by Paul Kearney
One of those energy bursts caught Brother Arrun in the back of his leg, blasting through the ceramite and burning through fibre-bundles, flesh and into the bone. The Space Marine dropped, cursed, got up again and his leg buckled under him, the burned bone fracturing like charcoal.
The others dragged him into cover, bolter-rounds splashing up dust in the street at their feet, a few sparking and screeching off their armour. Brother Fallon took one in the side of his chest and merely grunted as it went through his armour and found a lung. Then he kept firing.
‘Terciel, join us, we will give cover,’ March said tersely.
The Dark Hunter from Novus Company got up at once, hefted his heavy weapon, and sprinted down towards them while the rest of Primus – even crippled Brother Arrun – kept the Punishers occupied with well-placed fire.
Terciel joined them. ‘They’re still working on the gates, brother-sergeant, and a fresh company is coming up from the south.’
‘Captain,’ March said on the vox, ‘this is Primus, do you read?’
Nothing. ‘Damn them and their jamming,’ March said. ‘I’ve never known it so bad, and I fought these scum first time around. Arrun, how is the leg?’
‘Healing, sergeant.’
‘Can you run?’
‘I will.’
‘Good. Fallon, what of you?’
‘Round in the lung, sergeant. It’s all right, I brought a spare.’
Finn March considered. His squad had slain perhaps thirty of the foe, but there were as many more still working on the gate, plus another company – say eighty – coming up on them.
Against six Dark Hunters, two of whom were wounded.
Good enough odds, March thought.
‘We are going to attack,’ he said.
Brother Terciel set down a base of fire, streaming rounds down the street and peppering the gatehouse. The enemy had gone to ground there now and a veritable storm of bolter fire was streaming from their positions, most of it wild.
March and his brothers kept moving. In the flashlit dark, with the cameleoline blending them into their surroundings every time they stopped, they could make staggered dashes through the ruins and then fade into near-invisibility again.
Arrun was dropped off to cover the approaches from the south, where they could already see a crowd of the enemy making their way up what had once been one of the main thoroughfares leading out of Sol Square. They were bunched up, firing at every shadow, yelling and bellowing like beasts in rut.
‘Delay them here,’ March told Brother Arrun. ‘Use grenades. When your bone has reknit, or they are within a hundred metres, join us. Remember what First Sergeant Fornix told us, brother – this fight is not for glory.’
‘Acknowledged,’ Brother Arrun said.
The rest of the squad moved up towards the gate, approaching from the south while Brother Terciel kept a heavy fire down on the enemy from the east.
March pulled back the cocking handle of his bolt pistol to peer into the chamber. He let it go forward again quietly, hefted his chainsword, and thumbed the power-button.
‘We go in hard. Grenades out first and then in close, brothers. We clear the gatehouse, set up there, and call in Brother Terciel. Then we make a stand. The enemy must not open this gate. Brother Kass has told us that they are forming up outside the walls in vast numbers, with vehicles and all manner of other filth. The longer we keep them out the better it will be.’
Not a word. March smiled bleakly inside his helm, and lifted the whirring chainsword. ‘Then let us be at it.’
He turned and sprinted across the open space leading up to the gatehouse, a tall, bulging pillbox of a building which guarded the lock mechanisms. The rest of the squad spread out to his flanks and began clicking grenades off their belt-dispensers. As they drew near, they were finally noticed as dark blurs of motion, and a shout went up from the enemy.
The Space Marines did not pause, but flicked out the grenades before them. Some arced with unerring aim into the gunslits of the gatehouse; others exploded so close to the charging Dark Hunters that the shrapnel kissed their armour.
They opened up with bolters from the hip at five metres, while March leapt in as silent as a ghost and with one swing decapitated a Chaos champion who had risen in his path.
A hedge of fire erupted around him as his brothers came up on either side. Above their heads, broken rockcrete began to rain down as Brother Terciel shifted the fire of his heavy bolter to the gunslits further up the gatehouse.
