Saturnine

by Dan Abnett

  The enemy had stopped at first. Shelling from Colossi had driven them back, pummelling a landscape already cleared, on Dorn’s orders, into extinction. They’d made their line at the eight kilometre marker, and set out their investment: an arc of contravallation, twenty-eight kilometres wide, ditches, trench systems, earthwork ramparts and reinforced palings. They were dug in, defended and capable of resisting any sortie or counterstrike Colossi threw at them Armour divisions had duelled for a day and half, an inconclusive sparring. Air assaults had been punished by the gate’s comprehensive circuits of surface-to-air weapon systems.

  Now they pushed a section of their own ramparts forward, a few metres at a time.

  Behind the advance, artillery and dug-in tank sections began to fire, looping a steady bombardment over the heads of the heavy infantry and into the outworks and lower wall tali. Explosions lifted in vivid bouquets: bright fireworks of incendiary, spitting flashes of phosphor, fire-splashes of napthek. High explosive hurled earth and brick into the sky. Penetrators shattered stone, and sowed the air with showering grit. Trench 18 was hollowed out. Trench 41 was lost in a welter of sub-munitions. Four field emplacements were annihilated in as many seconds as high-arc howitzer shells dropped into them shredding the guns and atomising the teams. Men fought to keep the raging fires from spreading to the back-line shell magazines

  Most shells fell deliberately short, dropping into the mangled waste between the lines. They were ranged to kick off any mines spread by the loyalist garrison, though few remained undetonated, At the blast of a war-horn, rotating flails extended beneath the lower lips of the trundling plates, their chain lashes whipping the torn earth to trigger micro anti-personnel seeds.

  Marshal Aldana Agathe of the Antioch Miles Vesperi jumped down the steps into Trench 40, and hurried along the metal duckboards In the fire control station. She could feel the heat-flash, the prickle of grit the air. This would be assault sixteen, the first significant land push. She dodged stretcher parties, yelled at malingering Albian infanrtymen, ignored the snap salute of Vesperi hussars. At fire control she looked at the auspex status. She kept thinking about her husband and her two children, back in Hatay-Antakya Hive, a quarter of the world away, the sunlight on the patchwork arable estates beyond Orontes, the vivid green of the irrigation circles, the cool of the plunge pool below the villas on Iskenderun Spur. Why that? Why now? She couldn’t eject the thoughts from her head, and there was no space for them. The images were like drag weights slowing her down. She waved her hand, and the adjutant brought her the vox-link.

  Clear precise now. Hatay-Antakya may not exist any more. This was the business now.

  ‘Forty, forty,’ she said. This is forty, forty calling.’ She took off her throne helmet and ran dirty fingers through her tightly curled brown hair. Crease sweat and the helmet had flattened the natural ringlets and made her scalp itch. ‘Range now two kilometres,’ she said. ‘Requesting air cover and wall guns’.

  Big ask. Air cover north of their line had been decimated after the fall of the port. Wall guns in the main upper bastions of Colossi had been told to conserve munition stocks for possible engine assaults. Handling orders direct from Bhab. But Bhab had not reckoned on mobile shield advance. And this was the Death Guard. She could smell them on the wind.

  * * *

  At Emplacement 12, Militant General Burr of the Kimmerine heard her voice on the link, chopped by the overlap traffic from a hundred stations.

  ‘Forget it, Agathe,’ he called, thumbing the send button of his vox-mic. ‘Ready foot for repulse, go.’

  ‘They’re ready,’ she replied, her voice a twisted crackle. ‘Is armour deploying, go?’

  ‘Engines hot, six minutes,’ he replied, ‘but the last strikes took down the dispersal ramps at Twenty. We’re laying boards. Lag time, ten minutes.’

  He heard her curse.

  ‘There’ll be no top cover,’ said Raldoron, watching him. Tell her that.’

  Burr glanced at the massive Blood Angel standing nearby. First Captain Raldoron’s helm was off, and he was hunched to fit in the low Army dugout. Technically, Burr had seniority in the line section, but he deferred to the veteran legionary.

  ‘I told her, lord,’ Burr said.

  ‘Tell her again, and make sure she knows.’

  Bombs fell close by, shaking the bunker. Dirt sieved from cracks in the ceiling. Debris rained across the angled roof, pattering like a cloudburst.

  Someone shouted out.

