by Paul Kearney
‘We have been fighting for over three months in this city, my lord.’ The strain in Dietrich’s voice was palpable even over the vox. Kerne grimaced. He hoped the man still had some fire left in him.
‘What about the civilian population?’
‘Dead or fled. Thousands still subsist in the ruins, and there are at least fifty thousand more crammed into the citadel with us.’
Kerne grunted. ‘Very well. We plan to move north at once. Is the spaceport viable?’
‘Negative, captain. The pads are destroyed and it is covered by enemy fire.’
‘I will land my company wherever I can then. We will coordinate fireplans soon. Kerne out.’
He blinked off the vox. His party was approaching the main concentration point of the drop. The other drop pods were standing upright, cone-shaped shadows in the whirling dust – textbook landings by the look of them – and around them nearly forty Adeptus Astartes were spread in a rough ring.
Already, their midnight-blue armour was so powdered by dust that they blended into the broken rubble in which they crouched. He saw some of Novus company’s Devastator teams with their heavy bolters and meltaguns set up and firing.
But what lifted his hearts most was to see Fornix striding up to meet him, and behind him Elijah Kass.
Fornix’s armour looked even more second-hand than usual, but he had wiped his pauldron clean so that Kerne could see the blood-stripes of his rank. His power fist shimmered, the dust ionising as it landed upon it in continuous crackles.
‘We are all here at last then?’ Kerne said to his first sergeant.
‘Yes, captain. A few minor injuries, some equipment loss, but in the main we are intact and ready.’
Orsus was there, and Greynan and Kagan, the three veteran sergeants of the squads on the ground.
‘I have the Haradai out to our front some two hundred metres, captain,’ Orsus said. ‘They report scattered enemy positions ahead, some heavy weapons emplacements, but no armour. It looks like it’s no more than cultist trash ahead of us, from here to the outskirts of the Armaments District.’
Jonah Kerne took that in, looking around at the utter devastation of a once proud and populous Imperial city.
‘It wasn’t cultist trash that did all this,’ he said. He maglocked Biron Amadai’s ancient, beautifully crafted bolter to his thighguard.
‘Orsus, lead out,’ he said. ‘Three squads in arrowhead, command centre-rear, Haradai to scout ahead some five hundred metres of the main body. There are Imperial forces still holding positions to the north of us, so be aware there are friendlies ahead. As soon as we clear a path to the Armaments District, I will signal the Thunderhawks. Advance on a bearing of zero three six degrees. Questions?’
None. They were Space Marines, and this kind of thing they could do in their sleep. Kerne smiled inside his helm.
‘Lead off.’
Reports came filtering over the vox as the Hunters advanced. Kerne flicked between his own company net and that of the Thunderhawks who were cruising high above on overwatch. They monitored the advance of their brethren on the ground and the enemy positions ahead. There was a brisk, heavy fight in the skies as the gunships took on a flight of Doomfires that rose up to meet them, but every one of the Chaos craft were shot down without loss.
Brother Simarron came over the vox. ‘Captain, the enemy seems to have constructed an extensive airstrip outside the city walls, on the plains to the west. At least two dozen enemy craft are on the ground there, refitting and refuelling. Permission for the gunships to engage.’
‘Granted,’ Kerne said. ‘Destroy the airstrip and all enemy craft, then return to station.’
‘Artillery,’ Fornix said beside him. ‘Ours, I think. Heavy guns.’
They could see the flashes up ahead through the murk and smoke. They seemed to be up in the air.
‘It must be the citadel batteries,’ Brother Malchai said.
The Dark Hunters marched north across the broken wreck of Askai. They encountered shell-holes and trench lines full of the enemy, which were ruthlessly destroyed. At least a dozen heavy weapons emplacements were overrun. In some of them the Punishers were manning captured Imperial ordnance.
The Haradai went ahead of the main body in their cameleoline-painted carapaces and cam-cloaks, flitting from cover to cover, their sniper rifles dealing out swift and accurate death.
