by Paul Kearney
Finn March spoke up for the first time. He took off his helm and looked Kerne in the eye.
‘Captain, all I know is that I have four battle-brothers remaining out of the nine I jumped with, and holding the line with them right at this moment are squads of these xenos. They have been fighting beside us now for almost three days, and they have helped us stem at least four major assaults. I speak merely as a combat leader – if the eldar become our enemies too, then the line will fold, and we will have to fall back to the citadel.’
Brother Malchai clenched a fist. ‘Brother-sergeant, are you suggesting that brothers of the Adeptus Astartes cannot hold their positions without the aid of filthy xenos?’
‘Yes, Reclusiarch, I am, and believe me when I say it is a bitter pill to swallow. We are over-extended as it is. If the eldar pull out, then we will have to redraw our positions drastically.’
‘He’s right,’ Fornix said. ‘I inspected the lines this evening. Jonah, there are fifty-two of us still standing. The militia and the Guard do their best, but aside from the gunners in the citadel, Dietrich is now down to three tanks and a few understrength battalions. Even with the help of the eldar, we will need to consider withdrawals by morning. Without them, many of our positions will be overrun almost at once.’
There was a silence as this sank in.
‘Better to die clean, than live with tainted honour,’ Malchai murmured.
Jonah Kerne touched the leather sheath at his hip in which Mortai’s ancient banner resided.
‘Honour?’ he said. ‘Brother Malchai, I gave my word to the eldar farseer. She has kept hers – must I break mine?’
‘You gave it to a xeno, from a race famed for its deceit,’ Malchai told him implacably. ‘There is no honour at stake.’
Kerne’s face hardened. ‘I see your reasoning, and there is much to recommend it. But I have been thinking over this since Fornix returned from the mines. I cannot agree with you, brother.’
‘You’re going to hand it over,’ Elijah Kass said, disbelief in his voice. ‘Captain–’
‘Let this be on my head alone. Brothers, the Kharne will be moving stone and stars to come to our relief. We have but to hold on here, even as General Dietrich did.’
‘Dietrich was allowed to survive to draw us in,’ Malchai rasped.
‘He fought for fifteen weeks in this charnel house. We can survive for as long, whether the Punishers wish it or no. We are Adepts of the Stars, brothers of the Dark Hunters Chapter, and we will not go gently into the night.’
Kerne stood up. The Infinity Circuit was balanced in the palm of his gauntlet, a faint glow visible through the cloth which covered it.
‘I have made my decision. I will keep my word to those who have kept theirs, and I will bear the consequences of that on my shoulders alone. Brother Malchai, you may make of that what you will. I respect your faith, your courage and your integrity – even in the worst of our disagreements, I have never doubted your loyalty and commitment to Mortai and to the Chapter. But I am the commander here, and I must consider the military realities of the situation as well as the niceties of the Codex.’
‘On your head be it, Jonah,’ Malchai muttered, and he seemed genuinely grieved.
‘Brothers,’ Kerne said, ‘the endgame of this little adventure lies before us, but it is a simple one. We must fight, and survive. That is all. If only one of us is still standing when relief arrives, then we will have been victorious here.’
He looked at his brothers. Malchai was staring at the ground, and Kass seemed deeply troubled.
‘Brother Passarion, I want you to secure the gene-seed of our fallen brethren and conceal it in the depths of the citadel, at the very heart of our strongest defences. If it survives, then so will Mortai.’
At that moment, with the Infinity Circuit in the very palm of his hand, Kerne realised the irony of the order. And it made him more sure than ever that he was doing the right thing – the necessary thing. He was trying to preserve some relic of his company for the future even as the eldar had done.
‘It shall be so, captain,’ the Apothecary said, as impassive as always.
‘Finn, go to the line squads, and warn them that we will be making a fighting withdrawal before dawn. I intend to evacuate the Armaments District. We have stockpiled enough munitions in the citadel now to last through weeks of siege. We are going to fall back to the fortress.’