  Burr got on the scope. It had been knocked out of alignment, the lenses blinded by mud. He squeezed past the Blood Angel, and got up on the scaling ladder instead. Bright shoals of las-fire and tracer were shredding past overhead.

  The advancing wall had parted in several places. Through the gaps, plated gun carriages were running out ahead of the line: small, light, last They’d harried the outworks before. The men called them gun wagons. They mounted heavy auto and las cannons on their pay-load pintles. Their wheels were big and spiked, and often rode over mines that blew harmlessly against the armoured axles and angled bellies of the wagons.

  Behind them came the first of the foot heavies, echelons of a thousand at a time, streaming through the wall gaps, striding at their tails, sheltered by the wagons. Storm troops. Trench fighters. The insane riders unafraid of death, who would rush the line and assault the outworks first.

  Line, up, line up!’ Burr yelled. Men scrambled.

  Raldoron was calling him. He dropped back down.

  ‘What, my lord?’ he asked.

  The Blood Angel showed him the vox signal.

  ‘Hold fire, two minute count,’ Burr read out. ‘What is this?’

  ‘Nothing, unless it’s authentic,’ said Raldoron. He remained patient. The siege made them all brothers, and survival required strict adherence to the chain of command Dorn had set. But, in Baal’s name, humans could be so slow…

  ‘You can see it is, general. The tag marker…’

  ‘I can. Call the hold.’

  Burr grabbed the vox.

  ‘Lines, lines, all lines!’ he yelled. ‘Cease on my mark and hold! Seventy seconds!’

  A barrage of queries answered him.

  ‘Do as you are bloody told!’ Burr shouted. Raldoron calmly fitted his helm into place. Burr heard the throat seals click and lock. It seemed like the loudest sound in the world. The only sound.

  Burr watched the clock. He could hear Aldana Agathe yelling at him over vox for confirmation. He ignored it.

  ‘We’re dead bones if this is a mistake,’ he said to the First Captain. Raldoron drew a sword, a tactical gladius. For a moment, Burr thought the Blood Angel was going to strike him down for cowardice, and realised he didn’t care.

  ‘We’re all dead bones in the end, Konas,’ said Raldoron.

  ‘Throne, that’s the truth, lord,’ said Burr.

  ‘Let’s delay that inevitability by trusting the Praetorian has a coordinated plan.’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Burr. He nodded. His mouth was utterly dry. ‘Yeah, let’s do that.’ He was gripping the vox-horn so tightly his knuckles had gone white. He looked at the clock, clicking down.

  Mark.

  ‘Lines, lines, all lines!’ he yelled. ‘Cease and hold!’

  The Imperial bombardment died away. Burr could hear officers yelling at men who were still blasting from the gun-steps. It wasn’t silence. The thunder of the enemy barrage remained. But it was stillness, eerie. The stillness of death.

  Burr put down the vox, and heaved his way back up the ladder. Assaulting fire was still coming in. Smoke was washing north across the Colossi lines. He saw a flash. The glint of light catching sonic thing moving in from the south-east, something exceptionally fast.

  ‘Oh, Throne,’ he said. ‘Oh Throne and stars.’

  The cavalry action was a technique of warfare seldom practised any more, except on some feudal or xenos worlds. It was a throw back to an antique age of conflict, when military
superiority was weighed on a different scale.

  But the technique had not disappeared entirely. It had evolved and disguised its true nature under a veneer of modern technology

  That was what this was, the raw truth of it. A cavalry action. A charge. The simple rules had been laid down long ago, before man reached out to the stars.

  The first: maintain formation. Start steady, and do not race ahead of your fellow riders.

  The White Scars ran out of the ground smoke in a wide, blade-edge fan. A perfect formation. They came from the south-eastern end of the Colossi outworks, sweeping around north in an arc like the swing of an axe. Three hundred and thirty jetbikes, gunning together. The roar of them was like a scream. Slow smoke tumbled in their back-wash, accelerated, whipped, tortured into streamers and whirls and even halos, as the White Scars punched through thicker banks. Crimson pennants bent and cracked from the red-and-white vehicles: Bullock-pattern, Scimitar-pattern, Shamshir-pattern, Hornet-pattern, Taiga-pattern.

  Burr stared.

  The second: put your spur to your steed only when the enemy is in range.

