by Nick Kyme
Engines idling noisily, Chronus stood up in the Rage of Antonius’s cupola and watched the necrons advancing. He suspected a great many, mortal and superhuman, were doing the same.
His battle tanks were assembled in three squadrons. The first, comprising all the siege engines, was ringed around the space port and would provide suppressing bombardment fire as soon as the outer walls were deemed no longer defensible; the second, which was made up of Predators and Land Raiders commanded by Gnaeus, assembled behind the north gate; that left the third with Chronus himself at the west gate.
There were enough breaches in the outer walls to provide adequate apertures for unleashing their long-range guns. Once that was no longer practical, their orders were to withdraw into the warren of streets and provide armoured bottlenecks to slow the necrons down and give their infantry time to effect an ordered retreat.
Of course, that was assuming the enemy could penetrate the indomitable guard of Agrippen. The Ancient had taken position at the western gate and looked in no mood to relinquish it.
Chronus knew it was partly for show. An astute strategy in terms of human psychology. By the tank commander’s calculation, they were near reduced to half-strength, which meant just over fifty Ultramarines give or take pilots, crewmen and a few attached specialists. Roughly ten times that number were left in the Damnosian Ark Guard, and perhaps a further three hundred in conscripted militia. Kellenport was not a huge city by any standard, and with its outer districts abandoned, it shrank further still, but the Imperial forces were paltry in number and inhabited a virtual ghost town. The necrons were legions strong, tens of thousands, and with an abundance of esoteric heavy weaponry at their disposal.
Chronus was under no illusions about the outcome of this fight.
Fabricus pulled up alongside in The Vengeful, sitting up in the cupola like his commander.
‘Come to wish me well for the battle ahead, Sergeant Fabricus? I do believe they may write stories about this one. No doubt our exploits in destroying those phasic generators are already being immortalised,’ said Chronus, with more than a hint of irony. ‘I expect we will have thrown several necron war cells into defeat and nearly single-handedly turned the fates of this war by the time the ink is dry on its parchment. Stories do seldom reflect the truth, don’t you find?’
‘I had come to gauge your thoughts before battle, commander, but can hear they are only bitter and lacking in the inspiration I sought.’
Chronus gave Fabricus a sideways glance. He had yet to don his helmet, and left it sitting on the Predator’s roof. By the standard of most sergeants, Fabricus was youthful and bereft of scars. He also had a shock of close-cropped blond hair, which meant he must be young, but there was maturity in his eyes, born of hard experience.
‘I make you sergeant and all of a sudden you are questioning my demeanour.’
Fabricus was instantly contrite. ‘I meant no offence, commander–’
‘Stop, please.’ Chronus held up his hand. ‘A poor attempt at levity. I apologise. But you’re right,’ he added. ‘I am bitter. I don’t like to lose and although we are standing defiant at Kellenport’s gates, I cannot shake the feeling that we are already beaten.’
‘So what would your counsel be then, commander?’
It was a fair question, one which Chronus had already asked himself and subsequently answered.
‘We make them pay for their victory as painfully as we can.’
Hunkered down amongst the ruins by the north gate, Scipio closely observed a soulless robotic horde through his scopes.
Vast phalanxes of infantry, flanked by skimmers and walkers, descended on the city from its two gated aspects. Unlike a living foe, they did not shout war cries or even stare in that grim, determined fashion that Scipio had seen some warriors affect. It was cold, methodical, and calculated in every way. Necron strategy was a logic engine, a long and dispassionate equation that factored in nothing of courage or individual heroism. The only human facility they had ever accounted for was fear, and in that they were consummate masters.
The terrified faces of the Damnosian soldiery surrounding him attested to that fact. Scipio’s Tactical squad, the Thunderbolts, had been reunited for this last defence. There were some exceptions. Auris was dead and Brakkius had become an unlikely gunner for Vantor aboard Gladius. The gunship had used most of its ordnance payload by now and had been pressed into service, like all atmospheric craft, ferrying citizens from the surface to the ships at low anchor above.