‘And the eldar with us?’ Malchai asked sharply.
‘That is up to the eldar, Reclusiarch. I will notify Dietrich and his men, and the eldar farseer. We will begin shipping the civilians north in the last armaments convoy, while we still hold the road.’ He paused. ‘Only those who can fight. We cannot take them all.’
‘That is defeat,’ Malchai said.
‘That is reality, brother. Better to do it now by our own choice, than be forced into it in the midst of another assault. Fornix, you will see to it. Take direct command of the men still fighting down there and bring them north, across the spaceport lines.’
Fornix nodded. Even he could find nothing to say.
‘Let us go to our duties, brothers,’ Kerne said. ‘And may our mighty father look down upon us with favour. There is a lot to do before the sun rises.’
‘By the Throne,’ Brother Malchai said heavily.
Even on Ras Hanem, even now, the fighting had its lulls and pauses, as fleeting as the gaps between raindrops in a storm. It was in one of these that Kerne finally found his way back to the eldar farseer.
She was just to the rear of her warriors, and the xenos before her had seen off a probe by the Punisher armoured fighters who might once conceivably have been Adeptus Astartes. There were eldar dead lying around, and one of their kind was gathering the spirit stones from their armour. The others were seeing to their weapons, making repairs to the light wargear they wore, and as they did so, they were singing a low threnody, a lament for their fallen comrades.
Male and female voices joined together, and Te Mirah stood and watched them, raising one slender hand as though she were receiving a salute, or conducting the song. She did not turn around as Kerne approached, but lowered her arm.
‘Ainoc is dead,’ she said.
‘Yes,’ Kerne told her.
She bent her head. ‘I hope he was fighting, at the end. He would have wanted to leave this world with a blade in his hand.’
Kerne said nothing. Fornix had not elaborated on the warlock’s death, and he had not thought to ask.
‘But he did not die in vain, did he, captain?’
Te Mirah turned around at last. She lifted her helm so he could see the pale blur of her long, severely beautiful face in the night.
‘You have it with you.’
‘My brothers brought it up. Only two of them survived. It was guarded.’
Te Mirah was breathing quickly, though her face was quite composed.
‘None of your kind has ever seen such a precious treasure before, much less held it. You have in your hands the fate of a great number of my people, captain. And yet you come here alone, holding it. To threaten me?’ She was breathing fast now, and her eyes had begun to glow. About her feet, a cold wind began to circle and stir up the dust.
‘Brother Laufey,’ Kerne said.
From the ruins, a voice said: ‘Here, captain.’
‘Do not fire unless I give you an express command, brother.’
‘Acknowledged.’
Te Mirah scanned the surrounding ruins. Behind her, the other eldar warriors rose to their feet and cocked their weapons, the thin shriek of the shurikens quite different from the solid sound of bolter mechanisms.
Three red dots appeared on the farseer’s torso, and another travelled up her body to rest on her forehead.
‘I am not alone,’ Jonah Kerne said.
‘You had best kill me quick, mon-keigh,’ Te Mirah shrilled.
‘I am not here to kill you.’
The light in her eyes steadied. She held up a hand, and the warriors behi
nd her went very still, the shuriken catapults poised to fire.
‘I gave you my word,’ Jonah Kerne said in the same low, calm voice. ‘I mean to keep it.’
He stepped forward and held out the cloth-wrapped bundle he carried to the eldar woman.
She gasped, and over her face a whole gamut of emotions came and went, flitting like leaves before a wind. Then she gently reached out with both hands, and took the Infinity Circuit from the towering Space Marine.
The glow in it intensified, beaming through the fabric which enwrapped it. Te Mirah looked down upon the artefact, and from her mouth there came something which might have been a sob, bitten back instantly. Her voice when she spoke was thick and raw.
‘You give it to me freely, you, one of the fanatics we have despised and feared for tens of thousands of your years. It is… inexplicable.’
‘Some of my brethren think so also,’ Kerne said dryly.
