by Various
‘Ready your weapons,’ Krugeran said, prompting a synchronous clunk of boltgun priming mechanisms from the siege squad beyond. Smacking their boarding shields down twice on the compartment floor, the Iron Warriors indicated their readiness. About him, Krendl heard Escutcheon’s belligerent machine-spirit powering up the assault tank’s flank-mounted lascannon quads and cycling belt-ammunition from trough-feeds into the forward heavy bolter. The gunners were ready too.
‘Eradicant, Obliteratus,’ the warsmith voxed, looking down at the data-slate in his gauntlet. ‘You are cleared to fire. Initiate Ironfire, I repeat – Ironfire protocols initiated. Acknowledge.’
‘Ironfire a go.’
‘Ironfire, go, Escutcheon.’
Krendl looked from a chronometer on his slate, back to the dirty port window. His broken mind swam with seconds, metres and angles. His mangled lips wrapped themselves silently around a countdown.
‘Eradicant – this is a call for fire. Grid IF 3-61 72-09.’
‘Grid IF 3-61 72-09, confirmed.’
‘Confirm. Target – curtain wall. Ordnance adjust,’ Idriss Krendl voxed back.
The warsmith waited. From kilometres away he heard the thunder of the monstrous siege gun. He waited. And waited. With the armoured column ripping through the multicoloured sands. Krendl could hear the faint whine of inevitable destruction overhead as he counted down under his breath.
‘…three… two… one.’
One moment there was a formidable expanse of wall. Moon rock. Architectural flourishes. The smooth line of crenellations. Emplacements of exotic weaponry.
The next there was obliteration: flame, storm, darkness, thunder.
Krendl watched as the curtain wall became a swirling maelstrom of fire and debris, as the Iron Warriors ordnance smeared the structure into shades of destruction. Blasted sand swirled outwards in a blinding storm of grit, and glass streaked with the darkness of soot and ash. Flames tore through this polychromatic assault on the senses, washing off Escutcheon’s armoured hull with a hail of masonry fragments that pranged off the thick plate.
‘Maintain speed and direction,’ Krendl ordered as he felt Gholic ease off the drive. With the thunder of detonation all about the assault tank, and rubble cascading down from the towering wall section, Krendl understood the legionary’s concern. ‘This is Ironfire!’ he roared through the insanity of destruction. ‘Embrace it. Become one with the storm. Ride its eye through the obliteration of your enemies!’
Escutcheon plunged through the swirling devastation, its tracks thrashing against the small mountain of rubble that had crashed down in the lee of the demolished wall section. Thrashing the treads against the rocky incline, Gholic kept the Spartan assault tank bouncing and shredding its indomitable path into the Selenic palace.
‘Column, stay with us,’ Krendl warned the other drivers over the vox. ‘Maintain position on our augur signature.’
As Escutcheon thundered down the rubble slope on the other side, the smoke and dust began to clear. The warsmith could see the labyrinthine settlements and hab-shacks that dominated the municipal plazas beyond – a small city of brightly coloured tents, stilt-shacks and sand-glass architecture.
‘Hit it,’ he commanded.
Gholic took the assault tank straight into the buildings, the people and the confusion. Men, women and children of the slums screamed and ran for their lives. Native livestock trumpeted calls of alarm and broke free from their rickety enclosures. Escutcheon’s armoured form ploughed through hovels of coloured glass, stilts, steps of second-storey shacks and trailed the coloured materials of market stall awnings. Sand imps were smashed from their cages and flapped through the destruction. The mist-eyed, swarthy citizens of the Great Selenic went down under the tank’s thrashing tracks and bounced with bone-breaking regularity off the Spartan’s armoured hull. Exotic beasts of burden were smashed across the tank’s riveted assault prow. Mechanised wagons of wares and spidery walking limbs were smashed aside and aged repulsor-bikes exploded, dousing Escutcheon in fresh flame.
‘Obliteratus,’ Krendl said into the vox. ‘Grid IF 4-61 68-07.’
‘Grid IF 4-61 68-07, aye,’ Vhosk returned from the interface chamber of his mighty siege gun.
‘Confirm. Concentric wall section. You are cleared to fire… now.’
