Then I stiffened, my eyes narrowing. The first bright streak across the sky was followed by another, and another, falling as thick and fast as rain in a thunderstorm. I turned back to the hololith, my panicked questions dying on my lips. Zyvan was standing, talking to someone outside the range of the projection field, while the insubstantial figure of the tau diplomat hovered on its fringes, flickering in and out of existence like a warp wraith trying to cling to its handhold in reality.
‘Something’s wrong,’ Sholer said, his eyes still fixed on the miniature drama being enacted on the tabletop.
‘Very,’ I agreed. ‘Take a look outside.’
‘Holy Throne!’ he said, succinctly. ‘That looks like–’
‘The second wave’s just hit,’ Zyvan informed us. ‘Far heavier than the last one.’
‘Of course,’ I said, recognising the typical tyranid tactic. This time round they’d try to get enough organisms on the ground to really stretch our dirtside defences, gathering the information they needed to completely overwhelm us on the next try, or the one after that, or the one after that. In the meantime they’d be creating beachheads, allowing the swarms to grow, and begin harvesting the biomass they needed to swell their ranks still further. I tried to make my next remark sound like a joke, already knowing the answer, but clinging to the hope that it wouldn’t be the one I expected. ‘I take it my lift’s postponed?’
‘’Fraid so,’ Zyvan said, taking the pleasantry at face value. ‘You’ll have to sit this one out too.’
But, as I stared at the flickering lights in the sky, I didn’t think for one moment that that would be an option.
From The Crusade and After: A Military History of the Damocles Gulf, by Vargo Royz, 058.M42.
The second tyranid assault hit Fecundia with a ferocity the beleaguered defenders could scarcely withstand, losing several of the lighter vessels to acid or bio-plasma discharges even before the fleets closed. Through these gaps in the defensive line poured uncountable numbers of mycetic spores, each loaded with lethal organisms, infecting the planet below like viruses finding a vulnerable host, while the living starships tried to engage the survivors at close quarters with claws and tentacles, or launched boarding parties in an attempt to harvest the crews.
Though faltering, however, the line did not break, the gallant starfarers of the Imperial Navy retaliating with lance, broadside and torpedo, tearing the hearts out of untold numbers of the void-spawned abominations. Even the merchant vessels still in orbit used their relatively puny armament to good effect, forming themselves into ad hoc squadrons whose combined firepower was sufficient to cripple, and in a few cases kill, those tyranid monstrosities incautious enough to consider them defenceless.
Nevertheless, the battle in space was a close-run thing, and could easily have had quite another outcome had it not been for the unexpected and decisive intervention of Commissar Cain who, at the point the battle began, had more than enough to concern him as the invasion of the surface got under way.
TWENTY-FIVE
‘Looks like we’re a prime target,’ I said, trying to keep my voice level, as the number of contact icons grew around the glowing rune marking our position in the hololith.
‘We are,’ Yail agreed, sounding as happy as a Space Marine ever is when faced with overwhelming odds, which isn’t exactly cheerful, but a lot more sanguine about it than I generally am. No doubt because, from their point of view, it’ll either result in a heroic victory or a glorious last stand, both of which will go down well in the annals of their Chapter.
‘They’re targeting the bioship fragment,’ Sholer said, sounding almost as concerned about his lump of meat as our own safety, which I have to confess was my main concern at this point. ‘What’s our state of readiness?’
‘As good as it can be,’ I told him, knowing he’d be as aware as I was of just how inadequate that was likely to prove. ‘The skitarii have finished laying minefields, and are dug in around our perimeter.’ Rather them than me, I added silently to myself.
‘My battle-brothers and I will be joining them,’ Yail added, ‘as soon as the tactical situation has become clear enough to know where we will be most needed.’
