by Various
By robbing Gorvus Hive of its anti-aircraft capabilities, the stealth groups had ensured that their air caste allies could close in unmolested. Razorsharks shot down those few aircraft the hive could launch in its defence as Paradox squadrons circled the spires like vultures, dropping stasis bombs on the canopies and domes that protected its people from Agrellan’s toxic atmosphere.
The deadly zephyrs of the planet’s wastes slowly filtered into the hive’s innards, and soon panic had broken out in every district. It was as potent a weapon of conquest as any bomb. Gorvite citizens fought tooth and nail for the rebreathers and puritan canisters that were worn by the richer members of the populace, just as Shadowsun had known they would, for humans were selfish and had little concept of a greater good.
Before the hour was out, the hive’s gates had been flung wide by swarming refugees seeking the safety of neighbouring cities. The people that formed the hive’s lifeblood spilled out onto the toxic plains in screaming rivers and desperate, pooling crowds. So it was that whilst Imortis fell from without, Gorvus fell from within.
Rebellion took Barantius Hive, a fortress famous for the great macrocannons that girdled its thick waist. After inveigling their way inside the underhive, water caste ambassadors had traded cutting edge plasma weaponry to every gang leader they could find in exchange for little more than a handful of Imperial silver. When the Adeptus Arbites came for the tau that had been anonymously reported as lurking in the gangers’ midst, the trigger-happy hivers were more than ready to test out their new guns in defence of their new ‘friends’.
Skirmishes turned into bloodbaths as the enforcers of the noble houses came down heavily upon those gangs that had dared resist them. With the temper of the oppressed masses already dangerously short, the tau ambassadors found it easy to fan the spark of revolt into a raging inferno. The entire underhive mobilised into an uprising that coursed through the hive city, consuming it layer by layer as the wordcraft of the tau ambassadors worked its subtle magic. Before the day was out even the highest spires were taken – not by tau warriors, but by human guerrillas only too glad to turn the tables on their long-time oppressors. In the end, Barantius fell without a single one of its macrocannons being fired.
Predominus Hive was next. Huge shield discs jutted from every structure sturdy enough to hold them, a profusion of hemispheres reminiscent of the plate-fungus that clusters to the trunk of an ancient tree. Though they were individually weak, when all of these discs were at maximum output the hive was shrouded by a shimmering cloak of energy that could deflect artillery shells and lascannon beams alike. With every generator in the lower hive given over to these defences, the populace considered themselves invulnerable.
The hive’s citizens were to be disabused of this notion in the most horrific and final of ways. As Agrellan’s great cities were taken apart in a dozen locations, the planet’s moon appeared full and gloating directly above the spires of Predominus. From the armourglass balconies and vivariums of the hive’s upper levels, a tiny blue flicker could be seen in the planetoid’s deepest crater. The flicker grew larger, then larger still, until it hurt to look at the sky.
Then, with a window-shattering thunderclap, a column of fusion energy the width of a mag-train stabbed down into the topmost spire of Predominus. It blasted the hive apart from within, a hundred thousand gun ports and archways venting sheets of blue-white energy in a single cataclysmic explosion. As Shadowsun had predicted, the fusion lance’s fell energies were contained within the same protective force fields that had been designed to protect the hive. Instead of being released they raged like a trapped firestorm, burning away every living thing inside and out until the hive was little more than crumbling ash.
The price of such destructive power was high, for the titanic release of energy from the earth caste mega-weapon upon Agrellan’s moon caused a fusion reactor meltdown of unprecedented scale. The backlash consumed half of Agrellan’s moon in blue fire, cracking the rest of the honeycombed orb into little more than space debris. Yet the deed was done. For the loss of less than fifty earth caste scientists, the tau coalition had obliterated over seven billion hivers.
Adronicus Hive fell next, then Stormspire, then Olnius, each taken down by a military masterstroke that turned the hive’s power against itself. Shadowsun’s worldwide Mont’ka strategy had halved the planet’s population and reduced its fortresses to rubble in the space of a single day.
