by Gav Thorpe
The concern was soon replaced with another emotion. Agapito flexed his gauntleted fingers and wrapped them around his sword, and smiled as the calm hatred of righteousness gripped him.
The smoke bank blotting out the sky above Iapetus was cut by the shape of a dozen sleek craft arrowing towards the centre of the city. Shadowhawks and Whispercutters slid almost invisibly down through the miasma, yet this was no stealth approach. Heavy weapons fire spewed from the craft as they skimmed across the rooftops and angled down the ruined streets, spitting death into the traitor skitarii beneath. Plasma bombs rained down from a Stormbird while two dart-like interceptors raked along the wide roads with anti-tank rockets and autocannons.
Agapito wanted the enemy to know exactly where he was.
Jets blaring, the Shadowhawks descended into the central plaza, dominated by the mangled remains of great abstract sculptures once raised in praise to the Machine-God’s artifices. There seemed to be not a building left intact, the pavements and streets scattered with debris, blocked in places where taller edifices had collapsed to their foundations. The drop-ships hovered a few metres above the uneven ground while their cargoes of black-armoured warriors disembarked, spilling out in a wave with jump packs flaring. Whispercutters circled noiselessly overhead, piloted by simple machine-spirits that relayed visual, audio and scanner information across the strategy-net to the Raven Guard leaders.
With practised ease the assault force dispersed, moving into the buildings while heavy weapons squads laid down covering fire from amidst the rubble, driving back the disorganised and scattered defenders.
Quickly, relentlessly, the Raven Guard pushed on, grenade blasts and flamer bursts heralding their progress as they moved from one shattered chamber to another.
There were bodies crushed amongst the debris, but Agapito ignored them as he led the first squad into the next set of ruins – the tumbled remains of a wire-production facility. Articulated conveyor belts and lifting engines protruded from the piles of broken masonry and twisted plasteel rebar.
A heavily armoured combat servitor stood watch from above, unleashing a stream of fire from its heavy bolters as the commander ducked through the remains of a doorway. It seemed unlikely to have clambered up to the higher floor by itself and must have miraculously survived when the rest of the building had come crashing down.
Bolts flaring from the rubble around him, Agapito cut to the right, drawing the fire of the mindless half-man. He fired his jump pack and leapt up to the next storey as return fire from a squad on the ground floor converged on the sentry machine. The white beam of a lascannon sheared through its tracks, scattering links and the molten remnants of broad-spoked wheels, slicing the servitor from waist to neck.
Moving up further, Agapito sought a vantage point from which to view the city. Reaching the pinnacle of a shattered stairway, he was able to see back towards Atlas and across the city to the towering edifice of the main temple.
The lightning insertion by the Raven Guard had achieved complete surprise, but the defenders of Iapetus were now responding. A trio of lightly armed walkers rounded a junction three hundred metres down the street. They had bulbous sensor lenses, like glittering spider eyes, and an array of communications dishes and antennae.
‘Recon walkers,’ the commander told the company. ‘Let them see us and then destroy them.’
Sergeant Varsio led his squad out into the street, bounding with their jump packs from one heap of rubble to another directly in front of the enemy spy vehicles. The recon walkers turned as one, false eyes sparkling as they locked on to the moving figures. Half a minute passed as Varsio and his warriors disappeared into the ruin of a flattened hab-block opposite; enough time for the scouts to signal back their discovery.
Missiles and plasma fire erupted from the upper levels of a nearby shuttle-docking port, punching through the walkers’ thin armour with ease and turning them into three smoking wrecks in a matter of seconds.
‘Good. Designate main temple as bearing zero. Insertion point is grid one. Company, relocate to grids four and six. Cannat, Garsa and Hasul, break right and set up a welcoming party by that communications tower at the end of the roadway.’
The ad hoc company moved as ordered, forming a rough perimeter around a square kilometre of city with the central plaza at its heart.
