by Dan Abnett
“I got lost,” Corbec said. “In all the confusion. It’s hairier than me out there. Any of my lads show up here?”
Domor shook his head. “We’ve got people from ten, eleven and thirteen here, but no sign of anyone from your unit.”
“Vox?”
“You’re joking, in this?” The ground above them shook with the heavy shelling. Even short-range micro-beads were only barely making it. Corbec saw Criid lying on a pile of sacking nearby. Kolea and Lubba were with her.
“How is she?”
“Okay,” said Domor. “Head wound. Nothing too bad. Others are worse.”
Corbec could see that for himself. It was ugly and going to get a lot uglier before daylight. There were civilians down here too. In one corner, Corbec saw several adults trying to comfort a group of terrified children. Everyone was black with ash-soot. He wandered over. The adults with the kids were all civvies, pilgrims by the look of them. Bonin was standing nearby, leaning his tired body against a wall and sipping from his water bottle.
“Taking a personal interest?” Corbec asked him.
“Me and Milo had to fight like bastards to get those kids out. We were all penned in a few streets away. It was close.”
“Armour?”
Bonin nodded. “You might want to have a word with Milo,” he said softly.
“Milo? Why?”
Bonin just shrugged and said nothing.
Corbec found Milo in the furthest, darkest corner of the basement space. He was hunched over, bruised and exhausted. A small shape lay under a dirty sack beside him.
“Brinny boy?”
Milo looked up. The grief on his face took Corbec’s breath away.
“You look like I feel,” he tried to joke, but Milo was too burdened by emotion to even respond.
Corbec sat down next to him.
“What happened?”
“There was a girl,” he said. He spoke so quietly, Corbec had to lean forward to hear him above the bombardment.
“A girl?”
“Yes…” Milo looked at the crumpled form under the sack. Corbec put the rest together.
“It’s always hard, that. Take your eye, did she? You’ll just have to—”
“You don’t understand, sir. She was… I don’t know. There was something about her. Something amazing.”
“Well, y—”
“I thought she was the Saint.”
Corbec paused. “What?”
“I knew the Saint was with us. I could feel it Like on Hagia, you know?”
Corbec nodded. He knew the feeling. It had got into his soul on Hagia and never really left.
“I knew she was with us, really with us. Not just on this planet like we’ve been told, but right there on the street in the middle of everything.”
“She watches over us,” Corbec murmured.
“She was there. I saw this girl and I just knew.”
“And?”
“She died. She saved the children and then she died. It wasn’t meant to happen. I can feel it wasn’t. It wasn’t meant to happen like that What will we do without her?”
Corbec didn’t reply. He lifted the corner of the sacking. The girl was very peaceful and very dead. Just a young girl, another victim of the endless war. He laid the sacking back.
“It wasn’t meant to happen,” Milo repeated.
“None of this was,” Corbec growled.
From outside came the rattle of small-arms close by. Domor, Bonin and the other able-bodied troops in the basement shelter grabbed up their weapons and headed for the exit.
“Come on,” said Corbec, getting up and checking his rifle’s power cell. “Come on, Milo. It’s a long way from over yet.”
The first Blood Pact warrior who made it into the shattered hab was a massive brute, even bigger than the late, lamented Trooper Bragg. He came through a gap in the east wall that Trooper Loff had, until a moment before, been defending.
The heretic warrior was clad in heavy fatigue battledress coloured a dark, patchy russet, with steel-plated boots and iron armour strapped around his thighs, shoulders and belly. His face, under the red bowl-helmet, was visored by a black metal mask, an iron grotesque shaped into a snarling, hooknosed, feral face. His hands, thick with the scar tissue of the heinous Pact ritual, clutched a laser pistol and a wickedly curved bill-hook.
Loff lay dead on his face in the gap where a blow from the bill-hook had dropped him. The Blood Pact warrior howled out an obscene war-cry and ploughed into the hab, firing wildly. There were others behind him.