They cut down eight of the enemy, and then were inside, firing at point-blank range, booting the bodies of the dead aside, changing magazines again, tossing grenades around corners and then hurtling into the smoke and dust and hot shrapnel like weariless angels of slaughter. The enemy were startled, confused, but also numerous, and as the dead piled up, so more leapt forward to take their place.
The Hunters were grappling at close quarters now, fighting with bolter butt and blade, the fight slowing down. Warrior for warrior, the Punishers were almost as physically strong as the Dark Hunters Adeptus Astartes, and it took March and his chainsword to break the threatened stalemate. He slashed the enemy to the ground here, there, wherever one of his brethren was struggling, breaking up the fight again. The Punishers seemed stunned by the ferocity of the assault.
A grenade at his feet. March was blown to one side, red sigils flashing in his helm display. He saw that Brother Moshiri was down, badly wounded, and he clambered to his feet again and slew the Punisher warrior who stood over the fallen Dark Hunter, a snarl of pure hate leaving his mouth as he hacked the enemy warrior almost in two at the neck, the chainsword carving deep into the ceramite and flesh, finding the hearts within and tearing them to gobbets.
Then it was done. On the vox he heard Brother Fallon in the chamber above him.
‘Locking mechanism secure, brother-sergeant. Eleven enemy dead up here. A good accounting.’
‘Get back down here,’ March said. ‘Terciel, on my location. Set up in the lower chamber. Help Brother Moshiri. Brother Arrun, sitrep.’
The clatter and crack of close-range fire came over the vox, along with Brother Arrun’s voice.
‘Full enemy company about two hundred metres short of your position. All grenades gone.’
‘Can you exfiltrate, Arrun?’
‘Negative, brother-sergeant. They’re teeming around me like ticks. I will hold them here as long as I can. Mark my location for gene-seed retrieval, brother. Faces change, names change–’
‘But the flesh endures,’ March said, completing the ancient Hunters proverb.
‘Continue the fight without me, brother,’ Arrun said. ‘I mean to make them pay before they get by. Arrun out.’
March remained staring at the bloody floor of the corpse-strewn gatehouse for perhaps two seconds. Brother Arrun had been in his squad for thirty years.
Then he rose, and shook the congealed meat out of his chainsword.
‘Firing positions,’ he said. ‘Enemy company approaching. Let us be sure and welcome them, brothers.’
Primus Squad, or what was left of it, took up position at the firing slits of the gatehouse, while Brother Terciel barged through the doorway and then turned at once to set up the heavy bolter.
‘Three belts left, sergeant,’ he said.
‘Use them well, brother,’ Finn March said. ‘Make sure every bullet has a home.’
The firing began again.
All across the city vicious firefights erupted, exploding like novae in the ruins, burning a while and then sputtering out: as though flint were clashing with steel at a score of spots within a darkened room.
The human defenders of Askai fought where they stood, lacking the superlative night-fighting capabilities of the Dark Hunters. But the warriors of the Adeptus Astartes ranged the streets in small groups, inflicting mayhem here and there and then drawing back into the shadows, unbalancing the enemy even as the Punisher companies were trying to coalesce after the harried and chaotic ma
nner of their insertion.
One thing became clear as the night went on, though. The Punishers might have landed many thousands of warriors within the unbroken circuit of the city walls in the aerial assault, but the main body of the enemy was being set down outside the city, on the plains to the west where the Dark Hunters Thunderhawks had destroyed the airstrip upon their own arrival.
The gates of Askai, those indomitable bastions of adamantium, therefore became key to the city’s initial defence. In the first war they had been bypassed and left intact, then ignored; the city had fallen without the need to cross the walls.
But this time around, there were Adeptus Astartes defending the city, and it would seem that the Chaos commander, whoever he was, wanted to bring heavier metal to bear within the perimeter. To do that, the gates must be opened.