Yet for all the deadly genius that Shadowsun had exhibited elsewhere on the planet, it was the conquest of Agrellan Prime that was to become legendary.
Kor’sarro Khan leant forward out of the cupola of the Rhino Steelsteed, toxic winds whipping across his face as the transport hurtled through the desiccated forest. The air was foul, and he could feel his multi-lung pumping at maximum capacity next to his spine. At least he could see his surroundings. Moondrakkan would take weeks to replace, and in the meantime there was no way he was going to hide from sight like a tau coward.
The khan’s transport was the arrowhead point of an armoured column that made all speed towards the evac site at Agrellan Prime. Each vehicle bore the white and red heraldry of the White Scars, the remains of its biker squads acting as outriders on either flank. Inside each Rhino and Razorback was a squad itching for battle, praying for the xenos to bar their path so they could take a measure of revenge before the evacuation craft bore them into the night sky.
Less than a hundred metres ahead of the Steelsteed, the contrails of Raven Guard jump packs flickered blue. The khan’s allies shot through the forest, their fast but stealthy approach in stark contrast to the White Scars juggernaut charge. Shrike had insisted the khan’s men take the forest road, sticking to the natural camouflage of the white trees for as long as possible before making a break for the walls of Agrellan Prime. After his losses at Blackshale Ridge, Kor’sarro had reluctantly acquiesced, part of him silently grateful that his loss of the steed Moondrakkan would be less evident if they rode through woodland instead of the open wastes.
‘Slippery tau hag,’ he muttered into the wind. The enemy commander had twice escaped him now, twice evaded Moonfang’s steel bite. If the witch hadn’t have been xenos, perhaps… perhaps the hatred he felt for her would be closer to respect.
A cloud of orange flame flickered up ahead, and the trunks of dead trees threw out stark shadows as shrill screams rose into the night. On either side of the forest road, baleful eyes flashed in the gloom. The khan caught flashes of heavy-set figures with their backs flattened against the desiccated trunks, white tree-dust smeared across their muscled frames.
Catachans. Kor’sarro knew fellow hunters when he saw them. But as for what they were waiting for…
An avian caw jolted Kor’sarro from his thoughts, and there came a clang of clawed feet on metal from behind him. He ducked on instinct just as a jagged blade attached to a hunting rifle swept overhead, ripping a clump of black hair from his topknot.
Face set in a grimace of contempt, the khan punched upwards and grabbed the rifle’s shaft, yanking it forward to draw its owner into his line of sight. A gangly xenos stared down with beady black eyes, beak open and head-quills shaking in a primitive threat display. A kroot mercenary, savage in a fight but easily broken.
The creature’s head exploded, showering the cupola and its occupant with foul-smelling gore.
Kor’sarro shouldered up to lean out of the hatch once more and scan his surroundings. He could hear bolter fire, and see the flicker-flare of mass reactive shots detonating in the distance. To the right of the Steelsteed rode Djubali, grinning fiercely under his mask of whipping black hair. He had a smoking bolt pistol in his hand.
‘That kill was mine!’ bawled Kor’sarro, wiping xenos blood from his face.
‘My apologies, steedless one!’ laughed his battle-brother over the din of the armoured column’s engines. ‘At least you look a bit more like your old gory self now!’
> The khan shrugged, picking up the remains of the xenos corpse’s arm and biting down into it so that blood ran down his chin. The muscle was stringy and foul, but he could feel his gut thanking him for the protein nonetheless. He smiled redly at Djubali and flung the rest of the arm at his head.
‘There’s whole tribes of the things!’ shouted Djubali, expertly swaying his bike so the khan’s improvised projectile flailed past him. ‘Straken’s lot are hunting them!’
‘No time to join in!’ replied the khan. ‘Stick to the plan!’
A solid slug pinged hard from his pauldron, some tree-hidden kroot sniper’s best shot. Kor’sarro snorted in irritation, picking his helmet from the mag-clamp at his waist and pushing it down hard over his head. ‘Do not fall to this distraction,’ he voxed to his men. ‘We’ve a real battle to fight. Punch through the thick of it, then on to the hive walls.’