Eighteen runs that ship had made so far. It had survived every one without a scratch.
Say what you will about the Techmarine, thought Scipio, but he is a determined and excellent pilot. He suspected Brakkius’s marksmanship might have something to do with the Thunderhawk’s Throne-blessed existence, too.
A flash of crackling lightning and the whip of turbulent storm winds manifested near Scipio’s position, causing some of the Guardsmen to turn and aim their guns fearfully. When they saw the figure that stepped from the psychic tempest, they had to resist the urge to kneel instead.
Scipio contented himself with a shallow bow.
‘My lord.’
‘It does our charges good to see that we still possess power, Sergeant Vorolanus,’ uttered Tigurius. He never just spoke, the Chief Librarian; he declared, and in this kind of mood he did so always in a resonant voice, redolent of his psychic might.
Tigurius was staring out into the icy void, but his eyes seemed far away, as if seeing far more than any mortal or Space Marine standing guard at that wall ever could. His staff, a ram-horned stave of master artifice, he clutched in one hand, sending a ripple of eldritch energy down the shaft.
‘You are most welcome at the wall, my lord.’
‘I am not merely on the wall, Sergeant Vorolanus. I am in all places, at once.’ He gestured with his staff. ‘Do you want to know what I have seen in the ether?’
‘If it is our demise, then no, my lord, I do not.’
Tigurius turned slowly, the trace of a smile playing on his inscrutable face. They had fought together on the Thanatos Hills, but he was deep into the warp in that moment, all of his attention bent towards his powers and unerring prescience. He barely seemed to recognise the sergeant.
Even for a Space Marine as veteran as Scipio, it was unnerving. To know such a being was by your side in any fight was ultimately galvanising, however, and so here Tigurius was.
‘You are a curious one, Scipio Vorolanus,’ he uttered. ‘I see greatness in you, a potential you might yet reach, or die in agony in the attempt.’
‘A sobering thought,’ Scipio replied, dryly.
The Chief Librarian lowered his voice. ‘Our paths here on Damnos are myriad, but none of them leads to victory. Not yet, not in this future.’
He turned away again, and Scipio was left to wonder at his meaning.
A shout ran out from one of the few watchtowers that were still standing, forcing the sergeant’s attention onto the immediate present.
The distant hills rumbled and flashed, heralding the inception of the necrons’ preliminary bombardment.
The final siege of Kellenport had begun.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
DEFIANCE
Gauss fire crackled across the ice plain in an unending storm. It tainted the oil-black night, heating the air and turning it an ugly verdant green. It ripped apart the meagre defences, tore up the gun emplacements and rendered men to ash. It thundered from skimmer-tanks, implacable warrior-cohorts and the distant, pyramidal silhouettes of the largest terror weapons in the enemy arsenal. A green haze of atomisation hung over the ruins in the wake of rapid and collective particle fusion.
It reminded Scipio of a funeral shroud, and the corpse beneath it was Kellenport and all its desperate citizens.
Delivering valiant if mostly ineffective return fire, the defenders at the north wall had held for just under an hour. That staunch resistance had ended when the gatehouse and one of its watchtowers had collapsed
into rubble, leaving a vast breach into which hordes of robotic infantry were now marching.
The skeletal faces of the necrons were pitiless as they emerged through the gloom. Their advance was slow and inexorable, preceded by a constant fusillade from their gauss rifles.
As soon as the wall came down, Scipio gave the order to fall back. He saw Vandar do the same from farther up the battlements. His helmet vox crackled with the voices of Solinus and Octavian, also sounding the retreat. He had no line of sight on his fellow sergeants, the defence being stretched and necessarily ragged, but knew they would be heading deeper into the city.
Somewhere behind him the assault squads of Ixion and Strabo were already redeploying. Across the length and breadth of the city, Devastators would be occupying their predetermined strongpoints from which they could launch support fire. As he retreated with the others – the remnants of three Ark Guard formations, a band of militia and his own Thunderbolts – Scipio heard the heavy guns give voice.
