans were occupied by trying to kill enemies that stubbornly refused to die. ‘Advance,’ he ordered closing the hatch and returning to his command seat. Tamzarian threw the tank into reverse, moving out from behind the rock wall where it had been hull down and sped down the slope towards the oncoming enemy. Catachans and militiamen threw themselves out of the way as the gargantuan tank moved through them, tearing up the ailing daemons beneath wide tracks.
To the crew inside, it felt as if they were barely moving, the only evidence of progress the gentle jarring every time the Hellhammer crushed a foe. K’Cee’s modifications to the tank did not simply extend to the armour and weapons. The Phaeton pattern Adaptable Thermic Combuster which powered the tank had been souped-up and tuned to such a degree that when Tamzarian had opened her up on one of the plains approaching Thermenos, the Hellhammer had reached a speed of one hundred and seventy-six kilometres per hour before experiencing any significant hull rattle.
Coming to a halt still some fifteen metres away from the new frontline, the tank’s Demolisher cannon came to life for the first time during the battle, the siege breaking weapon just as efficient at breaking rocks behind which traitors skulked. Chunks of stone, ceramite armour and body parts were thrown into the air as a result of each cacophonous detonation, dust and shrapnel raining down on the slope. Using the command vehicle as cover, the defenders of Thermenos lent their weapons to the effort, keeping the traitors behind cover so that the heavy calibre weapon could despatch them with impunity.
His veteran ears attuned to the sounds of battle, Strike thought he heard a noise in between the cannon fire.
‘Cease fire,’ he ordered, much to the puzzlement of the gunners. The big guns fell silent, as did the chatter and whine of the secondary weapon systems. There. Faint, indistinct but undeniably the sound of an engine. He slid back the cover of the view slit but the tiny aperture offered no kind of view. Risking enemy fire, he popped the top hatch and stuck his head out far enough that his eyes came above the top of the rim. The las-fire from the Catachans using the tank as mobile cover had not abated and the Traitor Marines were still hemmed in behind the few rocks left for them to shelter behind. The engine noise was louder now. When Strike moved his gaze to the south-west, the source became clear to him.
Slamming the hatch behind him, Strike dropped back into the command chair. ‘Enemy bombers at two o’clock. Three of them plus a fighter escort,’ he explained. The graveness of their predicament escaped no one. Exposed as they were on the side of the hill, the top of their hull presenting as a near-unmissable target, their chances of surviving the next few minutes were almost zero. ‘Get me a firing solution now.’ Strike cursed himself silently. Had this all been a ruse to draw him out? The enemy force did seem too small to capture a delver-stronghold and the Traitor Astartes had seemed very reluctant to commit fully to the assault.
With barely the sound of motors and gear whirring, the turret turned quickly, hellhammer cannon elevating to the correct angle. The lead gunner’s targeting array filled with hostile icons and, with K’Cee’s aid, he finessed the dials and mechanisms until a single target sat between the crosshairs. ‘Target acquired,’ he said turning to the colonel.
‘Fire when ready,’ Strike acknowledged. Without hesitation the gunner depressed the firing stud, the muffled sound of shell discharge resonating within the compartment.
One of the large red icons instantly blinked out on the gunner’s array. ‘It’s a hit, chief. We got it!’ the gunner called out enthusiastically. His joy soon waned. ‘The formation’s breaking up. They’ve split the bombers.’
Strike’s heart sank. If the enemy had stayed in formation they stood a chance of taking out both bombers. Having to readjust the turret and firing angle to a greater degree, they’d be fortunate if they downed even one more. Without waiting for an order, the lead gunner and K’Cee had another large red icon in their sights. This time, Strike didn’t say anything, nodding his affirmation instead. The only hope left to them was that the final bomber missed with its payload and they’d get one more shot. That still left the fighter escort and, with the top of the tank exposed as it was, they would be like target practice to any pilot who could shoot remotely straight.
The tank rocked gently under suppressed recoil. ‘Another hit, chief,’ the gunner said grimly moments later. To the amazement of all those cooped in the Hellhammer’s command compartment, he added, ‘The other bomber’s gone too. And the fighters. Every one of them just disappeared from the targeting screen.’
Not waiting for confirmation from K’Cee that the instruments were functioning correctly, Strike lifted the top hatch to see for himself if the enemy flyers were still in the sky. The chorus of cheers from his troops and the militia told him that they weren’t before the string of black smoke clouds and tumbling debris became apparent to him. New engine noise filled the skies now. Louder, faster craft and, after the formation of five black flyers flew directly overhead and Strike had taken a good look at their markings, friendlier ones too.