Djubali nodded his understanding and peeled off, the bolters on the front of his bike thumping out shells into the night.
The noise of battle up ahead was intensifying. Blossoms of flame illuminated long-limbed kroot and thickly muscled Catachans as they darted through the darkness. Catachan blood spurted in black arcs, hunting staves swung and chopped, alien flesh sizzled as lasguns stabbed pinpoint volleys through the darkness. The khan breathed in the heady scent of war, opening a vox-channel to his brethren whilst the White Scars column bullied its path through the sparse forest.
‘Engage only those in your path, brothers, do not slow,’ the khan said. ‘Deliver what wrath you can from atop your steeds.’
His men answered only with gunfire, those in the armoured column behind throwing open the top hatches of their Rhinos to send bolt shells blasting into the kroot snipers crouching in the trees. Xenos remains pattered out of the white boughs like the flesh of burst fruit.
Up ahead, a squadron of squat-bodied Imperial Guard tanks bulldozed their way into a clearing. The khan chuckled evilly as he recognised the silhouettes of their giant promethium barrels.
Hellhounds.
The oily scent of ignited promethium billowed through the forest, and a roiling bow-wave of flame blasted a nearby copse of trees to burning splinters. The khan saw long-limbed figures blaze like tallow candles in a bonfire before falling away to ash.
Dozens of kroot fled from the Hellhounds, sprinting right towards the armoured column. They flitted and darted from tree to tree like shadows given life. Shouting a wordless war cry, the khan pivoted the cupola’s storm bolter and sent a volley of rocket-propelled shells thudding into scattering aliens and desiccated vegetation alike. Each deadly little cylinder detonated on impact to spray bone-white powder and xenos remains in a wide radius. The weapon bucked hard in the khan’s hands as it killed foe after foe, and the Rhino kicked like a mule as it crunched over those xenos too slow to scatter out of its path. Kor’sarro savoured the prickly feeling of hot adrenaline pumping through his system. Armoured warfare. There was nothing quite like it.
The Raven Guard, as focused and driven as ever, had avoided the fighting entirely to boost out of the forest and onto the parched earth girdling the hive’s walls. The khan almost envied them their focus. He could no sooner pass through a forest of foes without taking a few kills than he could devour a Land Raider. Still, their advance had not slowed, and the edge of the desiccated woodland was in sight.
The White Scars column bullied its way out of the forest at breakneck speed, the crushed remains of kroot mercenaries gumming the tracks of many of its vehicles. A few kilometres distant the man-made mountain of Hive Agrellan loomed impossibly tall. Its spires disappeared up into the glowering clouds, though its perimeter wall loomed close, a promise of safety wrought in brutalist rockcrete. On its upper slopes ancient guns clanked and huffed, steam gouting from their gargoyle-mouthed vents as they ground into new firing positions. The khan could swear they were taking a bead on his armoured column.
Or perhaps, thought the khan, aiming at an unseen foe closing in upon it.
‘Beware the flanks, battle-brothers!’ shouted the khan, ‘Close all hatches! The alien is near!’
No sooner had the khan given his command than a shoal of xenos war machines hurtled down out of the low-hanging clouds towards them. Grav-skimmers, fighters, drones, battlesuits, every one of them bore down upon the White Scars with their guns spitting blue-white plasma. The Raven Guard jetting off ahead and the Catachans sprinting across the plains behind them were easy targets, but the xenos ignored them entirely. The khan could feel it in his bones. This was about revenge.
Several bikes tumbled away into the dust as the tau volleys hit home, and a Razorback flipped over as a volley of missiles struck its tracks. Rhinos were rocked on their suspension by seeker missiles that slammed into their hatches over and over again, hammering in hard as if trying to get at the Space Marines inside. The khan growled in frustration, longing to change tactic and engage them head on, but knowing the time for such tactics had passed.
