Major Hussari was in the command bunker, instructing the squadrons engaging the edges of the tyranid legions. Nobody was to venture closer than autocannon range; the tyranids reacted too quickly to risk sending them in closer. As it was, the enemy was sending out harrying parties to go after the squadrons, overtaking some and scattering others. This was a flood, and they were but a lone rock hoping to break the back of the storm, but Hussari continued to direct his squadrons, hearing them die one at a time. He doubted whether more than a handful of birds would ever reach the caves.
Kortan, meanwhile, was regretting his decision with every fibre of his being, but he stood his ground along the northern wall. He tried to ignore the thunder of the approaching mob, the undulating sea of bone-grey, turquoise, blood-red and black carapaces. The pressure of them seemed immense. How they didn’t crush one another with their bodies, Kortan did not know. For each artillery shell that cratered a hole in their ranks, the horde surged to fill it again; there was no sign of their numbers thinning. They were endless. Kortan was on the verge of collapse when a steady hand found his shoulder. It was Dashour. He handed him a remote device with a single switch mounted on its face.
“Is this the magic button to make them go away?” Kortan shouted, nodding to the tyranids.
“In a manner of speaking,” Dashour said, missing the joke. He said something else that was swallowed by the explosive artillery shot. The air was already thick with the smell of cordite from the propellants. “I said, once the tyranids draw in close, the Basilisk will be useless. This is one of four triggers to detonate the ammo sheds that are filled with deuterium shells.” He paused, waiting for another salvo to be fired. “When the camp is overrun—”
“Don’t you mean ‘if’,” Kortan said, half in jest and all in hope.
“When,” Dashour said. “It will be up to Major Hussari, Captain Abantu, me or you to detonate the ammo sheds and take as many of these bastards with us as we can.”
Kortan nodded, his head swimming with the truth of their situation. In most operations, he was well behind the front lines. He saw combat rarely, if ever. Today, however, was another matter entirely. The Basilisk fired again. This time, it was joined by mortar fire from the trench below, and by the gun emplacements on the wall.
The tyranids had reached the base of the plateau.
The battle was an ugly, desperate thing. The tyranids struck the base of the plateau and melted around it, the way water flows to find cracks. They surged up the ramp, the air filled with their insect-like chatter and their war howls. In moments, the base camp stood alone in a living sea of enemies, the desert forgotten. The tyranids nimbly scaled the cliff sides, using one another for purchase before leaping up higher, their claws and blade arms sinking into the rock wall. Others, reminiscent of centipedes and cockroaches with faces, scurried up the cliff and defied gravity with no effort. A few fired up at the Guardsmen, but they seemed frantic, eager to reach the humans within and kill them with their bare hands.
The swell of tyranids reached the compound’s walls. The first wave crashed into the abatis spikes and skewered themselves deliberately. The almost suicidal run caught the Guardsmen off kilter, until they realised that the tyranids were using their bodies to cork the spikes. Others used the dead to scramble higher up the wall, but the Guardsmen fired down into the mob. The skirmish was in desperate and full swing. The whistle of mortars was as constant as the weapons fire, and every shot was promised a hit.
Dashour stood with his men on the western wall, certainly more composed than they with their desperate battle cries, but fighting just the same. With bolt pistol in hand, he chose his shots, aimed and fired. The mob on the ramp below was packed together and blinding in their uniformity, but Dashour fancied he understood the tyranid… respected their strengths, and capitalised on their perceived weakness. The tyranids were hive-minded, and each pack possessed an anchor to that unifying intellect. It was usually a larger beast, better armed and armoured than the rest. Dashour sought them out with his sharp eyes, firing grenade shell rounds into their bodies. The rounds detonated inside them and sent out a hail of shredding fragments into their closest allies.
Kortan kept his head low as he ran along the various walls. The oversized packs strapped over both his shoulders were heavy, but were quickly becoming lighter as soldiers grabbed frag and krak grenades from him. The grenades went over the walls quickly, and detonated with muted whumps somewhere below. Kortan did not linger, however, and focused on keeping his head down.