It was not long before the skitarii arrived, the lead elements transported in tracked open-topped carriers that were easy targets for the heavy weapons that had been moved into position to greet them. Part-cybernetic warriors spilled from the burning remains of the two lead vehicles while the others quickly tried to reverse, only to be caught in a crossfire of plasma grenades and bolter fire from a pair of Raven Guard squads that had moved in behind them through the cover of a demolished hab-complex.
The rest of the counter-attacking force approached more cautiously. Agapito moved from position to position, ensuring that the lines of sight of each squad were maximised, creating killing grounds where possible, leaving some routes open to encourage the enemy to venture further forwards than was safe. He had studied under Corax himself and attended to the fine detail of his force’s disposition with the same care with which a tech-priest might administer maintenance to the circuitry of a cogitator.
As he moved, he assessed the enemy strength. About five hundred infantry, moving ahead of a dozen battle tanks and three support guns. The vehicle commanders were understandably wary of advancing too far into the mess of broken buildings and haphazard rubble piles, instead sending in the infantry brigade to clear a path first.
Agapito detailed three squads to follow him as he dropped down to ground level. They gathered in the shadow of a leaning rail stanchion; the rest of the bridge had fallen to block the road behind them. Picking their way sure-footedly through the debris, the Raven Guard circled to the left around the incoming squads of infantry. Concealed by the pall of smoke, using their heat-detecting autosenses to track the progress of their foes, they waited.
A minute later, the Raven Guard stationed around the enemy line of advance opened fire, tearing into the infantry with their bolters. Several dozen were cut down in the opening salvo. Not willing to stay in the open, the Mechanicum soldiers broke ranks and moved into the cover of the shattered buildings, and it was then that Agapito made his move. Splitting his force, the commander led the charge into the enemy, power sword in one hand, plasma pistol in the other.
Though their bonded plasteel breastplates and bionic limbs made the skitarii superior to the unaugmented soldiers of the Imperial Army, they were no match for thirty-one warriors of the Legiones Astartes. Agapito did not use his pistol, instead hewing down a handful of foes in the first few seconds of the combat. Fragmentation grenades exploded ahead of him as another squad charged into the fray, shrapnel from the charges combining with splinters from the littered masonry in a deadly firestorm.
In a hail of bolter shots, chainsword swings and savage punches the Raven Guard cleaved into the foe without pause. Those enemies that chose to retreat from the assault strayed into the fire of the legionaries still waiting behind, and in minutes all but a handful lay dead or dying. A few black-armoured Legion warriors lay amongst the fallen, taken out by lucky blows or desperate hacks from the power weapons of the skitarii squad leaders, but Agapito quickly calculated the kill ratio to be a satisfactory seventy-to-one or more.
Robbed of their infantry support the tanks withdrew, covering their retreat with a barrage of shells from main guns and a hail of las-fire from secondary weapons, creating even more dust and debris but inflicting no casualties upon the Raven Guard.
As the growl of engines receded, Agapito could hear the thump of larger guns in the distance – the main advance of Atlas’s own troops. Five hundred infantry and three scout walkers was nowhere near enough damage to ease the attack of the Mechanicum acolytes. The commander needed to make even more of an impact if the enemy were to be draw
n into a full attack.
He activated his command link to the patrolling Whispercutters overhead, half of his visual display flicking from one to the next as he built up a sense of the surrounding enemy forces. A sizeable combined column was advancing from bearing one-seventy, almost directly opposite the approach to the tech-temple, about a kilometre away and coming closer.
They were of little concern for the moment.
Of more interest was the Warhound-class Scout Titan picking its way along a rubble-strewn street two kilometres to his left, at bearing two-six-five. With it came assault guns and at least a thousand infantry, many of them with praetorian upgrades, supported by tracked Rapier laser destroyers, mobile rocket pods and other heavy weaponry.
‘Regroup, grid seven,’ he commanded, shutting down the link. ‘Shadowhawk command, interdiction strike on Titan advancing through grid four-six. Assault group, follow, attack vector eight, two-two, two-three. Stealth approach. It’s time to make our presence really felt.’