The anti-aircraft fire from the citadel had taken a huge toll on the Stormbird squadrons, and these were now withdrawn. The fighting rolled out along the ground in waves of death and fire, while on the western plains the heavy vehicles of the Punisher armoured companies formed up for attack.
All across the city, companies of the enemy assembled and began fighting their way to the western gates. And as they struggled westwards through the night, the Dark Hunters were waiting for them.
‘Dawn in an hour,’ General Dietrich said to Von Arnim.
They looked out from the heights of the citadel to the ruins below, where half a hundred firefights were flaming in the dark, and columns of smoke were lit up from below like hatchways to hell; and out to the west they could see where the fiercest fights were going on at the three tall gates.
‘They cannot hold forever,’ Von Arnim said. He took off his cap and wiped his pale forehead. ‘Even warriors such as these cannot stem this immense tide of hate.’
‘He knows that, Ismail. He knows that at some point he will have to pull them back. But he means to make them pay for it first.’
‘Have you ever fought alongside the Adeptus Astartes before, Pavul?’
The general shrugged. ‘Once, in my youth, I saw them from afar as we relieved them at the end of the Dundarron campaign. They were giants in the distance, no more.’
‘Giants indeed. I give thanks to the Emperor for his wisdom in creating them – else I think mankind would long ago have been wiped from the stars.’
‘They are not invincible,’ Dietrich told his commissar. ‘Their blood is as red as ours, Ismail.’
‘But it takes a lot more to spill it.’
NINETEEN
Amicis et Inimicis
In the shattering chaos of the trench lines, Fornix found Jonah Kerne and Elijah Kass under a cameleoline tarp, watching while some of Dietrich’s vox specialists struggled to coax their comms signals through the welter of jamming frequencies that flooded the aether.
The sun was up, but smoke was rolling across the city in such clouds that it seemed closer to dusk than dawn. Now the heavy guns of the citadel were being called in on enemy positions beyond the walls, and the howitzers in the gun caverns were at full elevation, sending earthshaker shells arcing high above the ruins to impact on the plains where the enemy was forming up, some three kilometres outside the western gates.
There were Haradai on the walls, observing the fall of shot and calling in corrections whenever they could get a message through on the vox. Sergeant Laufey was working with Finn March on the most vulnerable gate. With the help of his Scout Marine squad, Primus had beaten off three assaults in the last two hours, but they were hanging on by a thread now, reduced to scavenging the enemy dead for bolter-magazines that fitted their own weapons.
‘What word, first sergeant?’ Kerne asked Fornix as they all three stood under the frail tarp and listened to the frantic efforts of the human signallers to construct some kind of viable vox-net.
‘They’re hitting the gates with everything they’ve got, especially Primus’s position,’ Fornix told him. ‘I give it another hour before they take the gatehouse.’
‘And our other squads?’
‘I’ve ordered them back within the interior trench line. They are consolidating even as we speak, covered by Dietrich’s artillery.’
Kerne said nothing for a long moment. Finally he turned to his Librarian.
‘Elijah, get through to the squads on the walls. Tell them to break out and make their way back to our lines. The walls are to be abandoned – we have not the means or the numbers to defend them any longer. Can you do that, brother?’
Elijah Kass did not answer. His eyes were sightless, bright as blue marbles lit from within. A thin cobalt light pulsed around his psychic hood.
At last, he came back to them, blinking. ‘It is done,’ he said. His eyes were more than bloodshot, and when Kerne looked closely into them, he saw that there was a blackness there, leaking through the iris like dye spreading through fabric.
‘Brother, are you all right?’
Kass smiled thinly. ‘Brother Vennan warned me before I set out on this expedition that the Great Enemy would make me pay for my gift, and he was not wrong. I am fighting off psychic attack day and night now, captain. It takes a toll on the body as well as the mind. But I am equal to it, I assure you.’
‘I hope so, brother. Were it not for your abilities and the instincts of our Reclusiarch, we would be fighting almost blind.’
‘I’ve never known the Great Enemy to utilise such efficient vox-jamming,’ Fornix said, anger taut in his voice.
