by Paul Kearney
Other booming detonations within the manufactoria. Fornix was running out of the northern gate now, leaving the Armaments District behind at last, and behind him it was erupting in a sea of flame. Tons of munitions had been left behind back there, and they were all cooking off as the Punishers poured into the area, setting off scores of booby-traps. Fornix afforded himself a grim smile as he ran along.
Well, you wanted it, he thought. Now you have it.
The rambling, staggered detonations boiled up into a single great pall of smoke which rose above that region of the city, towering into the morning sky and flattening out into a great mushroom of fire-veined darkness. Thousands of the enemy died in that shadow, consumed by the explosions and crushed as the heavily built manufactoria were brought down around them.
It would be a long time before the armour of Titans was ever built on Ras Hanem again, longer still before the mines could ever be reopened and set in use once more. A few minutes of calculated destruction had undone the labour of centuries.
But better that than let the enemy have it intact.
Fornix and the Haradai halted, went to ground and assessed the situation. The convoy still had at least three kilometres to go, and was losing speed, the big vehicles picking their way carefully over the broken ground and shattered roadway. Firefights were sparking into life all along the northern lines as Mortai withdrew, supported by the eldar and a battalion of General Dietrich’s militia. The city was lit up with energy beams and tracer, and the sound of the growing battle was deafening.
‘It’s beginning to look like a hot morning’s work,’ Fornix said.
‘Hotter for some than others,’ Brother Laufey said with a grin, jerking his head at the conflagration which covered the southern sky. Then his eyes narrowed.
‘Enemy in sight, range six hundred metres. Armoured squads. Brothers, pick your targets left to right.’
The Haradai sighted down the long rifles, and began firing single shots one after the other. With his enhanced sight, Fornix could see that every round found a home. The leading Punisher squad was torn apart, and the rest went to ground and began firing wildly. A heavy bolter started up, rippling along their front and kicking up dirt and stone.
‘Move,’ he said. ‘Fire and manoeuvre, brothers. Keep them off balance.’
‘They’re on our right, first sergeant,’ one of the Scout Marines said, consulting an auspex. ‘I make out at least two full companies heading round the flank to the west.’
‘Damn them.’ Fornix glanced back at the convoy, and cursed once more. ‘Incoming aircraft. Take cover, brothers!’
A flight of Doomfires swooped in low out of the sun, chain-guns blazing, churning up a lane of fire below them. They turned in a graceful arc to the north, and then spread out, still firing.
‘Convoy, this is Fornix – pick up speed – you are under air attack,’ Fornix said into the vox. ‘Captain, can you give anti-air cover to the convoy?’
Jonah Kerne’s voice came back. ‘Acknowledged. Commissar Von Arnim, target those aircraft, priority call. I want the roadway protected for as far out as you can range.’
Fainter, Von Arnim answered from the citadel gun-caverns. ‘Anti-air-batteries retargeting now, my lord.’
They saw the bright flashes in the sides of the citadel as the heavy batteries opened out. But the Doomfires were flying nap-of-the-earth. They coursed overhead at less than fifty metres, and strafed the helpless vehicles below. A line of explosions rippled along the roadway, and Fornix saw one of the huge thirty-ton munitions haulers blasted onto its side. Another was set alight but kept driving, and the tiny living torches of its passengers leapt off in their dozens, their screams lost in the cacophony.
As the Doomfires pulled up at the end of their run, the guns of the citadel caught them, a wall of tracer and kinetic fire smashing into the Chaos fighter-bombers and knocking them out of the sky. None of the flight survived.
Fornix watched the sight in grim silence.
‘They’re on the move again,’ Brother Laufey said. ‘Squads feeling round our left now, first sergeant.’
They were in danger of being cut off. Fornix looked about him. The tactical feed in his display was full of red runes. They were even advancing through the burning ruins of the manufactoria, clambering over their own dead and shrieking like animals, firing their bolters into the air and sending blasts of promethium fire into every corner.
‘To the citadel,’ he said to the Space Marines about him. ‘There are altogether too many of these scum around for my liking. Brother Laufey, lead off.’