Hussari was on the eastern wall, the one with the highest cliffs. The tyranids were clustered far below, with swarms of them trying to scale the rocks. He aimed down the scope of his M-Galaxy lasgun, picking off the highest climbers with a mid-range charge setting. Too little power and the shot might bounce off the carapace, but too strong a charge would deplete the power pack.
The major sighted, and sliced through the tentacle arm of a climbing beast with a mouth set in its chest, when someone next to him screamed. Hussari turned in time to see the man on the ground, writhing in agony, his shirt torn open, and the blood blisters on his chest exploding; beetle rounds were burrowing into his skin. Nothing could be done for him. The major turned the lasgun on the poor soldier and shot him through the head. That was the only triage any of them could expect today.
He was about to fire at another enemy when another soldier was hit: a shot to the face that rocked him off his feet and sent pin-sized beetles running in and out of the crater-like wound.
Sniper, Hussari realised. They have a sniper.
Hussari peered over the edge of the wall for a one-second count and whipped his head back again. A shot screamed past him, the sniper quick with his aim. Unfortunately, there were too many opponents below for him to see the sniper, but that didn’t matter to Hussari. He pulled three frag grenades from his webbing, adjusted them to a short fuse, pulled the pin on each and dropped them in different directions. The grenades exploded above the tyranids, the shrapnel dispersing over a wide area. Hussari moved to a different spot on the wall and peered over again for a one second-count. The mob below was devastated: carapaces split open, bodies spitting jets of ichor and yellow and red organs unravelling from bodies. No shots followed, but Hussari could also see the press of tyranids rushing in to fill the gaps and devour their own dead.
Back along the western wall, over the main gate, the fighting grew more intense. With no cliffs to scale, the tyranids were at the compound’s walls. Soldiers along the battlements fired directly down into the mob below them. The Guardsmen were efficient in their killing, but, unfortunately, were stacking a wall of corpses for the others to climb. Dashour continued to pick his shots, aiming at those tyranids that seemed unique among the throng of runners, leapers and warriors. He wasn’t sure if his plan was working, but he liked to pretend it was.
Suddenly, something caught Dashour’s eye: a row of simian-like tyranids. They were well armoured, with long, muscular arms and giant, clawed fists, the sharp knuckles of which they used to drag themselves forward. Biomechanical cannons grew from their backs, while under each body was the weighted udder of their ammo sac. Dashour’s eyes widened; he remembered these creatures, remembered the horrors they could inflict within the ranks of their enemies.
“Gunbeasts! Shoot them!” he cried, pointing. A few of the soldiers looked confused, unable to distinguish one tyranid from another in these conditions. Those that understood Dashour’s orders aimed and fired, but their shots fell short.
Dashour ran up to the autocannon gunner sheltered behind sandbags and pulled him off the weapon. He planted his shoulders into the recoil braces and fired at the tyranids, stitching round after round into the targets. Shots bounced off the heavy bone moulding of the cannon mounts and the heavily plated arms and legs, but Dashour kept his finger heavy on the trigger, his tracer rounds bringing all ranged fire along the wall to bear against the gunbeasts. Two went down, telling hits scored along the creatures’ necks and heads.
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It was too late. Three gunbeasts strained, their cannons flaring with electric sparks and heavy muscle contracting. They fired their spore clusters.
The first cluster sailed over the wall and struck the mortar trench. The spore exploded on impact, generating a cloud that engulfed four mortar crews and sent the others scrambling from the pits. They screamed, their pained howls a piercing cry that stabbed the heart. Dashour knew the effects: instant haemorrhaging, destruction of the soft connective tissues, disintegration of the internal organs. They died as their organs and arteries melted into pudding, and their skin, muscles, bones and tendons detached from one another. They turned people into bags of soup and bone.
The second spore struck the wall and caught two Guardsmen in the splatter. They didn’t even have time to scream as the liquid melted their heads and upper bodies. They fell to the ground, their organs spilling out of the exposed cups of their chests. The fast acting molecular acids also ate through the wall, opening a large crater, but not eating its way through.