‘Why?’ she asked, baffled. ‘Those I sent to retrieve it are all dead. Your own people brought it to the surface – you could have kept it. By your beliefs you should keep it.’
‘I gave my word,’ Kerne repeated simply.
The farseer studied Kerne as though seeing him for the first time. ‘You are not like the others of your kind, Adeptus Astartes. There is a wisdom in you that is uncommon in your species. But I still do not understand why you do this.’
Kerne frowned. ‘That thing you hold, it encompasses the memories, the souls of an entire world.’ He raised a hand to the ruined city which surrounded him.
‘Tens of millions once dwelled here, my people and yours, and now they are nearly all dead – at the hands of the same enemy. It occurred to me that if I had this relic of yours destroyed, then I would be doing that enemy’s work for him. Chaos wishes to see an end to both our races. I will not help those Ruinous Powers to their goal.’
‘My enemy’s enemy is my friend,’ Te Mirah said with a slight smile.
‘I would not go quite that far, xenos. You probably meant to deceive and betray us at some point – it is in your nature. But now you do not have to, and my brothers do not have to fight your kind as well as the Great Enemy which surrounds us.’
‘I could just leave, now, with all my folk, and sail away from this system.’
‘Yes, you could.’
‘Are you actually telling me you have faith in the eldar, captain?’
‘No. But I sense in you a kind of honour.’
‘Perhaps we are both singular examples of our peoples,’ Te Mirah said.
‘Perhaps. In any case, I have kept my word. What will you do now?’
The farseer stroked the bundle she held as though it were a dear child lately recovered. She turned and spoke in her own tongue to the eldar behind her, and handed it to one of them, a leader of his kind judging by the elaborate horns and antlers upon his helm.
‘The Circuit will be sent off-world to my ship at once,’ she said. ‘As for myself, I and my kind will remain here. You have made me curious, captain. I think I will have to reappraise your people. I will stay here, and see if I cannot help you hold back the tide of destruction which is enveloping them – for a while at least.’
They stood looking at one another. ‘Stand down, Brother Laufey,’ Kerne said at last. ‘I wish to inform our allies of tonight’s plans.’
The red laser-dots winked out. The Adeptus Astartes captain and the eldar farseer drew closer, and began to confer. They planned together how to defend the last corner of a ruined world, and how to keep at least one part of it free of the encroaching darkness.
TWENTY-TWO
Infractus vallo
All through the night, the retreat went on. The defenders of Ras Hanem abandoned their positions in the south of the city trench by trench, leaving behind many of the wounded who could not walk and had no hope of healing. These unfortunates among the Guard and the militia snapped off a shot now and again to convince the enemy that the lines were still fully manned, and they were also left with a fistful of grenades, to use upon themselves when the end came and the Punishers saw through the charade. Everyone knew now that to be captured alive was worse than any death imaginable.
Fornix supervised the withdrawal from the Armaments District, and Dietrich’s remaining engineers set booby traps linked to piles of munitions all over the manufactoria. The thousands of workers who remained in the district were shepherded north in the last transport convoys of the night, hundreds of them clinging to every edge and angle of the big munitions haulers and ore carriers.
Fornix supervised the loading of the vehicles. The civilians climbed onto the vehicles silently, with only some muffled sobbing. The big haulers could carry two hundred at a time, and they ran all night, bringing thousands north to the citadel through the lines. This would sound like nothing new to the enemy; supply columns had been running endlessly between the Armaments District and the citadel since the start of the fighting.
Of necessity, the sick, the old, and the worst wounded were left behind, and once they understood what was happening, they clustered around such munitions stores which remained, the more responsible among them given detonators by Dietrich’s engineers, so that they might set off the charges when the end came. After all these weeks of living in a kind of endless hell, they seemed to accept their fate with a kind of dulled relief. At least it would be over.
The entrance to the mines was also rigged to blow, this time remotely, and Fornix kept the remote detonator which linked to the charges on his belt. He knew how many people were down there, and what it would mean to touch that button and seal them off in the blackness.