The Space Marines began running again, while behind them the Punisher thousands advanced over the ruins and the shattered city, and above the Armaments District, the immense smoke-pall rose thousands of metres into the air like some fearsome monument to the dead.
Up near the foot of the citadel, Jonah Kerne was in the front line with Septus Squad under Brother-Sergeant Corvo. On either side of them the eldar were fighting with lithe economy, and the air was full of the unfamiliar shriek of the shurikens. Te Mirah went from one of her warriors to the other, emboldening them, her farsight lighting up new or hidden targets for their weapons.
A blood-drenched squad of Khornate berserkers charged through the withering fire, and for a moment she held out a hand and the power streamed out of her, holding them in place, their feet digging uselessly in the dirt. She skewered one with her rune-bright spear, and her people cut the others down, the tiny shuriken wafers slicing them to dismembered meat and metal.
More leapt forward, bearing heavy power axes, gilt horns adorning their helms. Their armour was scarlet with paint and blood, bright and garish compared to the livery of the other Punishers, and they charged with a snarling savagery that eclipsed even that of their fellow traitors.
Jonah Kerne raised his ancient bolt pistol and carefully shot the first two through their eye-lenses, then shouldered aside a third, its axe fizzing near his head. He plunged the chainsword down into the thing’s neck, felt the blade grind its way through the vertebrae, and the head rolled free.
‘Target left,’ he said curtly to Corvo’s squad, and the Space Marines half-buried in rubble and almost unseen opened up with their bolters in short, savage bursts which tore up the assault. The Khornate fanatics died to the last, the red mania of their fury burning away all thought of retreat. They piled up like a crimson barricade before Corvo’s warriors.
‘Reload,’ Brother-Sergeant Corvo said calmly.
The big munitions haulers had arrived at the gates of the citadel. Out of a convoy of seven, three had survived. One was still burning half a kilometre short of the Dark Hunters position, and the Punishers swept around it in a black, yellow-flecked tide. Thousands were now closing in on the gates of the citadel from all points of the compass, iron filings drawn to the magnet of the Adeptus Astartes and their allies.
Fornix came running up with Laufey’s squad. He met Kerne at that mound of enemy dead and raised his power fist in greeting. His fingers dripped with blood. ‘Quincus and Sextius squads are coming in on the right, captain, and Orsus is bringing Tertius up from the east. We must hold here until they join us.’
‘I hear you, brother.’
Behind Kerne, General Dietrich made his way forward, leading a platoon of his own 387th, their uniforms in rags. A Leman Russ tank was barking out to one side, smoke leaking from battered holes in its armour, and off to the left the command Baneblade of Dietrich’s regiment squatted like an immense armoured toad, belching flame. The general was firing a laspistol and the gauntlet-blades glittered in his other fist. Kerne noted with approval the steadiness of his exhausted men. There was no notion of retreat in their eyes – the Guard was not yet beaten.
‘Fornix,’ Kerne said. ‘Let us see if we can make them pay a toll for this gate.’
Then he bent and opened the leather pouch at his waist, and drew out the company banner. The plasteel staff telescoped out, and the tattered material rose above his head. Morta
i’s Cerebrum et Haliaetum rose above the battlefield of Askai for the first time, and as the surrounding Space Marines caught sight of that ancient banner, they sent up a roar.
The Dark Hunters rose out of the filth and rubble, and opened up on the approaching host with a blaze of furious bolter fire. Warriors from Novus Company set up their meltaguns and heavy bolters and flamers and poured streams of death into the oncoming ranks.
Kerne walked ahead of the line, the banner raised high in one fist, and he had to fight the impulse to charge headlong into the enemy, to deal out death with fist and sword, to break the body of the hated foe at close range and feel their life give out under his hands.
His brothers were seized by the same exaltation. They strode forward, still firing, still picking their targets with all the ferocious efficiency of their calling, but it seemed to Jonah Kerne in that moment that if he let them, they would gladly hurl themselves forward into the fray with no thought for tactics. Their blood was up.
