Wrath of Iron

by Chris Wraight

  Chapter Six

  Marivo lurched forwards, aiming for the magma-edged hole in the wall in front of him. The stench of the airborne poisons raged around him, leaving sticky residue on the inside of his helmet. He grabbed the shaft of his lasgun while he ran and hefted it clumsily, struggling not to trip over the trailing cables to the power-pack on his back.

  Then, almost without realising it, he was in. The interior of the tower enveloped him. He was plunged into darkness, and it took a few moments for his helmet to compensate.

  The toxic fog around him thinned a little. He saw other members of his squad break into the space alongside, coughing and staggering. Smoke rose from the breach in the tower’s walls, and it glowed angrily where the metal skin had been melted by the charge.

  The lowest chamber was utterly dark, half-submerged and home only to disused crates of supplies and mechanical parts. The power generators – their target – were on the next level up.

  ‘Quickly!’ hissed Marivo, trying to find a way up amid a flurry of whirling helmet-lumens.

  He started to move again, nearly slipping on the wet floor. The toxic air began to mingle with the cleaner atmosphere of the tower, making his headache worse.

  ‘I see it,’ said Khadi from over to his right.

  She was already climbing, scampering up a metal-mesh ladder like a rat out of a sewer. The rest of the squad followed her, all eager to get higher up as the chemical fogs rolled past them.

  They clambered up on to the next floor, shuffling along a narrow gantry before reaching a sealed blast door at the end.

  ‘Stay back,’ ordered Marivo, reaching for another melta charge. ‘Rennu, Bredfar – cover it. Noffe and Klieter – make ready to go in.’

  Marivo crouched down, clamping the charge against the blast door and setting the timer. Then he withdrew as far back as he could, pressing himself against the near wall.

  The charge blew, cracking the door and knocking it from its hinges. As the clouds of smoke cleared, Rennu and Bredfar inched forwards, aiming their guns at the chamber beyond. The sound of generators could be made out – a low, grinding hum. The chamber was lit with a dull red glow, and the cloudy outlines of gigantic power units could be glimpsed through the open door.

  ‘Let’s go,’ said Marivo, staying low as he advanced towards the chamber. Noffe and Klieter followed tightly behind him, keeping their guns held close to their chests.

  Marivo slipped inside, staying as close to the floor as he could. Ahead of him were the generators – five massive machines over ten metres tall and cased in pitted bronze cages. The red glow came from the coils within them, throbbing angrily with the energies needed to power the heavy weapons above.

  The rest of his squad fanned out between the generator cages, reaching for their charges and preparing to clamp them in place.

  ‘Quicker,’ urged Marivo, taking his own charge – the last of the three he’d carried – and priming it.

  He locked it to the case of the generator in front of him, just as the rest of his squad did. Their work done, they began to filter back towards the gantry outside, jostling past one another in their eagerness to get out. Marivo hurried them up, counting them out impatiently, hearing the whirring of the melta charges winding down all across the narrow chamber.

  A door hissed open somewhere up above. Marivo looked up and saw another metal gantry running around the walls of the generator chamber, up near the ceiling. It quickly filled with soldiers. A klaxon started to blare.

  ‘Get out!’ he cried, firing one-handed up at the gantry.

  He managed to get a single shot away before a whole torrent of las-beams burst towards him. He felt one impact sharply on his shoulder guard, and he flew backwards through the air, landing with a crack on the ferrocrete of the floor. His head bounced from the impact, sending black spikes into his vision.

  He heard the faint snap of other las-beams – those of his men still inside the generator room, returning fire. Marivo dragged himself into cover, crouching in the shadow of a generator as the hot white bursts of light rained down from above. He heard muffled grunts of pain as some found their targets. Ahead of him, Noffe went down while trying to get to the open door.

  He had no time left. The charges had been set, and only seconds remained on the counters. Marivo hurled himself out of cover, scuttling for the open door on all fours. Las-beams snapped and flickered around him, pinging from the reinforced metal floor.

