by Dan Abnett
The Shield Pylon shuddered as it took shell after shell.
At Croe Gate, Grizmund's valiant counteraction finally reached a stop. Flat crabs and spider death machines lumbered in at them, in strengths even the crusade's finest tank regiment could not withstand.
On the dock causeway, Varl and Rodyin began to pull their infantry back, facing an ochre host ten thousand strong.
Along the edge of the Commercia, where one of the war's bloodiest battles had been waged, Bulwar ordered his NorthCol and scratch companies to retreat. Overhead, the Shield flickered and waned. It would not last much longer. In the middle of a horrendous brawl in a side trench, Soric hammered his axe-rake into the foe. He was one of the last to heed Bulwar's retreat order.
Corday's Volpone unit was pincered by Zoican detachments. The Blue-bloods were slaughtered by crossfire in the rubble wastes that had once been the inner-sector habs. Corday died with his men.
In a lost pocket in the wastelands, Caffran held Tona Criid tight, Yoncy and Dalin curled between them. The sky was on fire and shells fell all around. It was just a matter of time, Caffran knew. But until then, he would hold her and the children as tight as he could.
In the baptistry, Ban Daur set aside his headset and sat back in his seat. The workers and staff servitors were still milling around, trying to maintain some semblance of control.
It was over. Daur got up and crossed to Otte at the Font. Windows blew in down the hall and the Main Spine shuddered as shells struck it.
We gave it our best, Daur said.
For Vervunhive, Otte agreed, weeping quietly with fatigue.
Intendant Banefail joined them. High Legislator Anophy has just been carried out. A heart attack.
Then he's been spared, Daur said callously.
Otte looked at him reprovingly, but Banefail seemed to agree. This is the end, my brave friends. The Emperor love you for your efforts, but this is the end of all things. Vervunhive is lost. Make your peace.
Daur looked round at Immaculus. The minister stood nearby with his robed clergy.
Begin the mass, sir, Daur told him. The requiem. I want the last sound I hear to be a psalm of loss voiced by the Emperor's own.
Immaculus nodded. He led his brethren into the celebratory and the soft dirge, a haunting melody, began to lift above the baptistry and the high stations of Vervunhive.
In the abandoned hall of her house, high in the Spine, Merity Chass heard the low plainsong welling through the walls. She had put on a long, formal gown and her father's ducal chain and signet ring, which Daur had brought to her.
She had spent an hour putting the House Chass ledgers in order and encrypting all the family documents onto storage crystals. At the sound of the mass, she frowned.
Not yet not yet she murmured. He won't fail us
EIGHTEEN
THE LAIR OF ASPHODEL
A friend of death, a brother of luck and a son of a bitch.
Major Rawne, of his commander
Its sounds amplified by the thick, metal walls around, carnage exploded into the Spike's command level. Savage fighting boiled through the dark, mesh-floored chambers. The strikeforce were engaging crew now as well as troops. The crew members wore loose flak-tunics and work-fatigues, and their heads were generally exposed. Gaunt's troopers could see for themselves the horror that had disturbed Larkin so at Veyveyr Gate. It wasn't the implants fused and sutured into their eyes, ears and scalps, linking their senses and brain patterns to the insidious chatter. It was the fact that they were men and women of all ages: hab workers, parents, guilders, older children, the elderly. The entirety of Zoica's population had mobilised for war, just as Gaunt had assessed. The bald proof was overwhelmingly tragic. With blank expressions, somehow even more lifeless than Sondar's servitor puppets, the people of Ferrozoica threw themselves at the attackers.
Gaunt hacked through a pair of Zoican troopers with his powersword, fighting to cut a route down onto the main bridge area. Through the seething press, the smoke and the flashes of las-fire, he could make out a wide, open platform of polished chrome, surrounded by black towers of control instrumentation. In the centre of the platform, the glowing, pinkish ball of a coherent light field, ten metres in diameter, coalesced up from an emitter ring in the floor. He fought his way to it, channelling his deepest reserves of aggression and determination.
Suddenly, he was on the platform itself, virtually alone, lit by the pink radiance. His last frenzied efforts to break through had been almost too successful. He'd effectively separated himself from the rest of his party, still locked into the mayhem in the adjacent bridge areas.