Gaunt met him head on. His scything, energised blade, the power sword of Heironymo Sondar, glowed like a sliver of ice as it deflected two of the storm-warrior’s laser bolts up into the blackened roof. Then he brought it sidelong and the murderous bill-hook — along with several scarred fingers — spun into the air in a puff of blood. Borne forward by his own momentum, Gaunt slammed the blunt nose of his bolt pistol up against the howling grotesque and fired. The brute, his head demolished, crashed backwards. Gaunt began firing over his collapsing corpse into the weight of enemy troopers scrambling through the gap at his heels.
Beltayn and Neith jumped forward beside him, shooting point blank with their lasrifles and thrusting with the Tanith warknives they had fitted as bayonets. “Straight silver! Straight silver!” Beltayn was yelling.
It wasn’t the only breach. The hab reverberated with the clash of hand-to-hand combat as Blood Pact storm-squads burst in through window lights, doorways and shell holes, driving first platoon backwards into the ruins. It was a killing frenzy, the malevolent, red-hot heart of pure war. The smoke-filled chamber, murky and firelit like daemon hell, was thick with screams, blows, spraying shots and thrashing figures. They were enveloped in chaos.
Gaunt’s bolt pistol was spent. There were spare mags in his belt-pouches, but absolutely no chance of reloading in the turmoil. He let it go and wrenched out his Tanith warknife plunging into the nearest enemy trooper with both blades. Blood soaked his jacket and his cloak so much the cloth slapped heavily around him. He realised he was screaming wordless sounds of rage at the swarming enemy.
They stank. They brought their abattoir reek with them: foul breath, sour sweat, dried blood and the noxious aroma of the oils and paints with which they anointed their bodies.
The sword of Sondar split a black-iron visor in two. Blood sizzled off the charged blade. Gaunt’s warknife hacked into a throat. Something knocked his cap off. A Blood Pact trooper crashed sideways into him and staggered him, but the wretch was already dead. Then a laser round clipped the top of Gaunt’s left shoulder and knocked him to his knees. He put the power sword through the armoured thighs in front of him, and was flattened as the severed bodyweight toppled forward onto him.
Beltayn had lost his lasgun. He snatched up a fallen billhook and slammed it with both hands into the nearest enemy sternum, then leapt forward and grabbed Gaunt by the shoulders, trying to drag him to his feet. Vanette and Starck charged in to support him, firing full auto into the scrum of Blood Pact all around.
“Back! Get back!” Beltayn yelled in Gaunt’s face. The colonel-commissar didn’t even seem to recognise him. He was dripping with gore. “We have to get back!” Beltayn repeated, his throat raw from the smoke. Gaunt shoved him out of the way and butchered another Blood Pacter who was surging at them. The power sword cut him in two and cracked stone chips out of the pillar beside him.
An explosion knocked them all off their feet. Masonry rubble rained down from the roof and the end wall of the hab fell like a stack of child’s play-bricks. Cold air washed in, thick with the smell of fyceline, and contorted the dense smoke around them into weird eddies and gusting coils.
Sword still clamped in one blood-smeared hand, Gaunt grabbed Beltayn by the arm and dragged him towards the caved section of wall. Vanette and Starck followed them, backing their way, emptying the last of their power cells from the hip as they went. There was no sign of any other member of first, just dark red figures scram
bling through the smoke at their heels.
The four men fell out down the mound of rubble into the open. Las-shots sizzled out of the hab building after them.
They were in the wide concourse of Hazgul Square itself. The whole area was on fire. Buildings, reduced to hollow shells by the firestorm, spurting flames and sparks from their blind windows. Three tanks — one Imperial light and two enemy models — were burning where they had died. Bodies littered the ground, half-covered by the ash falling like snow from the boiling smoke. The heat was so fierce it felt like a summer noon on Caligula.
There was no way of telling where anything or anyone was. It was as if they had washed up in the middle of the apocalypse.
Gaunt recovered his wits enough for his hands to start to tremble. His heart was banging like an autoloader. Limping from a wound he couldn’t remember receiving, he hurried the other three across the twenty metres of open square to the nearest cover. It was a burned-out RCB troop carrier. They cowered down, scanning the nightmare around them.