This is the price that war exacts from us, he thought.
He did not mind paying a personal price for victory, or the hope of it, but it turned his stomach to consign all those thousands who were still underground to a horrible death.
A horrible death – but a better fate than they would enjoy at the hands of the Punishers, all the same. He kept that thought in his mind.
An hour before dawn. The convoys had been running all night, and apart from a few skirmishes out to the west, it would seem that the operation was about to pass off almost bloodlessly.
But in that last cold hour before sunrise, the enemy finally seemed to catch wind of what was going on, and in the space of a few minutes they attacked all along the line, a dozen companies of their heavy armoured infantry leading the advance. Finding no resistance, they came on with a will, enraged to find that they had been tricked. Their sudden rush brought them through the deserted Imperial positions all the way up to the walls of the district itself, and there they raged, foiled by the looming defences.
More and more of the enemy were being roused out of their positions all over the west of the city, and being sent forward by their champions in teeming masses. They came on in their thousands, a massive, beetling surge of roaring warriors hell-bent on murder.
On top of the district blast walls, a squad of Haradai began picking them off with their sniper rifles, but it was like throwing pebbles at the sea.
‘Brother Laufey, withdraw from the walls and make your way to my position,’ Fornix ordered over the vox.
‘Acknowledged, brother. They have a Land Raider with them, and they mean to charge the gates with it, I believe.’
The gates were already rigged to blow. The Punisher vehicle would breach them, but it would be the last thing it did.
Fornix strode along the last of the heavy haulers, which were covered with desperate people scrabbling for a handhold. They could hear, now, the attack going on beyond the walls, and they set up a wail which no threat of violence could silence. It was immaterial now anyway.
‘Captain, this is Fornix – the enemy will be within my perimeter in minutes. Sending the last vehicles north to you now.’
‘I hear you, Fornix,’ Kerne’s voice came back. ‘I will meet them outside the citadel with Septus Squad, and some of Dietrich’s armour. We are pulling everything back within the fortress. They’
re assaulting on every front with everything they’ve got, and augur tells us they have bombers inbound.’
‘Yes, captain. Estimate our arrival in forty minutes, if we have some luck on our side.’ Then, ‘Get these vehicles moving!’ Fornix bellowed, augmenting the order with his helm’s vox-enhancer. ‘Do not stop for anything or anyone – drivers – spool them up.’
The big engines on the haulers roared, and the lead vehicle set off. People fell from its sides, screaming, and were crushed by the second hauler in the convoy. There could be no halting or slowing down, not now.
Brother Laufey appeared with four other Scout Marines, breathing hard.
‘They’re trying to scale the district walls,’ he said.
‘Stay with me,’ Fornix told him. ‘We are the rearguard, brothers. We must buy some time for the convoy.’
There was a massive explosion, and a towering mushroom of smoke and flame rose up into the air, blotting out the dawn.
‘That will be our friends at the gate,’ Fornix said. He consulted the chrono in his display. ‘Time to move, brothers – the other charges will begin to go off soon.’
He let them go ahead. The air was full of the sound of the Punisher horde, a noise which brought back old memories. The gate was down, and they would be coming through it as soon as the smoke cleared and they had stumbled through the other booby-traps set down there. Fornix lifted the remote detonator from his belt.
‘Forgive me, my Emperor, for I know what it is I do.’
He pressed the button, heard the muffled thunder as the charges went off down at the mine entrance, and saw the second pillar of black smoke boil up into the lightening sky. Three seconds he stood there, watching it, then he tossed the detonator aside and took off in the wake of the Haradai.
The vehicles were powering along some three hundred metres ahead, lurching over the debris on the road, their exhausts vomiting smoke. Every so often they swerved violently to avoid a shell-hole, and more people were flung off them like discarded trash. The drivers never paused or slowed – they were as eager to get to the safety of the citadel as their cargoes were.