The Selenic palace had hundreds of kilometres of walls. With the few Iron Warriors at his disposal, the warsmith could not hope to take the fortifications in a traditional siege. But he didn’t need to if he used his Ironfire protocols. A small force, shielded from a colossal defending force by surgical ordnance strikes could punch their way through the polar city-palace. Like the Imperial Palace on Terra, the people of Euphoros and their overlords hid behind walls, behind which lay more walls still.
Like the outer curtain, the concentric inner wall vanished in a cacophony of flame and tumbling masonry. Bodies and shattered structures rained down through the billowing, choking dust as Escutcheon led the way once more up the mound of rubble that marked the gap.
What the Spartan failed to crush in its track-thrashing path, the seven assault tanks behind pulverised into the ground. Euphorosian homes. Livestock. The bones of palace citizens. As death rained down from Eradicant onto the third wall, Krendl kept the stream of strike coordinates coming; his confidence in his strategy and siege guns increased as more Techmarines manned them.
For Siege-Captain Krugeran and his Iron Warriors, the experience was one of noise and motion. The assault tank shuddered as it bulldozed through buildings and bucked as it mounted piles of cascading rubble. The Spartan’s roof rang with impacts as small boulders and shards of masonry rained down from the never-ending succession of detonations. Krendl fed Achorax and Vhosk targets with increasing speed and fury. Escutcheon led the way through the hellish beauty of annihilation: an entrancing, multicoloured miasma of dust, ash, soot and sand.
It was twenty-two minutes into the assault before Krendl detected any evidence of resistance, which surprised even him. There were a number of reasons why, and it behove the warsmith to catalogue them in the interests of comparison and strategy development. Krendl had to accept the possibility that the princely overlords cared little for their people – at least the minions who inhabited the slums and city districts between the five concentric palace walls.
The local guard, conversely, had been sluggish to respond to the encroaching legionary threat as siege guns continually brought down the walls, fortifications and weapon emplacements set inside. As the tank column thundered on, leaving a dust-swirling path of destruction in their wake, Krendl took the precaution of having Obliteratus cover their rear. Krendl did not want regrouping palace soldiers or scrambled vehicles working their way behind the column. As Eradicant blasted walls, toppled towers and collapsed archways from the path of their advance, the warsmith had Obliteratus turn its attentions upon the catastrophic trail they had left behind. The craters and demolished wasteland of dumbstruck, wounded Euphorosians, shellshocked palace guards and wrecked repulsor-drive vehicles were turned to vaulting infernos of rock and flame, just as those victims began to celebrate their unlikely survival.
Smashing through ornamental gardens and plazas, the column of IV Legion armour took to the broad, elevated avenues and grand, arched thoroughfares of the inner palace. The Euphorosian guard there had established a gauntlet for the oncoming tanks. Krendl could not use Eradicant to decimate the road ahead, for such a barrage would destroy the columned avenues they were traversing.
Up until now, the Spartans had weathered the disorganised small arms fire of palace guardsmen stumbling from demolished buildings. They had withstood the gunfire of the half-smashed emplacements that soldiers had managed to jury-rig and establish across the tank column’s path.
Through the blood-splattered viewport, Krendl could see the palace soldiers in reflective scale-mail plate, cloaks and the baggy silk of their uniform
s swarming the thoroughfare ahead. Some sat astride repulsor-bikes or in tent-topped personnel carriers. Dish emplacements of sonic weaponry were manoeuvred into position, ready to blast the tanks back.
‘We stop for nothing,’ he told Gholic and the other Iron Warrior drivers across the vox. ‘We are iron. We are fire. We ride the storm. Authorise your vehicles to engage the enemy as we pass. Fire all weapons!’
The barrels of twin-linked heavy bolters barked to furious life. Escutcheon’s armour sang under the enemy’s return fire, the command tank bucking and bouncing as it forced its way on. The Spartan’s thick tracks chewed up the avenue, but blast after sonic blast from the dish emplacements hammered the vehicle and slowed its advance. The tank’s lascannon gunners fired, blazing the mobile emplacements to scrap. The palace guards’ scale armour was principally designed to deflect low-level energy weapons and offered little protection against the storm that was now directed towards them.