Before the line-squads even appeared, the Scouts had chewed up every enemy unit they had encountered. They were the light infantry of the Chapter, and every marine served his time in the Haradai until he was promoted into the line companies. But for some, who had a taste for it, the Haradai remained their home throughout their career.
This was a feature that as far as Kerne knew was unique to the Dark Hunters Chapter. There were brethren in the Haradai with a century of experience who preferred the sniper rifle and the ghost-like warfare of the Scout Company to the bolter and power armour of Mortai, or Haroun, or Novus. It had become part of the Chapter’s ethos to field a strong force of Scout Marines in any conflict, and it was not unknown for some in the line companies to go back to the Haradai for several months.
Fornix had spent two years back with the Scouts during the Gulbec war, only a few years ago. He was fast friends with Fell Ambros, captain of the Haradai, and the two worked well together. But even in the Dark Hunters, his action had been seen as eccentric in the extreme, and Jord Malchai had opposed it.
‘How did you link up with Orsus?’ Kerne asked his first sergeant.
‘After the landing I found myself lying flat on my back with one of the drop pod hatches on top of me – thank the Emperor for this.’ Fornix raised and opened the power fist on the end of one arm.
‘Brother Kass was not five metres from me, and he was able to detect the psychic footprint of our brethren through this soup of dust, which was just as well, because all my vox and infra systems were scrambled. I was as blind as a Phobian bat in a snowstorm.’
Kass and Malchai were behind them, walking side by side. Kerne had his own questions about Brother Kass, questions raised during the boarding action, but this was no place to voice them.
Brother-Sergeant Laufey of the Haradai came on the vox.
‘Command, this is Hunter Three.’
‘Command. Send, over,’ Kerne said.
‘Armaments District wall eighty metres to my front, manned by what looks like Imperial infantry. Shall I attempt comms with them, captain?’
‘Affirmative. Let them know which way we are coming in, brother, and tell them to shift fire with that damned artillery. It’s starting to impact close to our rear. I am sending you the coordinates.’
He blinked on the numberpad he had called up inside his helm, his eyes flicking from it, to the map overlay, and then the tactical readout.
All the while, he was monitoring the newly discovered Imperial net that Dietrich had turned up on, listening in on the activity of the Thunderhawk squadrons overhead, and in the world outside his helm he was scanning his lines of warriors as they advanced through the ruins and assessing their progress and formations.
No human mind could have assimilated so much information, digested it and reacted to it with the same pitiless efficiency that a captain of the Adeptus Astartes brought to the process. For Kerne, it was not even much of a conscious effort, no more than walking or breathing. It was what he had been created to do.
He called up Dietrich again. But it was a strange voice on the vox which answered him this time.
‘This is Commissar Ismail Von Arnim of the 387th Armoured. I am de facto second in command of Imperial Guard forces on this planet.’
‘Where is Dietrich?’
‘My lord, he is in the gun-caverns, coordinating our fireplan.’
‘Very well. Shift your fire south, commissar, and notify your forces in the Armaments District that a half-company of Adeptus Astartes is about to enter their lines. We will proceed through them, and clear the way to the citadel. Once that is done,
our Thunderhawks will begin direct assault on any enemy positions you flag up for us.
‘I want a perimeter cleared from my position all the way to the citadel. By darkness I intend to hold that perimeter in strength, in readiness for further operations during the night. Do you understand?’
‘Perfectly, my lord. And may I say what an honour–’
‘Kerne out.’ Jonah cut the vox. There was no time for self-congratulation, and he did not relish, the way some Adeptus Astartes did, the awe in which normal humans held his kind.
‘Command, this is Hawk One.’
‘Send, over.’
It was Simarron. ‘Attack on enemy airstrip going in now, captain. Six gunships.’
‘Acknowledged. Burn them, brother. Burn them into the ground.’
Kerne felt a great impatience well up in him. That, along with his temper, he had fought to rein in for decades.