Out beyond the walls, on the crowded tundra past the city’s outer defences, came a succession of missile detonations and the after-flare of a plasma ignition. Chugging heavy bolters and the hard-whine of lascannons kept up a steady chorus in the wake of these grander beats of war. And yet Scipio knew it was barely a scratch. There would be no holding here. The only way was back.
Kellenport’s streets were warrens, although many of them had been flattened by clustered enemy bombardments and were little more than blackened ruins now. Guerrilla fighting favoured the smaller, native force. It would slow the necrons down and thus give more time for the civilians to evacuate.
‘Fall back!’ he cried, vox-amplifying his words through his helmet. ‘Retreat to the commercia-districts. Quickly and in good order.’
Hit by a stray gauss beam, an old refinery shed combusted explosively. Guardsmen and Ultramarines too close to the blast were thrown skywards. Revealed in the sudden burst of flame Scipio thought he saw Praxor, sword raised, rallying his troops as they fell back to another part of the city. The vista died as quickly as it was born. Scipio did not linger, and signalled his own forces to pull back.
Some of the Guardsmen fled, militia too. They ran blindly, and without the support of their comrades would die swiftly. Some were even cut down during the initial act of flight. But the majority did as ordered, emboldened by the presence of the Ultramarines or simply too afraid to run. Either was fine by Scipio; in these final hours, he had learned to be pragmatic.
A single round from his outstretched bolt pistol took a necron in the skull, erasing its rictus grin with satisfying lethality. A second three-round burst shredded two others. By now the combined las and bolter fire of the retreating Guardsmen and Ultramarines had joined his, impeding the necrons’ efforts to overwhelm their position quickly.
From the left flank, rolling across a largely uncluttered plaza that was pockmarked with shell holes, a battle tank rumbled into view. It bucked on its tracks, its autocannon chewing a hole in the necron ranks before its heavy bolters poured on further punishment.
Those few crucial seconds gave Scipio and his men a chance to retreat. He was about to signal the driver his gratitude when the immense shadow of a monolith fell across them. The Predator’s turret was still turning when the floating necron obelisk unleashed an arc of power from the energy crystal glowing feverishly at the pyramid’s apex. The blast uncoiled, tearing open the Predator’s frontal armour and gutting it. The fuel tanks went up momentarily, bathing the ruined walls and their fleeing defenders in more reflected fire.
One of Tirian’s men, Scipio could not tell which, had crouched in the lee of a shattered gun emplacement and released a missile from his launcher. The incendiary exploded harmlessly against the monolith’s shielding, a bloom of displaced energy like water flashing on oil. Before the Devastator had time to load another, a gauss salvo reduced him to a ruin of smoking armour.
Scipio muttered an oath for the warrior’s passing, and urged his own troops back.
More tanks were moving in to avenge the destruction of the Predator. Three lascannon bursts lit up the dark. One even penetrated the monolith’s armour, but barely slowed it. They were priming for a second shot when the vast obelisk began to move, crashing down half-ruined wall sections as it simply pushed through them.
Falling debris claimed several militiamen unwise enough to seek refuge behind the stunted remains of the walls, but their death cries barely registered in the chaos.
The tanks fired again, but still the monolith endured. It ripped the treads from one vehicle with a wicked gauss arc. It tore the turret off a second, leaving a smouldering crater in the metal and the hull. Its commander emerged from the flaming crevice, bolt pistol firing. It was more out of defiance than a belief that he could actually stop this thing.
‘All weapons,’ shouted Scipio, out of a desire to go down fighting when he realised they could not escape the monolith. ‘Fire at will!’
Bolter shells and las-beams roared up at the vast floating edifice, mere insect stings against a hide of alien metal. There would be no stopping it, and Scipio began reciting his final litanies, until he saw the lightning storm.
A figure hung within it, suspended several metres from the ground. His body shimmered with coruscation as he sent an arc of bolts hammering into the ground. The necrons pushing for the breach jerked and spasmed in the lightning storm, each jag leaping from one to another until more than a score were smitten into ruin.