‘What about the Land Speeder?’ I asked, turning my attention to the pict screen, across which the darkened dunescape was scudding. The scout vehicle had been flying round in circles for the last hour or so, sending back increasingly pessimistic reports about the number of creatures heading our way from the scattered spores – not just vanguard organisms like gaunts and lictors this time, but scores of termagants, and the larger warrior forms to herd them. This time we’d be facing an army capable of coordinating itself and shooting from a distance, not an instinct-driven swarm desperate to close. There were even a few unconfirmed sightings of larger creatures, capable of taking on an armoured vehicle, if we’d had one, or, more cogently, tearing their way through whatever defences we’d manage to put in place before they arrived. Formidable as the walls of the shrine were, they’d been built to withstand an assault by nothing more threatening than the elements[170], and I couldn’t see them holding for long against a brood of carnifexes determined to breach them.
‘Standing by to provide fire support,’ Yail assured me. After some discussion, we’d agreed that the fast-moving flyer would be best employed once the expected assault began in trying to pick off the larger creatures coordinating the others, in the hope of disrupting whatever strategy they were attempting to use against us. That would entail remaining fast enough, and high enough, to avoid any ground-to-air fire the swarm might bring to bear, of course. We could only hope that the superior range of the heavy bolters and missile launchers, and matchless marksmanship of the Adeptus Astartes, would be equal to the task.
‘What about the landship?’ I asked, catching sight of the harvester still parked alongside the shrine, like a dinghy bobbing next to a wharf. ‘Can we use that to evacuate the tech-priests?’ Who would, of course, need a military escort to ensure their safety, a job for which I considered myself the prime candidate.
‘That has already been considered,’ Sholer said, ‘but their chances of getting through are extremely low.’
‘I imagine so,’ I said, having thought as much, but it never hurt to ask. The huge, lumbering machine would be an easy target for the swarm, which would simply keep pace alongside, throwing bodies at it until they tore their way through the hull. After that, it would all be over. ‘Then what do we do with it?’ I added. ‘It’s blocking our fire lanes, and giving them enough cover to mass for an attack.’
‘Detonate the reactor,’ Yail said. ‘The specimens caged inside will attract others, so if we time it right, we should take out a considerable number of the attacking swarm.’
‘The crew’s already been evacuated into the shrine,’ Sholer added.
‘Glad to hear it,’ I said, as if I actually cared one way or the other. ‘How are you getting on with defrosting the bioship fragment?’
‘Slowly,’ Sholer admitted. ‘It’s been dug out of the ice, but we needed heavy lifting equipment to move something that size, and our analyticae simply aren’t big enough to get it into. We’ve had to move our equipment into one of the storage bays in order to study it.’
‘Show me,’ I said, calling up a three-dimensional plan of the shrine on the hololith as I spoke. It sounded like the perfect place to avoid, and I wanted to make sure I stayed as far away from it as possible. Sholer poked the controls, and highlighted a large, vaulted area near the top of the structure. I stared at it in surprise. ‘I thought you’d keep it down in the sub-levels.’
‘The higher the better,’ he said, ‘as the tyranids don’t appear to have any flying creatures among them.’
‘Not yet,’ I said, ‘but they will.’ One thing certain about the ’nids was that whatever problem you presented them with, they’d have a creature perfectly adapted to dealing with it spawned and ready to go within hours.
‘The chamber connects to the main cargo l
ift,’ Sholer said, pointing to a wide shaft extending all the way from the lowest sub-level to the flight deck on the roof. ‘We can return it to the cryogenitorium easily enough if we have to.’
‘Good enough,’ I said, hoping I sounded as though I meant it. If we had winged organisms fighting their way down from the hangars, and the bulk of the swarm scrambling up from below, we’d have nowhere to go in any case. I turned back to Yail. ‘Better get all the non-combatants into the mid-levels, and be ready to seal off the lower ones,’ I said. That should buy us a little time if the swarm broke through. Or, more likely, I tried not to think, when they did.
‘I agree,’ he said. ‘Although we should arm as many of the acolytes as we can. It will make them feel less vulnerable, and lack of accuracy is hardly going to be an issue if the swarm does gain entry.’ Which was an understatement if ever I heard one.
We didn’t have long to wait for the first attack, which came less than an hour later. The night beyond the sheet of armourglass making up one wall of the shrine’s main operations centre was suddenly lit up by a series of vivid flashes, like far-off lightning, accompanied by a low rumbling sound which made the window vibrate almost imperceptibly. In fact, I’d never have felt it, if I hadn’t had my fingertips pressed against the slick, transparent surface as I craned my neck for a better view.