As he watched in awe and relief, four of the flyers peeled off, turning around no doubt to strafe the Traitor Astartes still in cover lower down the slope. The final flyer, a miniature cathedral sat atop its back just behind the cockpit, veered straight upwards before gracefully flipping over in a corkscrew motion and diving towards the side of the hill. The sheltering traitors broke from the protection of the rocks, the steep angle speeding their descent back down the slope and into the suddenly more attractive protection of the jungle. Pulling out of its plummet at the very last moment, the black liveried flyer deposited its payload in amongst the fleeing enemy from a height of barely five metres. The weapon’s effect was not what Strike had expected.
Though devastating to those close to the bomb’s point of impact, the larger number of traitors at the edges of its radius appeared to freeze, as if time had stopped briefly, locking them in place. Gradually, their progress sped up, but during the glacial seconds before they had returned to normal pace, the four support fighters had turned back around
and slain most of them. A handful of Traitor Astartes had survived the intervention from the Catachans’ newfound allies and were almost at the treeline where rocky hill face became undergrowth. Strike was about to order his troops to pursue them when the shade of the jungle was lit up by actinic light, ten figures in ivory Terminator armour materialising in the space between eye blinks. Another eye blink and they had mown down the retreating Chaos Marines with concentrated bursts from their storm bolters.
Fascinated by what had just occurred, it was some time before Strike realised that his vox-operator, Uclaris, was tugging at the leg of his fatigues. The colonel looked down into the darkness of the command compartment, the sweaty figure of Uclaris was trying to hand him the handset of a portable vox.
‘What is it, Uclaris?’ Strike asked, his attention still partly on the armoured figures down at the bottom of the slope who now appeared to be examining the corpses of the dead traitors.
‘Somebody on the vox, chief. Claims they’re a Lord Azrael of the Dark Angels and insists on speaking only to you.’
787960.M41 / Atika Hive, Pythos
Grigor Mittel, though he no longer remembered that he was ever called that, carried the ore like he had been ordered to do. The red Pythosian crystal was stained an ever darker shade, Grigor’s blood trickling over it from wounds sliced into his arms from the rough edges of the unrefined mineral. Just as Grigor could no longer remember his own name, he could no longer feel pain, and his cuts went both unheeded and untreated.
Beside Grigor, others plodded on, identical lumps of rock held out in front of them. None of them spoke; none of them looked in any direction other than straight ahead; none of them interacted with anything other than the precious cargo they had been told to carry from the mines below to the city above. The city. Was this where he had once lived? The surroundings seemed so familiar yet, like his name, it was impossible to recall.
The man in front of him fell, the weight of the ore too great a burden. Grigor stopped before he tripped over the man now lying inert on the floor. Stopping. Starting. Lifting. Those were the few things Grigor remembered how to do.
Noise from further ahead captured his attention like flame does a moth’s and he looked to see two armoured figures moving towards the fallen man. The others alongside him looked too and saw the same bloated forms lift the man from the ground and throw him to one side. An arm came off in one of the armoured figure’s hands and he laughed a horrible, wet laugh as he tossed the limb on top of the body. Grigor did not know that the laugh was horrible as Grigor could no longer feel horror. Grigor could not feel anything at all. Not any more.
A woman who had been performing some menial task at the side of the walkway out of the mine moved in front of Grigor and lifted the chunk of ore left there by the fallen man. Her clothes were filthy and her hair was a mess but none of this registered with Grigor. Grigor no longer had any concept of filthy or messy, just like he no longer had any concept of wood, the night sky or the colour yellow. As the woman hefted the rock up to her chest, her eyes briefly met Grigor’s and the slightest spark of recognition flared between them. It was over in an instant and the woman turned to face in the same direction as the rest of the indentured work party. At a barked command from one of the armoured figures, Grigor and the others moved off, conveying the ore to the waiting transporters.
As Grigor passed under the archway that signified where the mine terminated and the city began, sudden movement caught his eye from an alcove in the rocky walls above. Like the look he had shared with the woman in front of him, it was over quickly and, lacking the faculties to either react to or inform anybody of what he had witnessed, Grigor continued onward.
From a ledge set in the bedrock foundations of Atika Hive, Tzula, Epimetheus and Shira looked on as the procession of plague zombies passed beneath them. The Navy pilot wore a sullen look on her face as a result of having just been admonished by her two companions for wanting to leap down from their hiding place and ‘beat the crap’ out of the two Plague Marines who had so callously treated the corpse of the dead old man.
‘When are you going to understand that these people have been dead for a long time?’ Tzula hissed once the last of the zombies and their overseers were gone. ‘We can’t save them, Shira. They’re beyond that now.’