Other squads joined them, there before the very gates of the citadel. Kerne saw Sergeant Orsus there, and Sergeant Kagan came up alongside with his squad, then Sergeant Rusei with his. As they assembled under Mortai’s worn banner, so their dogged spirits were uplifted by the wanton killing, the roar of war, the company of their brethren.
For a few minutes, the band of Dark Hunters advanced across the battlefield like tawny, dust-shrouded giants and dealt out such death with such glorious abandon that the carnage seemed almost to take unto itself a strange kind of beauty.
They were Adeptus Astartes, the finest warriors in the known galaxy, and nothing could stand against them.
But the moment passed. The exaltation faded. The Punishers advanced over heaped lines of corpses and kept on coming, bellowing like the beasts they were. And to the rear of the infantry the warped crab-like hulks of half a dozen Chaos Dreadnoughts were coming up. Jonah Kerne collected himself, and looked around.
‘Back, brothers, back to the gates. There are too many – we cannot hold them here.’
They fell back by squad, whilst the eldar and Dietrich’s forces covered their withdrawal. They dragged back with them the bodies of three of their own, and as they reached the gates, Brother Passarion was there, with Reclusiarch Malchai and Elijah Kass. The Apothecary at once went to work on retrieving the gene-seed of his fallen brethren.
‘Malchai,’ Jonah Kerne said. Even over the vox, such was the sound of the fighting that he had to fine-tune his auto-senses before he could hear himself. ‘Is everyone else in?’
‘Everyone who is still alive,’ the Reclusiarch said. ‘You are the last, captain. Commissar von Arnim has defensive fire-zones keyed in all around the gate and the lower defences. Once we are all inside he will signal the barrage to begin.’
‘Very well.’ Then Kerne looked at the Librarian, who was standing as silent as a stone, staring past him.
‘What is it, brother – what do you see?’
The young epistolary had taken off his helm. Where once his eyes had been cobalt blue, now they had darkened into a grey as flat as old iron. He seemed to have to drag his gaze away from the ranks of the enemy.
‘He is here, brother-captain, upon this planet. Not orbiting above any more, but here in the city with us. He has come to oversee the final act of the conflict.’
‘Good,’ Kerne said with savage emphasis. ‘If he is down here with us in the dirt, then we can kill him. Get inside.’
They trooped in through the adamantium gates, the Baneblade taking half a dozen missile strikes as it went past them. It could barely limp into the citadel under its own power. Dietrich and his men stood around it as it halted, belching smoke, and the general patted the massive tank’s side as though it were a trusted horse.
The rest of the squads came in, still firing, errant rounds sparking and scoring their armour. ‘All present, dead and alive, captain!’ Fornix shouted.
Kerne looked up at the banner he held as Fornix joined him. To one side there stood Te Mirah and her eldar, seventy or eighty of them in their green armour. He looked at the eldar farseer, and she nodded in her tall helm.
‘Shut the gates,’ Kerne ordered. ‘Commissar Von Arnim, you may commence firing the heavy guns.’
The adamantium colossi slammed shut, crushing half a dozen of the foremost enemy warriors on the very threshold of the citadel. There was a moment almost of quiet in the wake of that great echoing boom, and then the thundering of the artillery began.
TWENTY-THREE
Pugna Ultima
The citadel of Askai on Ras Hanem had been built nigh on a millennium before.
Once, in that long-lost era of time before the coming of men to this part of the galaxy, there had been a hill beside a bright, free-flowing river, the Koi. The hill had overlooked the badlands to the west, and the rolling savannahs beyond. This terrain had come into being only in the last few thousand years; before that there had been thick forest and emerald-bright jungle carpeting the planet, and under the trees had walked the eldar.
The cataclysm that had hurled Ras Hanem and the Kargad system through the galaxy had seared the surface of the once fecund world, devastating flora and fauna, and destroying the ancient civilisation which had named the planet Vol-Aimoi. The eldar had fled the unstable system in a massed fleet of their beautiful ships, but not before burying the device which protected their dead deep in the earth of Vol-Aimoi.