Muttering psychic canticles and arcane rites known only by the Librarius, Tigurius hurled a fork of azure power against the monolith. The bolt split against its flank, tearing back the plates of armour and exposing the circuitry within. Chained lightning followed, rippling from the psyker’s brow and tearing off a side bank of gauss flayers.
Its apex crystal flaring in sympathetic anger, the monolith released an energy lash, but Tigurius threw up a kine-shield and bore the blast against it. The psyker staggered, his armour scorched in the violent throes of the particle whip’s dispersion, but not yet finished.
Tracing the sigils of his order in the air before him, Tigurius fashioned a vortex in the very fabric of reality, ripping open a passage to the warp in the monolith’s very midst. Howling, ethereal winds tore at the necron war engine. Potent energies of unmaking cascaded through it. The obelisk endured for a few moments before crumpling in on itself as the destructive fury of a star’s death was ignited in its midst and then faded like a flare of solar wind.
Tigurius resealed the breach in reality. The vortex had left a gaping hole in its wake and an empty crater in the vast necron ranks. The reprieve would be brief. More were coming, undaunted by the fate of the others.
The surviving battle tanks pushed on into the gap in the wall, allowing Scipio and his men to continue their withdrawal.
‘Do you hold here?’ Tigurius asked him as he returned to the ground. He looked tired, but the fury of a psychic storm still raged in his eyes.
Scipio shook his head. ‘We make for the streets. These walls are lost.’
‘Then go quickly,’ the Librarian replied before stepping back to summon a gateway of light. He was gone in an eye blink, manifesting in some other part of the city where his supreme prescience told him he was needed.
‘Back, back,’ Scipio urged his men, as the battle tanks sitting in the breach began to fire. They could not hold it for long and would soon need to retreat, too. The city streets beckoned, as well as the prospect of bitter, close-quarter fighting.
The walls around the western gate were barely standing, yet one warrior had not moved from his post.
Chronus had not known Agrippen as he was before being entombed, but if his flesh-and-blood predecessor was anything like the war machine that now stood sentinel in the Courtyard of Thor, the tank commander suspected he would have been a stubborn bastard.
Necrons littered the ground before the mighty Dreadnought, their wreckage unable to phase out fast enough before Agrippen added to the ruination s
urrounding him. Nothing could fell him, although his armour was rent and torn by dozens of minor wounds. A burst from his plasma cannon gouged a hole in the tight ranks of automatons, before the exhaust vents spiked to cool the weapon down again. There was no respite for the enemy, though, as Agrippen laid about him with his power fist. Chronus saw one necron, armed with claws and draped in a grisly hide of human flesh, seized and crushed by the Dreadnought’s massive fist. Agrippen then used the broken robotic corpse to club another, before pulverising a third beneath his foot.
With a hiss of vented pressure and a low-energy hum, the plasma cannon was fire-ready again. The resulting bolt vaporised an arachnid walker shouldering through the mass to reach the gate. More followed, acting as vanguard for a squadron of arks that trailed close behind them.
Chronus opened up the vox to Reckoner and Triumph of Espandor, directing the Predators’ fire at the more distant arks through gaps in the withered Kellenport defences. He then issued a string of pinpoint coordinates to the Whirlwinds and more advance-positioned Vindicators. A hail of ordnance from the vicinity of the space port and the surrounding region descended a few seconds later, engulfing the walkers and a sizeable portion of necron infantry.
The order to fall back from the walls had been given, so the tanks had moved up in accordance with that to provide much needed covering fire. According to his retinal display and the tactical feed scrolling across one of the lenses, all Ultramarines sergeants who still lived had made an effective withdrawal into the streets.
Chronus ordered the siege tanks back into their defensive positions and told his two commanders to do the same with their engines. He would follow in short order. There was but one matter to attend to first.
‘Ancient,’ said Chronus over the vox. ‘We are falling back.’
‘Then go with Guilliman, Antaro,’ Agrippen replied, not for a moment breaking his destructive rhythm. ‘I shall hold the line here.’