Gaunt was breathing hard and shaking. He'd lost his cap somewhere, his jacket was torn and he was splattered with blood. An almost painful adrenaline high fizzled through him like electricity glowing through fuse-wire. He had never been pushed to such an extremity of raw fury before in his life. His mind was locked out in a paroxysm of battle-rage. Everything had become distant and incomprehensible. For a moment, he couldn't remember what he was supposed to be doing.
Something flickered behind him and he wheeled, his blade flashing as it made contact. A tall, black figure lurched backwards. It was thin but powerful and much taller than him, dressed in form-fitting, glossy-black armour and a hooded cape of chainmail. The visage under the hood-lip was feral and non-human, like the snarling skull of a great wolf-hound with the skin scraped off. It clutched a sabre-bladed powersword in its metal-gloved hands.
Gaunt had seen its like before, on Balhaut. He'd glimpsed its kind distantly on the fields of war, during the final stage of the battle, and then seen several corpses closer to after the victory. It was one of the Dark-watch, the elite retinue of Chaos champions who had been gifted to the warlord, Asphodel, as his personal bodyguard. The thing flickered again, employing its monstrous, innate control of the warp to shift its location around him. Gaunt yelled and blocked the incoming blade of the repositioned horror. The cold blue energies of Heironymo's powersword clashed against the sparking, blood-red fires of the Darkwatcher's weapon.
It flicker-shifted again, just a few paces to the left, and sliced its sword around at him. Gaunt evaded, stumbling in his haste, rolling and then springing up in time to block the downward swing of the Chaos-tainted blade.
But this was not the same weapon. This was longer, straighter, incandescent with smoking green fire. A second Darkwatcher, shifting in to assist the first.
Without looking, Gaunt threw himself sideways, knowing the original fury was now behind him. Red energy sliced a gouge in the gleaming chrome deck.
He backed as they came at him together, both flickering in and out of reality. One was suddenly to his left, but Gaunt threw all his force behind a blocking strike that bounced the blade away. The other sliced in at him and caught Gaunt's right shoulder.
There was no pain. A cold, nauseating numbness ached into his wounded limb.
Gaunt hurled himself forward in a tuck roll, avoiding two more slashes. He knew he had never been this outmatched before, not even face to face with howling World Eater Chaos Marines in the underworld of Fortis Binary or surrounded by the Iron Men in the crypts of Menazoid Epsilon. He should be dead already.
But something kept him alive. Partly his elevated battle-edge, partly his determination, but also, he was sure, Heironymo's sword. It seemed to smell the shifting creatures and forewarn him by a tingle of their impossible movements.
Their shifting was localised, as if they were moving in and out of corporeal reality. Every time they became solid to strike, the sword twitched in his grip, moving him to block.
He ducked a scything arc of green energy and stabbed upwards, shearing one Darkwatcher's head off in a flurry of blue sparks. Lambent, frosty smoke jetted out of its tall form as it collapsed in upon itself, flickering and fading. A inhuman scream rang around the bridge.
The other lunged at him, flickering into being right in his face, and though the powersword pulled at him, he wasn't quick enough to avoid
the deep gouge the red blade sliced in his left thigh.
Gaunt fell.
A spray of autocannon split the air above him. Bragg had made it to the edge of the platform and was blasting at the Darkwatcher on full auto. The thing shuddered under the impacts, flickering in and out of real-space, its chain cloak whipping as it turned to face the new attack. Kolea and Mkoll were there too, heaving up onto the edge of the chrome level, opening fire at the beast. A second later, Neskon, Haller, Flinn, Banda and a Volpone called Tonsk had also reached the edge of the platform. Sustained fire from all of them drove the raging Chaos-thing backwards and targeted the other two that had manifested in the last few moments. Bragg's unrelenting fire-cone gradually disintegrated the red-bladed Darkwatcher, which advanced on him, despite the colossal wash of bullets, before finally exploding a few flicker-steps from him.
One of the others, wielding a pike-axe which smoked with orange lightning, chopped Tonsk in two and severed Neskon's left leg at the knee with one stroke. Haller snatched up the Blueblood's fallen hellgun, pumped the under-barrel launcher and blew the thing's head off with a rocket-grenade.