‘Looks like they found the minefield,’ Jurgen opined, handing me a more than welcome mug of recaff.
I took it, and nodded my thanks. ‘It does,’ I said, opening a vox-link to Yail, who was off somewhere in the darkness looking for ’nids to pot. ‘Contact in sector three,’ I told him crisply, then added ‘but I imagine you noticed that,’ in my best wryly humorous tone, as though I was eager to be out there with him. But someone had to watch the hololith, keeping an eye on the overall tactical picture, and for that job, to my vastly unspoken relief, we’d had a wide choice of me. I’d fought the ’nids before, and could pick out the patterns of movement that betokened an incipient charge, or a flanking attempt, better than anyone except possibly Yail, and his place was alongside his battle-brothers, not sitting out the fight in relative safety. His sense of honour would never have permitted that.
‘We have it covered,’ he assured me, although from the hololith display it looked more like he and the rest of the Reclaimers were just offering themselves up as an appetiser for the first ’nid arrivals. His last couple of words were almost drowned out as the speeder howled in from the south, unloading a blizzard of fire into the heart of the milling swarm, and pulled away again in the nick of time, rolling to avoid a barbed strangler pod fired by something in the press below. The living warhead burst in mid-air, spewing out an expanding mass of razor-edged tendrils which plummeted back into the heaving crowd of deadly organisms, ripping those it entangled apart with its fearsome thorns, which didn’t seem to disconcert the others in the slightest.
I could make out very little of the horde surrounding us, the encircling mass reduced by the darkness to a single amorphous stain on the landscape, which seemed to seethe like an angry sea as highlights struck briefly from one piece of chitin or another. I found myself obscurely grateful for the lack of clarity, as seeing that unstoppable tide of malevolence for what it was, and being able to pick out individual creatures within it, would have been far more unnerving.
‘Commissar,’ one of the red-robed acolytes manning the lecterns called, somehow managing to inject a tone of apologetic diffidence into his mechanical voice, ‘it appears we have a problem.’
‘No, really?’ I asked, tearing myself away from the window with some reluctance. The inexorable creep of the advancing wall of death beyond it had become curiously hypnotic. Then, reflecting that sarcasm wasn’t exactly calculated to inspire already terrified civilians, I plastered a smile on my face, as though I’d meant it for a joke. ‘Are we running out of recaff already?’
‘A serious problem,’ the cogboy insisted, predictably having had the sense of humour bypass common to his kind. He was carrying a welding torch in his mechadendrites, the makeshift weapon, and hundreds more like it, having been the closest we’d been able to come to Yail’s suggestion of boosting morale by arming the tech-priests, and poked at the dials and switches in front of him with calloused and stubby fingers. Something about the intensity with which he was working worried me, and I hurried across the wide, high room, Jurgen trotting at my heels.
‘What?’ I asked, finding the display in front of him as incomprehensible as I’d expected. Jurgen leaned in for a closer look at the wobbling dials, his brow furrowing in bafflement, and the cogboy flinched, apparently still in possession of his sense of smell.
‘I’m getting traces of movement in the cryogenitorium,’ he said. ‘Something’s moving around down there.’
‘Frak on a stick,’ I said, seeing no reason not to express my disquiet in the most forthright possible terms. If anything, the short burst of profanity seemed to reassure the cogboy, probably because he’d been worrying about bothering me unnecessarily. ‘They’re waking up!’ I retuned my comm-bead. ‘Apothecary, we’re reading movement in the deep freeze,’ I said. ‘Is the node waking up?’
‘Not as such,’ Sholer said, ‘that would imply a sense of individual consciousness, which tyranids don’t possess.’ Not for the first time, I found myself regretting that it wasn’t possible to strangle someone over a vox-link. ‘But we are registering cortical activity, which is increasing in strength by the minute.’
‘Then that’s what’s reviving the specimens,’ I concluded.
‘A reasonable hypothesis,’ he conceded. ‘But most are too deeply embedded in the ice to free themselves.’
‘They don’t have to,’ I reminded him. ‘You’ve got burrowers down there. They’ll break it up enough for the others to get out.’