“One! This is one!” Gaunt cried, and then realised the lack of response was because his micro-bead was no longer in his ear. Its snapped flex dangled from his collar dip.
He looked at the other three. All of them were covered in dirt and blood and multiple minor wounds. Vanette’s jacket was shredded and blood streamed down his right forearm from a wound at his elbow. Starck had his head in his hands, shaking with nervous energy and adrenaline. Both still had their lasrifles. Beltayn’s grazed, cut hands were empty. He sat with his back against the troop carrier wreck, staring out at the firestorms with the blank look of a man who had reached his limits.
“Vox?” Gaunt said, shaking him.
“Sir?”
“Vox?”
Beltayn shook his head. A las-round had blown the vox-caster off his back during the melee in the hab.
Melee, Beltayn thought. How inadequately did that stupid fething word describe what they’d just come from.
“Micro-bead, then? Beltayn? Beltayn!”
The signalman snapped out of it. He fumbled to his ear and started to call into his intercom.
Gaunt heard the clanking even before Starck called him. Two hundred metres north of them, across the shattered square, an Imperial light tank was reversing hard, smashing debris and ruined vehicles out of its way. As Gaunt watched, an AP shell hit the pavement beside it, showering it with dirt and stone, and then another blew its turret in half. It veered wildly, trailing thick smoke, and came to a halt. Gaunt saw the driver struggle clear. The man started to run, then fell as small-arms fire cut him down.
Two Blood Pact battle tanks, with a stalk-tank clattering up on their left flank, advanced into the square. The tanks rocked as they fired, sending shells screaming over Gaunt and his comrades and into the buildings on the south face of the plaza. Loose formations of Blood Pact fire-teams were hurrying forward with the armour. Whilst Gaunt and his platoon had been caught up in the hell of the fabricatory fight, the battle outside had been lost. The enemy had broken the Imperial resistance, crushed the armour, and was storming down Principal I.
Las-fire began to hit the bodywork of the troop carrier. It was coming sidelong, from the ruined hab. The Blood Pact unit that had driven first platoon from its position — and most likely slaughtered them all — was now spilling out of the hab over the shelled wall the way Gaunt and his men had come. They were shooting across the open ground towards the huddled Imperials.
The four of them scrambled around into cover at the rear of the carrier, but even that offered precious little protection from the crossfire To their right, the main advance and the rolling armour; to their left, the flank push of the infantry.
Vanette and Starck returned fire with their lasrifles, concentrating on the enemy unit advancing from the hab. Gaunt wished he had something more than his sword left. Beltayn gave up with the micro-bead and took out his service pistol, squeezing off shots around the end of the truck. The wrecked vehicle shuddered as incoming fire struck it, denting the metal and spalling off the scorched paintwork.
“Starck! Vanette! A pistol, either of you!”
Starck had lost his — lost the entire holster, in fact — but Vanette unshipped his laspistol and slid it across the rockcrete to Gaunt. Gaunt sheathed his sword and ducked down by the buckled rear wheel, taking shots at the main advance. By the counter display on the pistol’s butt, he had about thirty shots left before the cell expired.
Thirty shots. That was the measure of life left to him.
“Munitions?” he shouted over the crackle of enemy fire.
“One cell left!” replied Vanette.
“Half a cell!” reported Starck.
“Two clips!” Beltayn stammered.
“Make them count,” said Gaunt.
The fire they were receiving was getting heavier. Both infantry fronts were targeting the troop carrier, and the stalk-tank had begun to spit cyclic pulses at them. The wreck rattled and shook, and actually moved more than once under the impacts. Bodywork casing fragmented off into the air. Beltayn howled out as a piece of shrapnel tore into his arm. Vanette’s cheek was scorched by spall bursting from a hull-strike. Any moment now, Gaunt knew, a tank round or a rocket grenade would finish them off.
Ten shots left.
“Sabbat Martyr,” Gaunt began to murmur, “in the name of the hallowed Emperor of Terra, deliverer of the Imperium of Man, I commend my soul and my dying deeds, and the souls of these three brave soldiers, into your hands that you—”
Fire sheeted across the square from the south, cones of flame, white hot and hungry, spraying like water from pressure hoses, it gushed across the archenemy troops emerging from the hab and turned those that didn’t break and flee into jerking, stumbling torches.