  The formation, already moving, as it seemed to Burr, with dazzling speed, somehow accelerated. The agony-howl of the massed engines intensified. The enemy line, shield wall and extended storm-force had broken step and slowed. They had seen what was coming. Weapons drew up. The jolting gun-wagons began to turn, or stopped to traverse their pintle-mounts. Maintaining the arc line, the formation bore down on them, unfaltering, unyielding, low-level, a racing blur, like a pack of target-locked missiles. The stained light glinted off the blades of the ordu: lances, drawn tulwars, glaives. At the heart of the line rode the Khagan, the Khorchin Khan of Khans, astride his monstrous voidbike. His sabre rose.

  Time slowed down, as time always seems to do when something terrible is about to happen. The enemy columns started shooting frantically. The Great Khan’s sabre swung down.

  The White Scars began to fire.

  Bike-mounted bolters, heavy bolters, some in pairs; rotary guns housed in the nostrils or chins of their snarling steeds; plasma and lascannons, volkite culverins. A raking hurricane of destruction. Contrails and streamers of grey and black weapons-exhaust dragged out behind the bikes like banners. The discharge of it was heart-stopping, the continuation of it numbing. The roar, a frenzied drumming of heavy bolters, sounded, to Burr, like the thunder of hooves, the stables of a god unslipped at full gallop.

  There was no ranging fire. The White Scars already had their targets. The first gun-wagons exploded. Others lurched, hammered buckling. Fireballs lit off across the extended enemy mass from east to west. The storm troop lines began to fracture. Some broke. Some ran. Some tried to retreat towards the sally gaps in the shield line. Whole echelons were mown down where they stood, bodies twisting and lifting, and disintegrating in clouds of churned earth and stitching impacts. A few, unscathed, tried to fire back.

  Rule three: shock is the action’s best weapon.

  The White Scars ripped in, never for a second breaking formation, despite the gunfire that clipped at them and tore at their armour. One jetbike cartwheeled, gushing flame, rider lost. No one looked back. The bikes crossed the line of the already-dead, the blackened bodies littering the ground, and their anti-gravitic down-force bent, tossed and flipped the slain as they rushed over, their kills jerking and dancing.

  Impact. The first ordu riders reached the standing lines. Then guns were still reaping the enemy formations down. They punched through the breaking ranks, crushing through upright men, running over them, smashing them into the sky. Broken forms were thrown up and back, spinning slack and disjointed. Others burst against speeding armoured prows, washing the white ground-smoke red with puffs of aerosolised gore. Lances impaled, glaives scythed Swords Hashed, hooked, slashed. Burr saw one White Scar streak across an overturned gun-wagon. A traitor on its flank aimed a volkite pistol. The White Scar’s back-extended tulwar met his fist before he could fire, splitting the pistol end to end, the hand at the thumb, and the entire extended arm lengthways to the shoulder, where the blade-tip dissected the man’s head too. A kill from the saddle. All in one forward rush. The jetbike was past and on, even as the man spun and fell, sliced through, the cell of his pistol detonating like a flash grenade.

  They reached the shield line, slaughter in their wakes. At close range the bike guns fractured and crumpled the thick sheets of storm-plate, but they could not break them. They broke formation instead, rushing in through the wall gaps or over the shield line, entirely.

  Then they fell upon the vast host sheltering behind.

  The fourth rule: if you break the enemy line, you are in the heart of them, and war becomes the melee of hand to hand.

  From Emplacement 12, Burr could no longer see the White Scars. The shield wall and the smoke screened off the havoc that followed. It was perhaps, a blessing he was spared the sight. It becomes hard to trust as brothers, those you have seen capable of unbridled savagery.

  For the White Scars, the rapacious V Legion, the far side of the wall was another world. Speed, shock and rate of fire had swept them to the shield line with devastating effect. But crossing the wall line had robbed them of speed and line discipline, and the odds were reversed. They were inside the choking enemy mass. Each rider, in a second, had passed from the bright smoke of the open field into a fast back-line of standing infantry. The rain seemed heavier, a curtain unfogged by the blanket of smoke. The assault host was immense: thousands of storm pikes, dripping with rain, ranked for assault; hundreds of thousands of traitor infantry; ready lines of armour, engines revving; monstrous formations of the Death Guard.