Without stopping, the armoured column punched through the gauntlet, smashing aside derelict weaponry and antique vehicles. Droves of palace soldiers went down before the fury of heavy bolter fire, their cloaked and lightly armoured bodies torn apart.
The monstrous artillery fire of Obliteratus and Eradicant continued around them. The warsmith directed Achorax and Vhosk to drop cataclysmic barrages on guardhouses, landing pads and arterial avenues sighted from his position; feeding the Techmarines an almost constant stream of coordinates, Krendl increased the siege guns’ rate of fire but left the elevated avenue intact.
Suddenly, he heard a blast over the vox-channel, and the roars of dying Iron Warriors.
‘Ferrico?’ the warsmith said. ‘Ferrico, call in.’
‘Ferrico has been knocked out by enemy gunships,’ the commander of Truculent reported.
The unfortunate Spartan had been hit by a sonic cannon that had smashed in its side and knocked it into a skidding roll off the side of the elevated avenue. Plummeting down through the arches and towers, Ferrico hit the dome of a citadel before its engine exploded. Elegant gunships swooped in on the rest of the tanks, keeping pace with the racing column.
‘Engage enemy aircraft with rockets,’ Krendl ordered. He nodded to Siege-Captain Krugeran, who sent an Iron Warrior from his squad up through the hatch to man the multi-launcher. As the Spartans surged on through colossal archways, Iron Warriors blasted the gunships, so elegant in flight, from the sky like wounded birds.
Krendl felt a shudder work its way through the battered superstructure of Escutcheon.
‘What was that? All tanks call in,’ the warsmith ordered.
‘We just lost Unbreakable Litany,’ the Iron Warrior manning the launcher reported as he climbed back down into the troop compartment and secured the hatch. ‘Ordnance knocked down a tower across the avenue. It took out Litany and smashed through the thoroughfare, trapping Ictus behind it.’
‘Warsmith?’ said Gholic. ‘Should we slow for them?’
‘We stop for nothing,’ Krendl snarled.
‘Then at least call off the ordnance,’ Siege-Captain Krugeran implored him.
‘No. Ironfire will intensify.’
‘That’s insane–’
‘It’s necessary!’ Krendl roared back. ‘This is a live simulation. The real siege will change the galaxy as we know it. There is no going back – not for the primarch, not for Horus and not for us.’ He pointed at the viewport. ‘The enemy cowers in the inner palace, and we almost have them. Increase our speed. Step up the bombardment. We shall ride this storm right into the Third Legion’s nest of decadent deviance. Do you understand?’
Krugeran gave him the blankness of his helm lenses. He turned and retook his position with the siege squad. Krendl eyed him warily.
‘Brother Gholic, have the squad aboard Ictus disembark and follow us on foot into the inner palace.’
‘Yes, warsmith.’
As the armoured column left the elevated avenue, Krendl gave Eradicant coordinates for a colossal gated archway that delineated the interior of the Great Selenic.
‘What is that I hear?’ he asked across the vox. ‘It sounds like defensive fire.’
‘Limited enemy forces have left the palace and engaged us, warsmith,’ Mordan Vhosk reported.
‘Legionaries?’
‘No, warsmith. Palace soldiers and some light vehicles. The flak batteries and mega-bolters are taking care of them now.’
As the archway was replaced with the fury and flame of a renewed bombardment, Escutcheon plunged into the inferno, followed by the remaining Spartans. The compartment ceiling thundered with the crash of masonry, and fiery destruction scorched their reinforced plating. Escutcheon bounced on its tracks through the wreckage, before punching out the other side.
The architecture of the inner Selenic was grand and beautiful. Krendl had his siege guns destroy it all. Palatial pyramids and statues raged up into the skies in colossal fountains of rock and flame.
Lascannon quads cut through the columns of smaller structures, bringing down the roofs of temples, sanctuaries and arenas on palace guardsmen that took cover in the buildings. Heavy bolters chuntered through the Euphorosians, their rag-doll bodies blasted this way and that by the flesh-shredding assault.