The third spore struck the upper wall, this time exploding out in a web of filament threads covered in filleting micro-hooks. The threads wrapped around three men and instantly contracted. They tore through their clothing and sunk into their flesh until stopped by bone. One soldier died with a gurgle on his lips, the threads having cut through his throat and wrapped around his spinal column. The other two cried out for help, the wires embedded half-way through their stomachs, arms and thighs.
Dashour ignored the screams for help and the pandemonium. He continued firing at the gunbeasts, raking them with the autocannon to stop them from firing again.
“Major!” he cried into his micro-bead, “watch out for gunbeasts… the ones with the cannons on their back. Take them out first.”
“Will do,” Hussari cried back, “but we have our own problems.”
Quickly switching channels, the major backed away from the ledge of the battlements and contacted fire-direction centre while staring through his magnoculars.
“They’re approaching from the north-east. They’re the only things in the air,” Hussari said. He was staring at what appeared to be several flights of the creatures, what Dashour had called fliers.
“I see “em,” Captain Abantu reported.
“Take them out. We can’t afford to have them drop in our laps or skip us and find the caves before the others are ready.”
“Yes, sir,” Abantu replied.
Abantu was relatively safe inside the fire-direction centre, but the action was no less heated. They held a commanding view of the western slope and the base of the northern wall, while anything they saw to the east was out of range of their autocannons. Still, gunners waited at the three gun mounts that lined each of the four walls, either firing at the enemy they could see and reach, or waiting to fire at their own battlements the moment the tyranids began scaling the walls.
“Sir,” the forward observer said. He was a nervous looking boy who had been steady and clear in his instructions throughout the engagement. “Those gun-beasts that the major warned us about, I see more of them approaching from the east. I also see something the size of a small building. It’s moving around us with a sizeable contingent.”
“Is it now?” Abantu asked. “Moving around us? To flank us, perhaps?”
“Sir, I think that group’s avoiding the battle deliberately. I think they’re heading to the caves.”
Abantu sighed. How the creatures knew about the caves, he didn’t know, but if they managed to get inside, they could build a brand new army with all that rich bio-matter, and he doubted the others could do anything to stop them. They needed more time.
“Direct the Basilisk’s fire against that large creature and his group. Alert Major Hussari to the approaching gunbeasts, and tell the heavy gunners to fire on the fliers when they get within range.”
“Yes, sir.”
The first tyranids made it over the south wall at the same time the fliers swooped into the fray. All twelve ball-mounted guns over the command bunker began chattering at that moment, in between the heavy artillery salvos aimed at the large tyranid force that was north of the compound.
It was nothing short of spectacular chaos, with the fight disintegrating into a three hundred and sixty degree free-for-all. A bipedal tyranid with a scorpion’s tail mounted the southern battlement and swung its scythe blades, disembowelling one Guardsman and amputating the arm of another. Two ball mounts above the command bunker swung towards the warrior and unleashed a fusillade of shots that dismembered it and chewed through the ichor and blood-soaked duckboards, before blasting chunks off the walls.
Fliers swooped down at the Guardsmen on the battlements. Kortan barely managed to duck as the blade-tail of one sliced at him. Laspistol in hand, he fired at it as it swooped skyward again, but it moved too fast. Kortan checked the sky and headed for a group of soldiers shouting for more ammunition.
Major Hussari watched as a flyer with insect-like wings skewered a tripod gunner on its lance arms and raised him into the air. The man screamed as the tyranid lifted him up and sank his teeth around the man’s face. There was a brilliant explosion of red as the creature’s cartilage tongue burst out through the back of his skull. Hussari screamed in anger and fired his lasgun. Crackling shots tore through the creature’s wings, and both it and its prey dropped into the compound below. The surviving mortar crews shot the creature with their laspistols until it stopped jerking. Grim-faced, they returned to their steady salvos.