  The Death Guard. Of all the Traitor Legions, the Death Guard was the one most despised by the White Scars ordu, and the feeling was mutual. The war between the XIV and the V had become a blood feud would never be cooled. Hatred was too small a word. Even on this precipice of history, the White Scars were known as wild hunters, carefree killers, warriors who laughed in the heat of action, delighting in the fire of war.

  There was no laughter now.

  Nor were the Great Khan and his warriors fazed. They had done this before. Indeed, they had all known, from the moment they committed to the charge, that this was the goal. Unless enemy fire brought them down in the charging line, this was the highest purpose of a charge action: to reach the enemy, to meet his main strength, to engage, to be in his midst. They knew what to do. Physical momentum had been lost, but a momentum of mind took over.

  They broke into individual actions, maintaining as much speed as they were able, preserving what collective forward movement they could. They thrust through the waiting ranks, or dropped into them. The bikes themselves were weapons: their armoured prows, their mass and motion, the crushing downward force of their repeller systems. The traitor host, far larger than even the Great Khan had been expecting to find, was war-ready, but it was not prepared. They were drawn up in deep, pre-battle cohorts. Their sight lines generally blocked by the shield wall, they had no idea what was coming at them. Only the roar of guns and the scream of engines had suggested that anything was.

  The White Scars riders slammed down into them. Many came nose up, rearing, allowing their lift-systems to hammer the first rows off their feet. Their guns cycled, chewing into the bountiful, waiting lines of targets. Some shots passed through two or three lines of bodies. This was greedy killing. They were spoiled for targets, because they were vastly unnumbered, surrounded on all sides by armed, but as-yet undeployed enemy combatants. There was a kill to be made in every direction.

  The enemy mass collectively flinched from the points of attack, the host rippling like a pool of oil as it recoiled. Men fell against, and into, other men as they scrambled away from the killers entering their positions.

  But the White Scars were truly outnumbered. Traitors mobbed them from all sides, blasting weapons point-blank, heedless of their own kin, striking and battering with whatever blades and mauls were in their ha
nds. Riders and bikes became mired in scrums of attackers, fighting from the saddle in the driving rain, lopping off every hand and head and pole-blade that came at them. Thickets of pikes speared two of them from their steeds, punctured in a dozen places. Gunfire destroyed the engine of a running jetbike, and its rider leapt clear, allowing the burning, tumbling machine to power into the enemy files, killing a score with its shredding mass, and then another score with its detonation. But the rider, Kherta Kal, was on foot, alone, encircled and rushed.

  The Death Guard surged forwards, fighting through their own dazed foot troops to meet the White Scars. They were driven by transhuman reaction, sheer outrage at the audacity of the assault, and, more than anything, hatred. The desire to close with and punish their arch-foes, who had been fools enough to ride in among them. The brute horror of the Death Guard was plainly visible, a spasm of sadness to the heart of every rider. They beheld their once-brothers, painfully transformed: massive armoured thugs, their grey-green plate greased with rain, streaked with rust and seeping fluid, rank and diseased, their armour swollen as though expanded by infected bloat within, jet and ebon-iron visors formed like howling beasts and wild wood predators.

  Legionary met legionary, dots of gleaming white engulfed by tides of mottled verdigris. Tulwars and sabres slashed down from saddle height, splitting dark plate like rotten squash and pumpkin, spraying ginger and yellow gouts of pestilential matter. Filthy spears, black as charcoal, plunged into burnished white ceramite, squirting scarlet into the rain, unseating riders, carrying them down under weight of numbers, some White Scars taking eight or ten fatal blows before they hit the mud.

  The ground beneath was a deep mire, a liquid black morass, thrashed up by the shield tractors and the advancing host. It spattered and clung to the boots and legs of the churning Death Guard, and splashed the flanks of the wallowing jetbikes.

  Wild chaos. The deepest and most intense melee. No rules, no order. A frenzy. An overwhelming din of blows and impacts, bolter blasts, shrieking engines. A tulwar splitting a houndskull helm and the skull inside. A dirt-crusted warhammer breaking chestplate, bone and muscle, pulverising heart and organs. A White Scar lifting clean from the saddle, impaled on a dark serrated lance. A Death Guard squad leader mangling against the snout of a surging bike, knocked down, shredding in the repulsor field. Flying flakes of armour. A spinning visor, torn off. Dismembered limbs, spinning aside, some still clutching weapons or parts of weapons. Gore splashing up to meet the hellish rain.