Shattering their way across statue-lined plazas and along balcony platforms, the armoured column worked its way towards the colossal domed structure that crowned the Great Selenic. Taking his tanks up flights of carved steps and through the interior of ornamental vaulted halls, Krendl had the Spartans smash their way through.
‘Obliteratus,’ Krendl voxed finally. ‘Grid IF 2-54 69-00.’
‘Grid IF 2-54 69-00, confirmed,’ Vhosk answered.
‘Confirm. Target – the palace dome. Ordnance adjust,’ Krendl said. ‘Escutcheon out.’
The sky flashed white.
The blaze of the artillery detonation faded to reveal a fireball of blast-shattered masonry rocketing skyward. The domed roof was gone. All that remained was the smoke-streaming foundations of the ornate building. Billowing clouds of dust and pulverised stone choked the air.
Escutcheon’s tracks reached over the lip of the devastated palace before bouncing into the cratered, derelict remains. The great support columns of the dome were now stubby, soot-stained remnants sticking out of the shattered structure. The crowning glory of Euphoros had been huge and built to last for all eternity. It had not, however, been built to withstand a direct hit from one of the Iron Warriors’ mighty siege guns.
The assault tanks crunched through the palace foundations, while fiery rubble rained down about them. Slowing Escutcheon to a gritty crawl, Gholic negotiated the columns that sat like the stumps of felled titanwoods.
‘All stop,’ Idriss Krendl announced to the compartment and the open vox-channel.
The warsmith thumped the battered compartment controls and the reinforced door fell to form a disembarkation ramp – the warriors within were treated to the utter devastation that the siege guns had created.
Krendl smiled. It was an ugly sight.
‘Brothers, we have won. Ironfire works. You proved that. We rode the storm and were one with obliteration, instead of being distant observers. Now we must finish the task and destroy the enemy command structure still present within these ruins.’
‘How could anyone survive… this?’ Siege-Captain Krugeran muttered.
‘The Phoenician’s sons are weak of will and deviant of flesh, but they are not stupid. They sent their playthings to meet us in battle and die by the fire of our iron. The Emperor’s Children wait for us here. I know it. Just like Dorn’s dogs will wait for us on Terra, they will be skilled and they will be deadly. For the purposes of our simulation and the integrity of the data we bequeath our primarch, and him to his Warmaster – I would not have it any other way. But we shall prevail, brothers. There are legionaries here who still proclaim themselves sons of the Emp
eror, in name if not in deed. Find them and kill them.’
‘You heard the warsmith,’ Siege-Captain Krugeran said, stomping down the ramp. ‘The entire palace is coming down on us. We must be swift and resolute. All Iron Warriors disembark. Pattern Obduros – disperse and search by demi-squad. Shields and boltguns.’
Iron Warriors filed out from the battle-scarred vehicles, their studded and riveted plate held in close behind their shields. Resting the snub muzzles of their boltguns in the firing slots, the legionaries advanced.
Standing on the ramp of Escutcheon, Idriss Krendl clutched his data-slate. He narrowed his remaining eye, peering through his wire face-cage at the blasted palace foundations. Unlike the Iron Warriors filing down the smashed grand staircases and the smoking scree slopes leading into the structures below, Krendl was a broken warrior. His bones were held together by the iron rods shot through his body and the bolts and screw heads that covered his plate. It wouldn’t take much to demolish him once again.
Slipping a fat bolt pistol from his belt holster and with his ragged mail cloak clinking in the breeze, Krendl followed the legionaries, carefully negotiating a demolished staircase that descended into the lower levels of the foundation. Even a fall might be fatal for him here.
He picked out four Iron Warriors and a sergeant that he had met before – an officer named Torrez. Suit lamps cut through the murk of shadow, soot and dust. The Iron Warriors moved expertly from corner to corner, covering one another and protecting themselves from potential attack with their presented boarding shields. They moved with belligerent purpose, eager to be done with the search and get into battle – a state of being for which they had been specifically designed and trained.
Down in the bowels of the palace principal, the artful design and craftsmanship was gone. Here the corners were pleasantly angular and the walls unadorned. As the light from his own suit lamps stuttered between thick metal bars, Krendl realised that they were in a dungeon. He could hear the rattle of war-plate as Iron Warriors tensed behind their weapons.