The others, supported by more of the strike force just making it to the platform, caught the remaining Darkwatcher in a crossfire. The thing shrieked and flickered, twisting in the las-hail.
Behind them, the remaining elements of Gaunt's brigade fought a desperate rearguard at the Zoicans pouring into the command area from all around.
Gaunt clawed at one of the instrumentation towers at the edge of the platform and pulled himself to his feet. Hololithic screens projecting from the domed roof above showed fuzzy, amber-tinted views of the onslaught outside. The Spike, with its supporting armoured legions, had exploded in through the Curtain Wall just east of Sondar Gate, and the war machine's vast batteries, presumably recrewed after Gaunt's entry assault, targeted and demolished the Shield Pylon in a blaze of fire.
Sections of the huge structure crashed down across the Commercia, like a titanic tree being felled, wreathed in great washes of flame instead of foliage. Rather than being deactivated as before, the Shield collapsed, its massive energies unsecured and arcing out. The energy flare, designed to protect the city of Vervunhive, ripped the top ten levels off the Main Spine, and all the anchor stations around the city perimeter exploded.
The powersword loose in his hand, Gaunt searched the instrumentation around him for some system he could recognise. It had been built by the tech-wrights of Ferrozoica, so its essential patterns were Imperial, but the markings and format were wretched and alien.
Gaunt staggered across to the next tower and resumed his search. He found what appeared to be a vox-terminal and a pict-link displayer. But nothing else he could understand.
Behind him, the last Darkwatcher exploded, taking Trooper Flinn with it.
The third tower. Halfway down, what could only be a data-slate reader with a universal hub: standard Imperial fitting.
Gaunt felt himself sag, his leg wound pulling at him. Blood from his shoulder wound soaked his sleeve and dripped off his hand.
Gaunt! yelled Kolea, at his side, supporting him. Mkoll was there too, and Genx, Gherran and Domor.
Let me see to your wounds! Gherran was yelling.
No t-time!
Let him help you, Gaunt! Kolea growled, trying to keep the struggling commissar upright. Let me
No! Gaunt shook the big miner off. If this was the final act, it would be his.
He pulled the ticking, chuckling amulet from his pocket and fitted its link ports to the reader's hub.
It engaged, purred and turned twice like a kodoc beetle burying its abdomen in the sand.
The lighting and instrument power in the command section shorted on and off two, three, four times. A mechanical wailing of tortured, over-raced turbines welled up from the vast machine pits below them. The chatter cut short. Then the lights went out altogether.
Sudden, total darkness; sudden quiet. In the stillness, the groans of the dying and wounded; the bright, brief crackle and fizz of torn cables. A flash of las-fire.
Gaunt's eyes grew accustomed to the gloom. The heart of the Spike was dead. Smoke wafted, full of the rich, animal smells of war. Men stirred, blinking.
The force field in the centre of the platform had vanished.
A huge form, dark like a shadow, crouched where the field had been. It rose, unfurled, grew larger. In the half-light, Gaunt saw the richly embroidered silk of a vast cape spilling away from the figure as it stood. He saw an immense, metal-gloved hand reach out and beckon to him. He saw the shivering flame-light throw into relief a long, smooth armour-cowl split by narrow eye-slits. The cowl fanned up and out into massive, hooked steeples of polished horn.
Heritor Asphodel, Chaos warlord, daemon-thing, fuelled by his dark gods in the Warp, standing fully six metres tall, lunged at the human worms who strove to defeat him. He made no sound. Darkness, which he seemed to wear and pull around him like a great cloak, sucked through the air as it moved with him.
Kolea buried his axe-rake in the Heritor's flank. A second later, he was flying sideways across the platform, most of his ribs shattered.
Firing and making two hits, Mkoll was knocked sideways, his shoulder broken.
Domor's lasgun exploded in his hands, blowing him up, back and off the platform.
Gherran was lacerated by an ebbing fold of darkness, sharp as a billion blades. His blood made a mist that drenched Gaunt.
Genx was pulverised by the concussive force of the daemon's fist as he tried to reload his weapon and fire.