‘Progress is too slow,’ growled Corax, turning an angry stare towards Loriark. ‘Your skitarii have to make ground quicker and push the enemy towards the left flank.’
‘I shall pass on your instructions, lord primarch, but they are facing stubborn opposition.’
‘The longer you take, the more stubborn it will get. Advance quickly and the defenders do not have time to reinforce their positions against your attack.’
Loriark said nothing but simply bowed his head in acquiescence and returned to conferring with his fellow tech-priests.
Corax glowered at the main display. The bulk of Atlas’s forces had been committed and still they had made no more than four kilometres into Iapetus’s streets. For two hours of fighting it simply was not good enough and the primarch had expected better.
He focused on the rune-shapes depicting the locations of his Raven Guard and felt more positive. Agapito and his Talons had been making themselves a constant aggravation to Delvere’s forces, pushing closer and closer towards the archmagos’s temple whilst drawing skitarii away from the fight with Atlas’s army. It could not continue indefinitely, though; sooner or later Loriark’s soldiers would have to break through to Agapito or the Raven Guard would eventually be caught and destroyed.
Corax stared at the screen as if by will alone he could alter the course of the battle.
Agapito had lost around a fifth of his command, but now the enemy were taking the Raven Guard seriously. More and more infantry in particular had been streaming back through the streets, as if to swamp the Space Marines by numbers alone. Intelligence from the two Whispercutters that still remained airborne pointed to a mass assault coming from the right, which would push the Raven Guard towards the ruined dockyards at the city’s edge.
Alert to the danger, Agapito ordered the assault force to contract on his position, to create a single, mobile element that would be able to extract at a moment’s notice. The beast that was Delvere’s forces had finally been roused to strike with all its power and it would not serve the Raven Guard’s purpose to be caught out of position when the blow landed.
Leaping across shattered rooftops with his jump pack, Agapito rejoined his warriors as they gathered in the buildings surrounding a massive wreckage-filled crater. Overhead the Shadowhawks blurred past, becoming concealed once more until they were needed to strike. By the commander’s reckoning, nearly six thousand troops and at least a hundred battle-engines were now preparing to launch an all-out frontal attack. The Raven Guard would withdraw in the face of the first assault and circle back to grid one at the plaza, dragging the enemy closer to the most advanced prong of the Atlas assault and away from the arch-magos’s temple.
To confirm the rationale of his plan he took another look through the artificial eyes of the Whispercutters, watching for any detail that he had missed. He saw nothing unexpected and was about to cut the link when a blur of colour caught his eye – dark red against the grey shroud of smog. He sent a signal up to the armoured glider, turning it in a tight circle to come from the other direction.
It revealed red-armoured figures advancing through shattered buildings a kilometre away, slightly apart from the main body of defenders. Switching to the thermal view, he counted more than fifty signals: the distinctive heat plumes of legionaries at a fast run.
The Word Bearers had come to deal with the Raven Guard. They were trying to outflank them.
The rage started as a swelling of heat in his gut, spreading through his body as the thought of vengeance took hold in the commander’s mind. As with the discovery of the Kamiel, providence was offering an opportunity to avenge his fallen brothers on Isstvan V. In the Whispercutter display fluttered a banner, ragged and soiled, but unmistakably covered in golden script surrounding a bright red laurel on a white field.
Agapito had seen that same banner amongst the ranks of Lorgar’s whelps at the Isstvan dropsite, held proudly aloft as the Word Bearers had turned their guns upon their cousins in the Raven Guard. In the weeks that followed the massacre, a brutal XVII Legion Chapter commander named Elexis had been dogged in his persecution of the surviving Raven Guard. Despite Agapito’s entreaties to the primarch, every opportunity to strike back had slipped away… But now, Elexis had come to Constanix II. Memories crowded into the commander’s thoughts, each a tableau of destruction and death clamouring for his attention. His battle-brothers’ cries grew louder in his ears, the smell of blood and burnt ceramite strengthened in his nostrils.