They had been lurking in the shadows of Atika Hive for over two weeks now, slowly moving through the shell of the city that now resembled something from within the Eye of Terror more than it did anything that once belonged to the Imperium of Man. When they had set out from Thermenos many months earlier they had not planned on adding to their number, but when Shira’s fighter put down in the swamps less than half a kilometre from where they had made camp and Tzula was able to convince Epimetheus to go in after the Kestrel and rescue the pilot, two became three. Brave to the point of stupidity and with an independent streak as wide as a Baneblade, Tzula had taken an immediate liking to the younger woman. She’d already proved her worth on the march to Atika and her aim with a laspistol was as good as any Imperial Guardsman, as scores of cultists would attest to if they were still in any condition to attest. Her lack of patience was becoming a bind, however.
Unlike Epimetheus who was patience personified.
They had arrived at Atika a month earlier, but the Grey Knight insisted on taking his time to scout the city and find the best point of insertion to minimise their risk of detection. Eventually locating a sewer outlet pipe that ran into the ocean several kilometres east of the hive, they had crawled the entire way into the city through a stagnant stream of filth and waste. When they made it to the end, Epimetheus had insisted that they wait for three days until he had enough information to determine enemy patrol patterns. Finally emerging from the cess pipe, even the rancid corpse reek of the hive city had smelled like the sweetest air Tzula and Shira had ever breathed in.
Despite all the time they had spent together in the intervening months, Tzula still knew very little about the ancient Space Marine. Rather than wasting her time by verbalising ten thousand years of Imperial history, Tzula had let Epimetheus probe her mind to gather the information he needed to get up to speed. In return, he had offered nothing. One evening before they had met Shira, Tzula had deployed some of her more subtle Inquisition interrogation techniques, the kind where the person being interrogated does not realise it is happening. Either Epimetheus was wise to what she was doing or he had been conditioned to resist neurolinguistic questioning.
The only response she did get from the Space Marine was when she asked if he had fought during the Horus Heresy, and even that was nothing more than a close of his eyes and a slight nod.
‘I know, but I feel so useless hiding out in the shadows like this. Surely there’s something we can do?’ Shira still wore the same flight suit she had been wearing when she had crash-landed, but with adjustments to the legs and sleeves to make it more comfortable to wear in Pythos’s hot climate. Patches of scar tissue puckered over her legs and arms where they were visible beneath the crude cuts of the fabric and her neck looked like that of a much older woman where the healing process had wrinkled the flesh. A belt hung loose at her waist, a holstered laspistol on one hip, her predator-styled helmet on the other.
‘We are doing something,’ the normally silent, normally helmeted Epimetheus intoned in a bass whisper. Though Shira would swear that she and Epimetheus had shared many conversations in the time she had been a member of their little band, these were actually the most words the Grey Knight had ever spoken to her, all previous occasions being Shira talking at the Space Marine rather than with him. Yet more testimony to his patience and her brashness. ‘We’re going to find out what’s going on here and we’re going to put an end to it.’ There was an intensity to his words but laced with kindness. He could not chastise the woman for wanting to do something to help.
‘You think it’s more than a mining operation they’re running here?’ Ever since they had arrived in Atika it had been gnawing away at Tzula w
hy the invaders had turned to extracting the Pythosian crystal. There were rare examples of forge-worlds falling to Chaos and continuing to produce las-weaponry, but most converts brought their own with them when they turned or looted them from the corpses of dead Guardsmen. Her strongest theory was that Strike’s resistance was so effective that Abaddon’s army was forced to resupply and rearm itself from what resources they could find on the planet they now held. That thought at least helped Tzula sleep, on those rare occasions when she could grab rest so far into enemy territory.
‘I know it’s more than a mining operation they’re conducting in Atika. This city was built atop the Damnation Cache. A conduit by which daemons can enter the material realm lies somewhere beneath us.’
Tzula looked at him agog. ‘You know the location of the Damnation Cache and only now do you decide to share that information? How long have you known?’
‘My memory is eidetic so I have “known” its location ever since I first came out of my sus-an coma.’
‘You were in a coma?’ said Shira, who up until this point had looked on like a child watching her parents bickering. Both Epimetheus and Tzula turned and gave her looks that implied most convincingly that she would be better off keeping her mouth shut for the next few minutes. ‘It’s just you never mentioned anything about that to me…’ she added, sheepishly.
‘So if you’ve known ever since you woke up, why didn’t you let Strike know? He could have mounted an assault.’ Tzula fought hard to keep her voice at a level that wouldn’t carry.
‘As brave and able as the colonel and his regiment are, they don’t have the numbers capable of posing any real threat to Abaddon and his army. Strike’s guerrilla campaign is the optimum course of action at this point while we wait for reinforcements. Besides, even if the Catachans could fight their way through to the Cache, how would they close it?’
‘How would we?’
Epimetheus pointed to the hilt poking out of Tzula’s waistband. She reached down with her artificial hand and brushed her fingers over the hilt. ‘The blade…’