“Something…” Beltayn gasped. “Something’s…”
Not awry. Not by any stretch of the imagination.
Four Chimeras, displaying the insignia of the lord general’s life company, stormed into the square, crashing through burning buildings with their toothed dozer blades. They were moving fast, their hulls rocking back on their treads as they accelerated out of the rubble. In their top turrets, troopers manned the autocannons, blazing tracer fire into the air. Behind the fast, armoured carriers, lumbering tanks emerged. Civitas Beati armour, PDF lights and two life company Vanquishers. They began firing as soon as they had visual target on the enemy vanguard. Flooding in around the vehicle charge were troopers, many carrying company banners, flags and aquila standards on long poles. Leading the ground troops with a standard clenched in one hand, Gaunt could see Marshal Biagi. He was striding forward at the head of a dozen officers of the Regiment Civitas. They were razing the ground before them with their flamer packs.
The four Ghosts crawled under the wreck for safety as shells and heavy cannon fire whipped over their heads in both directions. The noise and concussion were physically painful. From where he lay, Gaunt could see Biagi directing the ground forces forward. Someone, Lugo himself most probably, had mobilised all the reserves into this counter-push. The damn fool! If this failed, there would be nothing, absolutely nothing, left to defend the inner hives with.
Gaunt knew Lugo was hardly the most gifted tactician ever to emerge from officer candidate scholam, but this was an act of madness even by his dismal standards. Already this night they had been surprised at the sheer scale of the advance force the archenemy had managed to land on Herodor. Who was to say that another force of equal size wasn’t now waiting to strike at the southern agriponic zone, or another poised in the Eastern Obsidae? What would Lugo do then, if his entire military strength was committed here?
It was madness. It was…
…it was madness, but not the kind Gaunt supposed.
He blinked.
Something odd was happening. Every sound was dulling, everything in sight beginning to shimmer. Shards of glass on the floor under his bloodied hands twinkled like diamonds. The scabby metal of the tailgate above his head looked like mot
her of pearl. Tank shells slid overhead in perfect clarity, leaving slow billows in their wake, the smoke turning and spiralling into perfect double-helix trails.
Everything seemed to slow down.
Feth!
For a moment Ibram Gaunt thought he’d been shot. He felt no pain, no impact, but he’d heard invalided veterans describe the way really bad wounds happened without you knowing it, turning the world into a slow motion wonderland as your failing senses registered the simple, profound splendour in everything.
There was a light in his eyes. A golden light. A life company Salamander, squat and heavy on its tracks, rolled up into his view, coming to a halt just a few metres from where he lay under the wrecked carrier. A figure stood upright in its open-topped cabin.
She was beautiful.
She wore a suit of intricately-worked golden battle armour so fine and form-fitting that it had been clearly fashioned for her by master metallurgists. Pieces of polished chelon shell had been set into the bodice and wide pauldrons. Imperial eagles formed the couters at the elbows and the poleyns at the knees, and the same symbol was also etched in repeated ribbons down the thigh plates and along the vambraces. Her left hand was covered with a gilded glove that had silver eagle claws extending from the fingertips. Her right hand was bare. Beneath the dazzling golden plate, she wore a suit of tightly-wound black mail, each link formed in the shape of an islumbine bloom. A white skirt, long and flowing and fixed with purity seals and prayer streamers, billowed from her waist. The heavy golden gorget rose up high to her chin, but her head was uncovered. She’d cut her hair short, sheared it off crudely in fact, so it fell in a glossy black bowl over her pale head. Her eyes were green, as green as an infardi’s silk, as green as the rainwoods of Hagia.
The Beati looked down at Gaunt. A halo of light surrounded her, so fierce and bright it made her seem almost translucent. Nine cyber-skull drones hovered around her in the radiant glow, forming a circle behind her head, their eyes lit, their miniature weapon pods armed. She was terrible to behold.