  He reached the threshold, only for a shot to pierce his shoulder, lancing through the gap between his torso plate and shoulder guard and tearing clean through muscle. He cried out, crashing into the doorframe as his body spasmed in pain.

  Marivo’s head snapped up. Above him, dozens of soldiers took aim. Others were already racing down ladders from the gantry level, swarming into the generator room.

  ‘Holy Throne…’ he breathed.

  Trecic Makda pushed down on the control column and felt the Kelemak Queen thrust cleanly through the air. He took the gunship up into the exit corridor, watching the scopes carefully as other Valkyries fell into formation above and around him.

  The gunships looked ungainly in the air, like a pack of hooded carrion birds flapping awkwardly away from a disturbed meal. Once in formation, the aircraft thundered out over the Helat, keeping low to the ground and trailing huge strands of smoggy backdraft. Mindful of the colonel’s instruction, Makda pushed further ahead, outpacing the lead gunship and taking point.

  ‘Kelemak Queen,’ came a distorted voice over the comm from the ground tower. ‘Hold position. Repeat: hold position.’

  Makda laughed, and poured more power into the drives. The Valkyrie swooped into full acceleration, drawing ahead of the closest stragglers by more than a ship’s length. The rest of the squadron fell in behind him, resolving into a loose wedge shape and sweeping fast across the Helat landing sites.

  ‘Do we have escorts yet?’ asked Makda, looking around him.

  ‘On their way,’ replied Fionash, his navigator, from the secondary cockpit. ‘Take a look.’

  Makda glanced down again at his short-range sensoria. He saw waves of Valkyries departing the Helat in straggling lines, each one carrying a lethal cargo of drop-troops. More of them lifted off every second, filling the sensor display with clusters of glowing pinpricks.

  Just as he was about to look back up he saw the signals of the Vulture escorts come into range and pull alongside the troop-carrying Valkyries.

  ‘About time,’ he muttered, watching the heavy-weapons vessels slide into flanking positions.

  Makda keyed in the approach trajectory, and the landscape swept under them with increasing speed. The Kelemak Queen surged past the perimeter walls of the Helat encampment. As they crossed the limits, the Ferik’s defensive batteries opened up with a pyrotechnic send-off.

  ‘Nice of them,’ said Makda, flicking a series of switches on the control panel to stabilise the gunship’s course and bearing. Then he looked up, out through the grimy front window of the cockpit and ahead into the murk of the sky.

  The Helat was rapidly falling behind. The Gorgas Maleon rose up on the horizon, studded with still-burning wreckage. Beyond that, dark and immense against a blurred horizon, were the artificial mountains of Shardenus Prime.

  Makda felt a sudden lurch of nervousness twinge in his stomach.

  ‘That’s… big,’ he breathed, checking the sensor readings to make sure he was on the right course.

  Fionash chuckled over the comm.

  ‘Watch yourself,’ she said. ‘Incoming.’

  By then the Valkyries had reached their full attack velocity. Moving in concert, the waves of gunships thundered over the pitted landscape of the Gorgas, sweeping in long, broken lines. None of them had fuselage lights on, and in the gloom of Shardenus’s perpetual twilight they looked like hordes of dark-winged spectres racing in for the kill. />
  The terrain up ahead of them broke into sudden, silent fire. Hard neon lights flared out from the perimeter walls of the hive, joined a fraction afterwards by the crack and bang of their discharge. Las-beams flickered past, lancing between the racing Valkyries like spears of starlight.

  ‘Hold your positions…’ murmured Makda, driving the gunship lower. Soon the Valkyrie was barely skimming the tops of the Gorgas ruins, weaving around the taller debris as it roared into range. The other pilots did the same, and their craft hurtled along at near ground-level.

  Shardenus Prime reared up massively ahead, growing quickly. Makda saw the lights studded across the hive spires twinkling in the night like jewels. He saw plumes of red-tinged smoke rising lazily from the foundries, curling around the vast knees of the hive clusters.

  ‘The defence towers are up,’ said Fionash, her voice flat. ‘They’re all up.’

  Makda pulled the gunship around the broken shell of a ruined tower. The barrage of fire from the hive ahead was intensifying.