They had meant to come back and retrieve it once the turmoil had died away, to begin again and rebuild their world. But, beset by the Chaos fleets and armies which teemed out of the newly opened Eye of Terror, harried by the advancing crusades of the Imperium of Man, they had never managed to return. And so, even their long memories had lost all knowledge of the forgotten world, even as its last exiles were hunted down and destroyed in a hundred battles over a thousand years. The eldar who had lived on Vol-Aimoi became extinct, and all record of them was lost in those tumultuous centuries.
Millennia passed. Men arrived near the star they named Kargad, and took the system as their own.
They landed at the foot of the hill, beside the river, and on that hill they built their first base, while they surveyed the planet and discovered the deep-buried riches of its ores. They built their houses and workshops and fledgling manufactoria under the fortifications on the hill, and grew in number.
The years came and went, and the settlement by the river grew into a city, and spawned others across the world that men now named Ras Hanem. The city was constantly enlarged, rebuilt and redesigned, until it was decided that Ras Hanem was important enough to warrant a major construction project. The fortress on the hill was dismantled and the hill itself was enlarged, built higher in a gigantic feat of engineering until it became a mountain, faced with igneous stone, braced with adamantium, hollowed out and reared up into a mighty bastion full of guns – a city to itself.
Thus was the citadel of Askai born, and it had stood for a thousand years, home to the ruling house of Ras Hanem, the Riedlings, who in turn were merely descendants of the first explorers and traders set human foot on the planet.
The citadel was a thousand metres tall, and within its hollow heart tens of thousands of people lived and worked and hoped and hated and loved and died, while below them the city of Askai sprawled out at its feet, and underneath it the mines of the Administratum delved ever deeper, seeking the precious ores which fed the war machine of mankind.
Until the Punishers came.
Now, the citadel of the Riedlings was under siege. It was the last remaining outpost of the Imperium of Man in the entire system, and though it had originally been built with such trials in mind, the long years of peace had atrophied many of the systems and mechanisms of the defence.
Manufactoria buried in the mountain’s foundations had fallen into disuse because the Armaments District with its massive production lines was only a few kilometres away. Food stores and water purification plants had been neglected under the latest and last scion of the Riedlin
gs, and the defences had been allowed to run down in the years before the present catastrophe.
It was in this place that Mortai Company and its allies awaited the final assault of the massed Chaos hordes.
‘Si vis pacem, para bellum,’ Brother Malchai said. ‘If you wish for peace, prepare for war. A proverb more ancient than the Imperium itself. The men who governed this planet might have done better to learn such ancient wisdom.’
Outside, the endless thump of the siege guns went on, a noise they had ceased to notice. It was part of the music of their lives, as unremarkable as the hot, humid air they breathed.
The blast doors of the citadel had been shut, and the fortress-mountain had closed itself off from the world, and the fury that was outside. The stone slopes of the mountain thundered with the endless bombing runs of the Stormbirds, and down at the gates, the Punishers were still trying to batter their way through the massive adamantium defences, like a bull charging at a cliff face. They had not stopped for twenty-six days, now, and the ancient gates of the citadel were still intact, but the stone in which they were embedded was crumbling away under that relentless barrage.
‘Brother Heinos,’ Jonah Kerne said. ‘How long do you give it before they break through?’
The Techmarine looked up at the vast gleaming mechanisms which upheld the stark adamantium of the gates. The air before him was full of dust, but the specialised auspex built into his helm saw through it, scanned the microscopic and not so microscopic cracks in the metal and stone.
‘I estimate that given three more days of this, the surrounding material will lose all integrity. The gates will not break, but what holds them in place will crumble.’
‘Three days!’ Fornix exclaimed. ‘Well, it’s good to be forewarned.’
‘What about our repairs?’ Brother Malchai asked. ‘General Dietrich has had his engineers all over these gates day and night for the last four weeks.’
‘It is the larger area that is in question,’ the Techmarine told him implacably. ‘It cannot be adequately repaired unless this entire section of the mountain is demolished and rebuilt. As it is, captain, I recommend that we abandon this section of the lower fortress. It has become unstable and could collapse of its own accord at any time.’