Whatever had happened here, the worst of it was over – the storm had passed. The forces of the Great Enemy might have been enough to overwhelm the Imperial Guard and the pitiful human militia of this world, but against the Dark Hunters they had no hope of victory. His brothers were grinding them under their feet.
He was disappointed. He had been hoping for more.
Both the Imperial Guard and the Punisher warbands were lacking in infared equipment for their infantry, and had been for some time. In the last several weeks nightfall had brought about a lull in combat operations, and apart from the incessant skirmishing of patrols, and the odd night assault, the dark hours had been the quietest of the war.
All this now changed.
The Dark Hunters did not pause, or regroup, or stop to consolidate. As the day died, and the Kargad System’s dull star went down in the banks of dun-coloured cloud, so the tempo of combat operations actually picked up.
Mortai split up into squads, and began fanning out across the city, slaughtering any Punisher forces they came across. The Thunderhawks landed the rest of the company in diverse locations across Askai and these squads began working their way through the broken urban wasteland metre by metre, supported by the gunships.
When heavier resistance was met, the Hawks dropped ten-bomb sticks of rosaries upon it, and then chewed up the stunned enemy with chain-guns.
And in their wake, the line-squads advanced inexorably, groups of armoured giants who never wearied, who never broke or hesitated or retreated. The Dark Hunters had a long memory of hatred to work off against these, their bitterest foes.
The hordes of Punisher cultists, and the scattered squads of Chaos Space Marines which had been left behind to stiffen their ranks could not withstand that cold, clinical precision, that economy of death. All across the fifty-kilometre length of Ras Hanem’s ruined capital, all through the night and into the bloody dawn of the next day, the Dark Hunters did their work, and nothing could withstand them.
And in the shadows, when the Chaos bands had broken and run, they found no shelter in bunkers or trenches, for the Scout Marines of Haradai harassed them without mercy, dropping Chaos champions with headshots from the long sniper rifles of their calling, picking off all those who tried to rally their fellows, bringing down the veterans who carried banners and heavy weapons, and banishing all notions of rest or safety from the bewildered enemy.
Kerne lost nine battle-brothers in the first thirty-six hours of the city-wide assault, but the Punishers died in their unmourned thousands.
They finally broke, and ran for the bridges, the gates. They hid in holes and half-ruined cellars. But they were burned and blasted out of every hiding place.
It went on all of that day, and continued into a second night of ceaseless slaughter without rest or pause.
The Thunderhawks touched down to resupply the scattered squads of Space Marines, and then took off again in moments to circle again, like vultures of Old Earth circling a dying prey.
A wind came up out of the desert to the east, clearing the air and revealing a vast sky brimful of stars, intensely bright and clear to those in the darkened city below.
The Ogadai was one of those stars, the brightest, holding over Askai in geostationary orbit. Nothing challenged the huge Dark Hunters cruiser and its surviving escorts. The skies belonged to the Imperium now.
Finally, the last coherent elements of the Punishers made a grand, concerted effort to charge the citadel, out of sheer desperation if no tactical sense.
On the ruined landing pads of the spaceport, Kerne’s warriors finally stood aside while the heavy Imperial guns of the looming fortress barked out a howling litany of hate, and immolated whole regiments of the Great Enemy, the last surviving formations of any size in the city.
And when they were broken into ragged, bleeding ribbons, the citadel gates opened for the first time in many days. As the sun came up, a single Baneblade roared forth, followed by half a dozen Leman Russes and a few gawky Sentinels, spitting las-fire. They were all General Dietrich had left, but he launched them into the battle without hesitation.
Inside the tanks the gaunt, red-eyed troopers of the 387th Armoured Regiment of the Imperial Guard loaded the main guns and the heavy anti-personnel weapons and set finger to trigger with the dark fury of men who have endured too much, who have lost all instincts save those of hate and destruction.
The last of the enemy were ground to scarlet bloody paste by the armoured treads of Dietrich’s surviving tanks.