  ‘Marvellous,’ he muttered, just as the first gunship was hit.

  A stream of tracer rounds found its target, striking a Vulture on the right turbine intake. The flyer’s engines exploded instantly, cracking open the armour from within and sending the fuselage tumbling over and over. The pieces crashed into the ground and ploughed a trail through the ruined buildings below.

  ‘Flak increasing,’ said Fionash coolly.

  ‘You noticed?’ growled Makda, struggling with the control column as explosive bursts detonated around him. A missile shot past on his left side so close that its flaming trail bathed his wing in smoke. Another Valkyrie went down, its cockpit blasted open by a direct hit. It spun wildly out of control, crashing into another gunship and engulfing both of them in a huge fireball.

  Makda felt sweat break out across his forehead. The perimeter wall drew closer, lit up in every direction by anti-aircraft fire. Las-beams and plasma bolts danced out at him in flickering, eye-wateringly bright stabs of light, punctuated by juddering lines of fire. Something exploded very close on his left flank and the gunship bucked and rolled drunkenly, nearly crashing straight into the side of an old industrial complex as it swept onwards through the rubble of the Gorgas.

  ‘Throne,’ he swore, fighting to bring the Valkyrie back into line. Out of the corner of his eye he saw three more gunships take direct hits and blow apart in mid-air. The volume of fire from the walls kept getting thicker – far too much to evade for long.

  ‘Holy Throne of shitting Earth,’ he spat, driving the Kelemak Queen as fast as he could. ‘How long till we hit the target?’

  The ground raced under them, passing in a blur of tangled metal. For all that, the towering hives looked hardly closer than they had been a minute ago.

  ‘Forget about it,’ snapped Fionash, stress evident in her voice. ‘Maintain attack speed.’

  Makda kept swearing. The whole structure of the Valkyrie shuddered as explosions went off around it and the hurtling wind tore at it.

  He gripped the control column so tightly he felt like his finger-bones would crack. His rocket-launchers finally acquired a target, and he loosed them both, watching as they streaked off towards the walls. Then he opened fire with the multilaser mounted on the hull. Even as he swept the gunship low over a debris-strewn ridge, firing all the while, he felt the shockwave of another Valkyrie being blown into pieces.

  We are going to die, he thought bitterly, feeling shards of shattered armour-casing clatter against his own hull. We are – all of us – going to die.

  Nethata leaned over the circular tabletop, staring intently at the hololithic projections shimmering in front of him. He was tense, and the figures he was seeing made him tenser.

  ‘The armoured divisions,’ he said. ‘Moving too slowly.’

  All around him in the command bunker, senior officers, aides and servitors moved from console to console, inputting commands or staring at tactical reports from the front. Close to fifty men and women jostled for space in the low-ceilinged, poorly lit space.

  ‘Orders to increase pace relayed to Galamoth commanders,’ reported a steel-faced servitor on the other side of the hololith table. ‘Dispatch received: They are hampered by terrain.’

  Nethata shook his head, stifling the urge to swear pointlessly at the automaton.

  ‘Those corridors should have been cleared,’ he snapped, watching as the signals from another half-dozen Valkyries blinked out of existence. The waves of gunships streaking towards the hive cluster were being thinned out rapidly. Close to a quarter of them had already been destroyed before they even reached the walls, and it was clear that the volume of fire from the defence towers was only increasing. ‘Sweet Emperor, get the Ferik up faster.’

  The main regiments of Guard troops were making heavy weather of the advance. Their targets were arranged along the south-eastern walls of the hive complex, between the Vannon and Rovax Gates and south of the gigantic Melamar hives, but everything was happening too slowly, and the gunships were dangerously exposed. In the absence of the Titans and the Iron Hands, the whole shape of the assault looked enormously fragile.

  ‘Reserve wings sent into the assault, as ordered,’ said Refede Gropis, overall commander of the air assault units. ‘All Vultures are now in the air.’

  ‘Any towers down?’

  ‘No.’