‘Perhaps it is not the Great Enemy,’ Elijah Kass said.
‘What do you mean, brother?’ Kerne demanded.
‘Only that the third presence which I touched upon from time to time before this assault began is still here, another element which is distinct from the foe we are trading fire with. It may be this other is responsible for the vox difficulties.’
‘Track it down,’ Kerne said grimly. ‘I want to know what in hell has killed our communications, brother. It is costing us in blood.’
‘I will, brother-captain. It will take time–’
‘Time?’ Fornix spat out with a bitter laugh. ‘Well, we’ve plenty of that.’
‘It is time,’ Ainoc said. ‘Their situation is worsening, and they are pulling back from their forward positions, but they still hold the entrance to the mines in strength. That is our only access point, farseer.’
Te Mirah looked down upon the bright turning world that dominated the shielded viewports of Steerledge. Around it now there wheeled a series of objects, long and angular, that caught the light of the Kargad star in bright glitters as they orbited the planet.
‘We are close enough now,’ she breathed. ‘Yes, you are right, Ainoc. We cannot leave it too long. How many teams do we have in readiness?’
‘Callinall’s rangers are planetside, and we have inserted a dozen other covens by falcon stealth ships around the city. They report that our jamming seems to have worked. There will be no communications off-world for as long as the vox-scramblers are undiscovered.’
‘Good. The planet must remain isolated from further Imperial involvement until we have what we came for.’
‘If the mon-keigh are wholly defeated, lady, then the Circuit will be lost to us – one cannot strike bargains with Chaos.’
‘I know it,’ she snapped. ‘We must keep the defence in being, but at a level of desperation which makes them more amenable to our… suggestions.’
‘A fine line.’
‘My life has been the treading of fine lines, Ainoc. Ready another falcon. It is time for me to make planetfall and confront these fanatics with the hopelessness of their position.’
‘Fanatics do not lose hope, Te Mirah – that is what defines them.’
‘They are rational beings nonetheless – not by our standards of course, but they will lend an ear to what I have to say.’
‘You should not go in person,’ Ainoc said, shaking his head.
‘I can read their intent more clearly than anyone else upon the Brae-Kaithe. It is my function, and
this is my destiny.’
‘Then I shall come with you, and my guardians shall be at your back.’
They looked at each other, not quite a test of wills – there was too much feeling there, a love not yet burned away by the centuries.
‘Very well, Ainoc. I should have a suitably impressive bodyguard, I suppose, if I am to convince these animals of what I am. Prepare the falcon, and bring along with you whoever you see fit – you are the follower of war after all.
‘And then the Brae-Kaithe must leave us. We are too close to the enemy here, and even the warp-addled minds of these invaders will sense our presence sooner or later.’
Ainoc bowed.
They chose the night, for during the day the fighting in the city reached a level of ferocity that appalled even the cold senses of the eldar.
The gates fell one by one, and were shunted open by the massive armoured hulks the mon-keigh named Dreadnoughts. Behind them came even larger tracked monstrosities: Land Raiders, Predators and Rhinos, all of Imperial design, but twisted, rebuilt and reconfigured to meet the tastes of those who now despised the Emperor of mankind with the same fervour that their far-off ancestors had once brought to his worship.
In the darkness, the bellowing engines rose high and loud under carefully laid smoke-barrages as the vehicles fought their way through the booby-trapped ruins, and Stormbirds made attack runs against the trench lines of the defenders, escorted by ancient Doomfires.
It was as though the enemy aircraft had been resurrected from some forgotten machine-grave, and raised corrupt and blasphemous to defile the very skies with their payloads.
In the midst of this, the Dark Hunters fought on, retreating metre by bloody metre to the secondary defensive lines which Dietrich and his men had held at such cost through the first invasion.
They wreaked havoc on the advancing enemy, cutting them down by the hundred, and hidden heavy-weapons teams would ambush the lumbering armour of the enemy as it lurched through the rubble, before moving to new hideouts.