Gaunt met Asphodel head on. He slammed the blazing blue spike of the powersword into and through the monstrosity's chest.
At the same moment, the massive bolt pistol clenched in the Heritor's left hand shot Gaunt through the heart.
NINETEEN
MOURNING GLORY
With this act we have richly denied the Darkness and made trophies of its creatures. A dark lord is dead. So, this holy crusade, blessed by the Emperor, is advanced with glory.
Warmaster Macaroth, at Verghast
They came like ghosts at dusk. Phantom forms, impossibly large, underlit by the dying sun as they settled down through the smoke-filthy upper atmosphere of Verghast. Warships, bulk troop transports, the might of the Sabbat Worlds Crusade, the pride of the Segmentum Pacificus Navy.
It was the fiftieth day. Learning via the Astropathicus that Vervunhive faced not an inconsequential rival hive but a hunted Chaos commander, Macaroth had made best speed for Verghast, arriving after twenty-seven days of urgent transit through the warp.
The hazy sky was full of metal and looked like it should fall. The awesome power of the Imperium was there for every Verghastite to see: ten thousand ships, some the size of cities, some bloated like ornate oceanic turtles, some slender and serrated like airborne cathedrals.
Macaroth unleashed his might on the planet below: six million Guardsmen, half a million tanks, squads drawn from three chapters of the Adeptus Astartes, two Titan Legions. Troop dropships, bulk machine-lifters and shuttles dropped in a swarm on the Hass valley. For a while, the sky did fall.
Mass destruction followed, lasting for five days, thought it was brutally one-sided. Heironymo's amulet had done its work and cut the insidious chatter for all time. By the time the warmaster's immense forces arrived, the Zoicans were already in total rout. Aimless and lost, they broke off the final assault. Many committed suicide or wandered blindly into the defenders' fields of fire to be massacred. Millions of others woke as if from a dream and stumbled, without purpose or motive, back into the grasslands.
Under Grizmund's command, the battered Imperial forces that had held Vervunhive for over a month reformed to drive the pitiful, bewildered invaders out. Narmenian and NorthCol tank brigades chased down and annihilated Zoican motorised units threading back across the grasslands towards their own hive. Guard infantry, co-ordinated by Colonel Corbec, Colonel Bulwar and Major Otte, utilising every troop-carrying machine they could raise
, hunted out and slaughtered the fleeing troop elements in vast numbers. There was no question of mercy. Ferrozoica's taint had to be expunged.
By the time Macaroth's armada made orbit, the Zoicans had been driven back six hundred kilometres into the plains, leaving vehicles and equipment scattered and abandoned in their wake.
In the crippled hive itself, scratch companies slowly weeded out the last, feral pockets of Zoican resistance.
The warmaster followed up with unstinting vigour. He politely but determinedly requested the assistance of the Iron Snakes Space Marines to overtake and neutralise the fleeing enemy. His armoured brigades poured down the main highways and decimated everything that lived. Skeletal Titans, shrieking like wraiths, stalked the grassland horizons, incinerating the retreating foe.
On the fifty-fourth day, crusade warships torched Ferrozoica Hive from low orbit. The blinding flame-flare filled the southern horizon.
But by then, the fight was out of the Zoicans and had been since the thirty-seventh day. Without the hypnotic chatter to unify their cause and drive them on, they had crumbled. Imperial Fist Space Marines ceremonially destroyed the Spike and incinerated the Heritor's corpse.
The final battle was one of humanitarian support. Intendant Banefail, along with the hive elders and noble houses, laboured to accommodate the millions of wounded and homeless. By day sixty, the true scale of the human cost was undeniable. Vervunhive was a necropolis: a city of the dead. Meeting with the surviving nobility, Macaroth signed the Dissolution Warrant that formally acknowledged Vervunhive's extinction. The hive was dead. All population elements were to be absorbed by the Northern Collectives or shipped to Ghasthive and the Isthmus Steeples. Two new hives were to be founded, one ruled by a clique of noble houses under House Anko, the other a collective governed by Houses Chass and Rodyin. Names would come later. It would be generations until these municipal structures would begin to establish themselves, and it would be decades before the bulk of the dispossessed population could be given new, permanent homes.