He gripped the hilt of his power sword tightly, his breath coming in short, rasping gasps. This was a second chance: Agapito would slay the bearer of that banner and see the colours cast down and trodden underfoot; Elexis crushed as his own Legion had once been crushed.
‘Commander?’ Lieutenant Caderil’s voice was loud across the vox, filled with concern. ‘Commander, the enemy are moving within range.’
Every fibre of Agapito called out for him to order the attack and he knew that the Talons would gladly obey once they saw the target. His hearts hammered and blood throbbed through his body, flushing him with rage.
A detonation rocked the building across the street as the first of the skitarii war engines clanked into range, sending an avalanche of smashed masonry onto the road.
Agapito barely noticed the explosion.
He was here to avenge; to punish; to kill.
Yet at the burning heart of his anger there was a cold core, formed of pure hatred. It did not fuel his rage but cut through it, gifting him with clarity, shredding the fugue of ire that clouded his thoughts.
‘Victory is vengeance,’ the commander muttered.
‘Please repeat, commander, what are your orders?’
‘Victory is vengeance,’ Agapito said, louder and more confidently. He could see the traitors with his own eyes now, a few hundred metres away, cutting through a bombarded district temple. Beyond them he spied larger shapes moving through the gloom of the smoke: Mechanicum reinforcements. If the Raven Guard attacked, then they would certainly be surrounded, even if they destroyed the Word Bearers.
Cold, rational hatred won over blind fury.
‘Withdraw to grid one, at speed.’ He issued the order through gritted teeth, as though the words were forcing themselves from his throat under protest.
‘Affirmative, commander,’ replied Caderil, sounding relieved.
The Raven Guard ran and bounded away into the darkness, leaving Agapito to stare at the Word Bearers in the distance, their banner to the fore.
‘Tomorrow, Elexis – you gutless coward. Tomorrow, you find out how the Raven Guard fight when we don’t have our backs turned. Tomorrow, I’ll show you bastards the same mercy you showed us on Isstvan.’
Six
Lightning claws spitting sparks, Corax slashed the head from another cyborg praetorian and stepped over the twitching corpse to meet its companions. Flanking him, two squads of legionaries laid
down a swathe of bolter and heavy bolter fire, explosive rounds cutting through more of the skitarii elite.
The Iapetus central temple complex covered more than a square kilometre of the city, the main ziggurat surrounded by smaller forges and furnace-houses. While a pair of Shadowhawks conducted attack runs against the few remaining defence turrets on the boundary wall, Corax and his warriors drove into the Mechanicum cultists. Las-fire, bullets and bolts criss-crossed through the fumes and smoke, the surrounding buildings ringing to the cacophony of battle. Higher up, amongst the plumes of smoke rising from the city, Fire Raptors patrolled, watchful for any shuttle or gunship that tried to escape from the Machine-God’s shrine.
Amongst the praetorians moved squads of heavily armoured foes: soldiers whose armour had been bonded into their flesh, their bodies turned into weapons. Bolter fire sparked harmlessly from ferrous carapaces while the brutally augmented warriors returned fire with arcs of lightning and blasts of plasma. Thallaxii, they were called – more machines than men, nerves deadened to withstand the agony of the insertion into their armour, the lobes of their brains replaced with calculating machines, turning them into efficient, unfeeling slayers.
Corax hurtled into the thallaxii as his Raven Guard pulled back, four black-armoured legionaries slain by the enemy’s devastating weapons. A plasma bolt smashed into Corax’s left shoulder, burning through the ceramite of his armour to set a fire of pain in his arm. He ignored it and took to the air, his flight pack flaring as he leapt skywards. Twisting, he dived into the midst of the thallaxii like a comet, claws scything to the left and right, armoured boots cracking open reinforced exoskeletons.