  Nethata suppressed the urge to gland a shot of tranquilox. He felt sweat burst out across his forehead. If all the defence towers remained intact, then those Vultures would be shot out of the sky soon enough.

  ‘Divert all forces to the attack zone,’ he ordered, never lifting his eyes from the dancing array of lights on the hololith. ‘Maintain speed. We need one breach. Just one.’

  Gropis bowed, and hurried away to transmit the order.

  Nethata didn’t watch him go. He gripped the side of the table tightly, feeling his blood press against his temples.

  Damn you, Rauth, he thought, trying not to imagine how much help the Iron Hands would have been, nor what obscure tasks they were engaged in. Damn you to the Eye, all of you.

  Marivo felt hands grab him by his shoulder and neck, hauling him through the doorway and out into the darkness of the gantry beyond. Even as he was wrenched out of harm’s way, he felt the heat of bolts as they crackled into the space he’d just occupied.

  ‘Come on!’ came Khadi’s voice. It was urgent and nervy.

  Marivo struggled awkwardly to his feet, gritting his teeth as the wound in his shoulder flared up with agonising pain. It was all he could do to stay conscious.

  Khadi sprinted off ahead of him, careering along the gantry towards the ladder. Marivo limped after her, feeling his arm go numb. He had an overwhelming urge to slump to his knees, to collapse in a heap, to give in to the pain. Then he heard footfalls behind him, echoing out from the generator room as the guards hurried after them. He stumbled along the gantry, sliding down the ladder to the level below, feeling his useless arm slap painfully against his side as he stumbled onwards.

  His fractured and smeared visor made it hard to see much. His shoulder felt like a wet hunk of semi-cooked meat and his throat was raw and bleeding. He staggered out across the basement floor, his vision beginning to blur, expecting at any moment to feel the hot stab of a las-bolt in his back.

  He reached the breach in the outer wall again. The sick feeling in his stomach grew even worse, and he recognised the bitter stink of chemicals in the air. It had been bad enough the first time, but now his visor was cracked and his armour compromised.

  Then, from behind and above, he heard the muffled crack of the charges going off. Taking a deep breath, he plunged out into the toxic filth once more.

  The sickness hit again. It was almost like plunging into a sea of poison. He gagged, tripped, almost falling to his knees. More muted explosions bloomed out, far above him.

 
He started to run. Somehow, even though he reeled around and crashed into the shells of the buildings around him, he stumbled his way out of the danger zone. His rebreather wheezed like a old dog at the end of its life, barely thinning out the soup of spores in the air before they were sucked into his mouth.

  He saw the flash of light before he heard the noise of the biggest explosion. The light swept out in front of him, a vivid surge of neon-orange that dragged his shadow out across the ground. Then came the deafening crash of the blast wave as it smashed through the defence tower from the inside.

  Marivo half-turned as he ran, looking up over his shoulder. The tower still reared up massively, dark against the dark of the sky, but it was burning. Gouts of flame shot out of rents in the walls, bulging from where ammunition deposits had ignited. A colossal pall of smoke rolled up the broken flanks, flecked with red-hot fragments of burning metal.

  Even as he watched, more explosions took root higher up, barely muffled by the distance. He remembered Valien’s briefing then, just as if the agent had been standing by his shoulder and whispering the words to him all over again.

  The generators are on level one. Hit them hard enough and the explosions will reach the ammo dumps. After that, the whole tower’s as good as gone. It’s simple; just move in fast and get out before they know what’s happened.

  Marivo turned away from the burning tower, feeling his awareness slide into sluggish torpor. His tongue had swollen in his mouth and was sticky with viscous saliva. Breathing was difficult – like pulling porridge through a sieve. His wounded shoulder throbbed agonisingly, and he felt blood slip down the inside of his armour.

  He started to run again, barely knowing which direction to head in, alone in the wasteland. He’d lost sight of the rest of his squad, all of whom were no doubt running as hard as they could for the sanctuary of the hive. He stumbled and staggered as fast as he could, his jaw clenched and his eyes half-closed. As he went, a single thought ran through his mind, over and over.

  I did the job; now to survive. I did the job; now to survive.