The Space Marines stood by and let the Imperial Guard have their moment, and allowed them to enjoy their unfettered rage. These men, mere humans, had after all been fighting in this charnel house for months, and they had a long list of scores to settle. The armoured vehicles were all manned by veterans now, and the mechanical behemoths wheeled and fired like part of the men who manned them. It was, in its way, a beautiful sight, for those who appreciated such things.
Fornix unhelmed and wiped his glistening forehead as the rare bright light of the sun rose upon it. He stood beside Jonah Kerne and watched the Imperials relish the last of the mopping up. Hundreds had now debussed from a line of battle-worn Chimeras in a mix of guard green and militia grey, and they were at close quarters now, fighting like men possessed.
‘They do make heavy weather out of it, don’t they?’ he said lightly.
‘From what I hear, they faced far worse than we found, in the early days of the war. The initial assault was heavy enough, but then something happened. The enemy withdrew most of his best troops, leaving just enough here to keep Dietrich and his men bottled up.’
Kerne was frowning with thought. ‘I’ve been in touch with Massaron on the Ogadai, and there are only scattered remnants of the Punishers on the rest of the planet, no more than marauding bands. And their fleet has fled the entire system. Or so it seems.’
‘Or so it seems,’ Fornix repeated. He sighed. ‘Not much glory in it after all, Jonah.’
‘There seldom is, brother.’
Kerne had not even presented the company banner for a battle-brother to carry, so unworthy did this fight seem of its unfurling. It had remained in its case.
He admired the mettle of the Ras Hanem defenders, but they were not Adeptus Astartes, and as Fornix said, they made heavy weather out of the mere act of killing.
Three days after the Dark Hunters landed, the last surviving remnants of the Punisher hordes which had once overrun the city were wiped out.
They died under the eyes of the silent Space Marines, who had been ordered by Jonah Kerne to stand down and let the Imperial Guard have this moment as their own. As flawed as their efforts had been, they had been valiant, and deserved this sop to their pride, Kerne had decided.
So it was that as the last artillery rounds fell, and the snapping of lasguns finally died out, the fighting men of Ras Hanem stared across the scarred, body-strewn, blood-reeking battlefield, and saw standing on the other side of it the silent giants of the Adeptus Astartes, dark under their dust, faceless in their savage helms, like creatures from another world and time.
&nbs
p; Two men came walking wearily towards them through the powdered dirt and the rubble and steaming body parts, one tall and bone-lean with the tattered peaked cap of the Commissariat on his head, and sunken murderer’s eyes, the other broad and muscular with a pale, hairless scalp. They drew themselves up before Kerne and Fornix, and saluted.
‘I am General Pavul Dietrich,’ the stocky, bald one said. ‘Officer commanding the garrison of Ras Hanem. I hereby relinquish command of this city to you, my lord captain, and entrust this planet to your care.’
He had a deep, tired stare that had seen a lot of killing, but the man was still there behind the death and desperation and the utter weariness. Kerne took off his helm, and tasted the iron reek of blood on the air, the tang of munitions launched and expended by the million. It was an old and familiar smell. He had known it all his long life.
‘General, I am most glad to meet you.’
The general and his commissar looked up at the towering captain of the Adeptus Astartes, and met his eyes a mere moment, then went to one knee. Behind them, by ones and twos and then in squads and companies, their men followed suit, until the scattered lines of soldiers were all on their knees, heads bowed.
‘We thank you, your mighty brethren, and the munificence of the Emperor himself for our deliverance,’ the commissar, Von Arnim said, with real reverence in his voice.
Kerne stepped forward and took Dietrich gently by the shoulder. ‘Rise, general. Brave men have no need to kneel, not before me and mine.’
Dietrich looked up at that, and there was a broken light in his eyes, catching the sun. He rose to his feet, and behind him the defenders of Askai rose with him, and the sunlight lit them up, making giants out of their shadows.
FIFTEEN
In Fragminis
The Thunderhawks were patrolling the skies like lean black raptors, something hungry in their box-shaped airframes. Dietrich stared out at them from the balcony over which Riedling’s body had once been thrown. The governor’s death seemed a very long time ago now.