‘Force Jekobah, Force Khenik, introduce yourselves,’ Kor’sarro growled into the vox. A moment later he heard the signature boom of turbo-boosted engines as eight Land Speeders and a Stormraven gunship roared out from the forest road to fill the skies with heavy bolter fire. Many of the shells hit home, and the blazing wreckage of tau drones and light aircraft fell out of the skies, long plumes of smoke trailing behind them as they corkscrewed towards the parched earth.
A guttural chanting came from behind Kor’sarro. Sudabeh had shouldered his way out of the Steelsteed’s top hatch, his force staff raised high. The seer’s eyes filled red, the air around him crackling faintly as his conjuration reached its zenith. Far above, the clouds above the approaching tau strike force began to curl.
‘Ha!’ barked the khan. ‘Show them a real storm, old friend!’
The curling clouds turned into a spiral, then a vortex, its interior lit with ruddy streaks of lightning. Here and there an electrical bolt would crackle out with a loud snapping sound, discharging towards the tau warsuits that were sending missiles arcing down towards their position. Several of the bipedal weapons platforms took direct hits, and though they were left physically intact they fell away nonetheless, dropping like falling statues to the earth.
The khan’s breath came quick. The vast city’s walls were less than three kilometres away. They could still make it. Even under heavy fire, they could make it.
He looked to the west, and saw dim shadows. He looked up, and his eyes widened.
Drifting down from the lightning-haunted skies came a new kind of death.
Four alien war machines emerged from the roiling clouds, so large and powerful that any one of them could have flipped the Steelsteed with one hand. The ever-present warsuits of the tau the khan had fought before. They were usually as tall as a Dreadnought and carried much the same firepower. Yet even those deadly things would barely have come up to the waists of the technological horrors that now came for them.
A single cyclopean eye glowed dull red in each boxy head, nestled small amongst the massive bulk of their segmented torsos and jetpack arrays. On the left arm of each massive warsuit discus shields shimmered, tiny flickers of Sudabeh’s red lightning dancing across the domes of force they projected. On their right arms were guns almost as large as the Khan Spear’s turbo-laser destructor.
The paired giants at the front of the formation raised their cannons, complex rotary weapons whose multiple barrels whirred into black and ochre blurs. The rising whine of the spinning barrels were soon joined by great bass pulses, the weapons booming voh-voh-voh-voh as arm-sized plasma bolts blitzed into the Raven Guard. Wherever the blinding white lozenges struck home, black-armoured Space Marines were bowled six metres into the dust, skidding to a halt in a tangle of smoking limbs and charred ceramite.
Behind them came two more of the monstrosities, boosting forward to take up kneeling stances in the dust. Bluish light poured from the ve
nts in their double-barrelled cannons as their thrumming reactors powered up for the shot. A krak missile shot out from one of the Rhinos in the middle of the armoured column, its firer hoping to disrupt whatever barrage was to come. His aim was true, and the missile smacked right into the leftmost warsuit, detonating with a clap of percussive force. It did nothing more than discolour the colossus’ ochre hide.
Then the warsuits returned fire.
With an enormous, blaring tzonng, two starbursts of ion energy flared out from the underslung cannons. Each boulder-sized sphere burned a trail through the air before smacking straight into the armoured column.
One of the blinding balls punched into the side of a Rhino, annihilating a full half of its hull in an instant. Flailing Space Marines spilled out amongst the smouldering remains of their comrades a moment before the vehicle exploded with a ground-shaking boom.
The other energy sphere burst upon the hull of a Razorback, incinerating its upper half and turning its lascannon turret into a pillar of crackling smoke. The stricken vehicle veered, tilted, and slowly toppled over, sending nearby bikers scattering away from its burning wreck.
‘Keep moving!’ shouted the khan, waving at his men to circumvent the ruined transports. ‘Full throttle! Full dispersal!’
Muting the vox for a second, Kor’sarro clucked his tongue in frustration and anger. With the Thunderhawks gone, they had nowhere near enough firepower to deal with this new threat, let alone the massed tau strike force on their right. Their only hope was speed and determination.
Luckily, those were qualities the White Scars had in great measure.