Hussari ran to an abandoned tripod mounted cannon and fired into the unending sea of enemies that was scaling the battlement’s walls. The cliffs were thick with tyranids.
Dashour briefly took note of the chaos around him. The ball-mounted guns were filling the sky with tracer fire, felling several of the fliers, and doing their best to keep them away from the wall crews. One occasionally managed to dart past the screen of fire, however, impaling a Guardsman or knocking him off his perch into the forest of claws and stingers below.
We’re losing through attrition, Dashour thought, before turning his attentions back to the west wall. Here, the litter of corpses served as a ramp for their compatriots, and the tyranids were getting close enough to swing their bladed arms at the Guardsmen. To Dashour’s right, a trooper wielding a melta gun fired a hissing thermal blast of ignited gases, striking a frog-like creature with powerful leaping legs and hooks for arms. The blast vaporised it and flash burned several leapers around him. Before he could fire again, a dozen small tyranids, each with four clawing arms and reverse joint legs, managed to bound up from the ramp, to the backs of their dead companions and over the walls. One tackled the Guardsman with the melta gun and pushed him off the wall. As they fell, the leaper slashed at the soldier, shredding the man before either of them hit the ground.
The tyranids scattered through the compound like a small plague, going after mortar crews and lone Guardsmen.
“The walls are breached!” someone yelled over the micro-bead.
“The northern tyranid mass is inbound,” Abantu said over the channel.
Dashour realised they were being overrun, the western wall moments away from being swarmed. The mortal and artillery crews stopped firing as they dealt with the leapers that were tearing into them. Another soldier on the southern wall was impaled on the scythe blade of a large bipedal tyranid that reached the battlements. The creature pulled him over the side before anyone could react.
Dashour scrambled to grab the dropped melta gun and brought it to bear. He fired thermal blasts at the enemies, vaporising those about to scale the walls. Another one of his men simply toppled over, a buzzing tyranid round leaving a hole through the chest.
“Prepare to retreat to the fire-direction centre,” Major Hussari yelled into the micro-bead. “We’ll make our last stand there! Emperor love you all for your bravery!”
Kortan back-pedalled along the wall, his bags empty of munitions and grenades, his laspistol depleted, though he was hard pres
sed to remember when he’d fired it and what he’d hit. He jammed in another power core, his last, and began firing to cover the retreat of the other men. Any notion of saving himself was somehow distant, and he felt invigorated by his actions.
He fired shot after shot, as tyranids scaled the battlements and threw Guardsmen to the ravening hordes below. All their screams melted together until they sounded like one unending cry that never drew breath. Kortan continued backing towards the fire-direction centre as men ran past him.
Tyranids overtook the southern wall entirely, the last soldier torn in half between two snake-like beasts with four arms apiece. They slithered along the battlements and on the wall, clinging like spiders, as they rushed the other positions. Men leapt to the courtyard below, to escape the attack. The mortar and Basilisk crews, and other Guardsmen were fighting back to back in small clusters, shooting up at the walls as leapers and runners cleared the parapets.
“Retreat!” Dashour cried, though he had no intention of surrendering his position along the west wall. Men ran past him, some cut down by bone rounds or grabbed off the walls by harpoon lines. He continued firing his melta gun, even after tyranids scaled the walls on either side of him. He was determined to stand his ground, to match his faith against theirs. He knew he was dead… there was no other end today but death. But he wanted to die facing them. He wanted them to see the same conviction of purpose that he saw and so feared in them.
“Come on!” he screamed, his controlled then finally broken on the back of his bloodlust. As he fought, the last man at the western wall, a pack of small, dog-sized tyranids leapt at him. They seemed to be comprised mostly of a large head with overly-developed fangs, a long skull crest of bone plates and six legs to scuttle about on. They bit and latched on to the meat of his arms, thighs, back and neck. Dashour screamed in pain, trying to whip them off, but more of the creatures leapt at him, biting whatever remained exposed.
[Imperial Guard 04] - Desert raiders Page 14