‘Then we have a serious problem,’ Sholer said.
Before I could congratulate him on his acuity, the entire room seemed to tremble, while a deafening rumble shuddered through my bones. A vivid fireball blossomed beyond the sheet of armourglass, against which debris clanged and clattered, leaving a few faint chips and streaks even in that phenomenally tough surface.
‘There goes the harvester,’ Jurgen remarked, in conversational tones.
‘We’re pulling back,’ Yail voxed, almost at the same moment. ‘We can’t hold them any longer.’
‘Then don’t try,’ I advised, after a quick glance at the hololith. The noose was tightening all around us, and unless they moved fast, they’d be cut off within a handful of moments. The Land Speeder was swooping and diving beyond the wide window, covering their retreat with strategic blurts of fire, and by the light of the burning landship I could see an unstoppable tide of chitin sweeping towards our fragile bastion from all directions. ‘As soon as you’re inside, we’re sealing the lower levels.’
‘Acknowledged,’ Yail said, not bothering to ask why. If he’d been monitoring my conversation with Sholer he’d already know, and if he hadn’t, I was pretty sure he’d be able to work it out. ‘We’ll be with you in ten.’
As it turned out, it was a couple of minutes more than that before the towering bulk of the Space Marine was looming over me again, his Terminator armour looking even more battered than before. Several of the rockets were missing from the shoulder-mounted launchers too, which in itself stood as mute testament to the ferocity of the fight he and his comrades had put up.
‘I’m recording more movement below,’ the welder-wielding cogboy piped up from behind his lectern, and I tilted my neck to converse with Yail.
‘Looks like you got back in the nick of time,’ I said. I turned back to the hololith, and called up the schematic of the shrine Sholer had shown us in the conference room so short a time before. Several internal doors were marked in red, to my considerable relief. ‘All the doors have been welded shut.’
‘That’ll buy us a breathing space,’ Yail agreed. ‘We’ll set up pickets here, here, and here.’ He indicated a couple of choke points, where
corridors intersected. ‘Reclaimers here, and skitarii there.’
‘This junction would be better,’ I said, my innate affinity for complex corridor systems kicking in, and indicated an alternative to one of the points he’d suggested. ‘If the ’nids get into the ducting, they can bypass a post here.’
‘Good point,’ Yail said. ‘We’ll deploy there instead.’
‘Better hurry,’ I said, ‘it won’t take them long to climb half a dozen levels.’
‘But they’re not climbing,’ the cogboy put in. ‘Look.’
His instrumentation made no more sense to me than it had done the last time I looked, but Yail seemed able to read it without too much trouble. ‘No, they’re not,’ he said. ‘Can you transfer this to the hololith?’
The cogboy nodded, and a moment later contact icons began to appear, clustered in the lower levels of the schematic. ‘Best I can do,’ he said.
‘It’s good enough,’ I assured him, and turned to Yail. ‘They’re in the plasma vents.’
‘Some of them, anyway,’ the Space Marine agreed. ‘I doubt many will fit.’
‘They won’t have to,’ I reminded him, the picture of the huge serpentine burrower I’d found myself standing on the first time I’d visited the cryogenitorium fresh in my mind. ‘The trygon will leave them a tunnel to follow.’
‘Why are they heading for the surface?’ Jurgen asked. ‘They usually want to attack us as quick as they can.’
‘Because there’s more prey to be had outside,’ I said, with a sudden flare of realisation, ‘and the ones attacking us are just as eager to kill the bioship node. We’ll keep for both of them.’ Which was hardly a comforting thought in the long term, but if it gave us a respite now, I wasn’t going to argue.
‘There’s the first one,’ Jurgen said, returning to the window and looking down at the landscape below. Ignoring the sudden assault on my sinuses which joining him entailed, I stood next to him, and followed the direction of his grubby forefinger. As I did so, something fast and scuttling flung aside the grating it had just ripped from the nearest vent, and leapt at the unprotected back of the gun servitor still doggedly guarding it from the encroaching swarm. The construct fell in a flurry of slashing blows, flesh, bone and metal parting like morning mist, and its slayer bounded off into the darkness. ‘’Stealer, you reckon?’
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