Interrogator Sibiya sat next to Olantor, consulting a data-slate that projected rippling lines of text onto her pinched features. Occasionally she would speak into a vox-bead attached to the collar of her glossy black power armour.
Olantor had never seen a woman clad in battle plate, but Sibiya wore the armour like a natural. He knew she had come to the Indomitable with a force of Datian Saurians, a fierce regiment that had fought with honour alongside the Ultramarines during the Zeist campaign. Sibiya had made veiled mention of other forces at her disposal, but had been vague concerning the details.
Tolling bells sounded from the cloisters along the length of the bastion precinct as though calling the faithful to prayer. Flashing lumen globes set in the angled walls pulsed in time with his heart, reflecting from the sealed armaglass of the skiff’s canopy.
Information scrolled across Olantor’s visor, troop readiness levels, defensive topography overlaid with damage reports and schematics of the devastated southern pier. He processed this information as the voice of Sergeant Decimus apprised him of the tactical situation through the vox-bead in his ear.
‘They hit us hard, whoever they are, and they knew what they were doing. We’ll be lucky to hold the south,’ said Decimus, ever the pessimist. ‘The far end of Via Rex has been obliterated and the lance batteries are gone, as well as many of the surrounding launch bays.’
‘How many can we count on?’ asked Olantor. ‘We need fighters in the air.’
‘Impossible to tell. Some launch bays are destroyed and some are simply not responding.’
‘Which ones?’ said Olantor, fearing he already knew the answer.
‘The ones on the south-eastern quadrant,’ confirmed Decimus. ‘The ones spared the worst of the barrages.’
‘And where damn near fifty of those boarding torpedoes were headed.’
‘Exactly,’ said Decimus. ‘Bomber hangars and fighter wings, at least two hundred aircraft. The Master of Skies is working up a manifest on how many the enemy may have seized.’
‘Come on, Decimus, give me some good news. It can’t all be bad.’
‘Well, the Gauntlet Bastions are manned and ready,’ said Decimus. ‘Even if they come at us now, they’ll find a warm welcome awaiting them.’
‘Our warriors are already in place,’ said Olantor, a statement not a question.
‘Naturally. I’ve spread Ultramarines combat squads through the Defence Auxilia to stiffen their backs, and Chaplain Sabatina’s filling their hearts with promises of glory.’
‘Very good, Decimus,’ said Olantor. ‘Interrogator Sibiya and I are approaching the towers just now, so we’ll be with you shortly.’
‘Hurry,’ advised Decimus. ‘There’s lots of activity in the rubble, and it looks bad.’
Olantor shut off the link to his fellow sergeant and turned to Sibiya.
‘You get all that?’
‘I did,’ said Sibiya. ‘Decimus didn’t give you any clue as to who is attacking us?’
‘Brother Decimus,’ corrected Olantor. ‘And you heard what I heard.’
Sibiya nodded and scratched her cheek.
‘I still don’t understand how they knew we’d be here,’ she said. ‘They shouldn’t have been able to predict our translation point. Damn it all, we don’t even know who they are!’
‘No, we do not, interrogator,’ said Olantor. ‘But I have an enemy to fight, that is all that matters. As soon as I lay eyes on them from the tip of the Gauntlet Bastion I will know them. And when I know them, I will know how to defeat them.’
‘It doesn’t matter to you, maybe, but it matters a great deal to me,’ snapped Sibiya, her mind racing off on a tangent. ‘The whole point of these random jumps was to confound anyone who might try to find the Indomitable. The only way they could have found us is if our jumps haven’t been random.’
‘What are you saying?’ asked Olantor, not liking the insinuation he heard in her tone.
‘That our last jump wasn’t as random as it should have been.’
‘Brother Altarion chooses the translation points.’
‘My point exactly,’ said Sibiya. ‘Perhaps his lapses in memory are not simply confined to the name of the Techmarine who attends him or the number of warp jumps he’s made.’
Olantor wanted to contradict Sibiya, but her logic was faultless. It should have been next to impossible for an enemy to find them unless Brother Altarion’s venerable mind was no longer as functional as it should be. Had he fallen into a predictable pattern?
‘How strong are the Gauntlet Bastions? Really?’ asked Sibiya, changing tack completely.
‘I’ll show you and you can decide for yourself,’ said Olantor as the skiff emerged from the electrical flashes of the Via Rex.
The gargantuan footings of two vast towers reared above the skiff, impossibly tall and casting long shadows over the lower reaches of the star fort. Red light from Aescari Exterio bathed the verticality of the landscape with a light the colour of sunset. To the skiff’s left, the Tower of Corinth was the taller of the two, its splendid arches and immense solidity the very embodiment of the men who manned its guns.
The Tower of the First was a more sombre structure, a memorial to the heroic warriors of the Veteran Company of the Ultramarines who fell defending their home world from the Great Devourer. For all its solemnity, it was as strong and immovable as its twin.
Sibiya gasped in astonishment. She had been on the Indomitable less than a month, but it still irked Olantor that she had not made the effort to tour the outer defences of the star fort. Instead, she had spent the bulk of her time ensconced within the depths of the Basilica Dominastus. The skiff passed between the two towers, coming to a halt beyond them in the midst of a heaving mass of armed men in the sky blue and gold uniforms of the Ultramarines Defence Auxilia.
Clad in armoured environment suits and all-enclosing helms, the defenders of the Indomitable were ready to meet the invaders head on. Eagle-topped banners were raised and officers passed orders over the vox as soldiers climbed to firing steps and static weapon emplacements were powered up. The docking pier’s atmosphere might have been blown out by the enemy attack, but the gravity field generators were still functional.
‘Ready?’ asked Olantor as Sibiya craned her neck to see the top of the towers.
Reluctantly, she tore her gaze from the magnificent structures and fitted her helmet, the silver faceplate worked in the form of an Imperial saint, though Olantor did not recognise which one. Sibiya nodded and he disengaged the vacuum seals of the skiff.
Together they made their way through the press of bodies towards the edge of the wall. Olantor climbed to the firing step, the soldiers bowing to him as he reached the rampart. Decimus was already there and the two warriors greeted each other with respectful formality.
Olantor turned his gaze outwards, and the sight of the Gauntlet Bastions filled him with confidence. The twin redoubts guarded the inner rings of the fortress, hundreds of feet high and studded with weapon emplacements. Each one’s walls were precisely angled to allow supporting fire from its twin to sweep over its armoured face, and concealed guns set in recessed firing chambers covered the approaches to Varro’s Gate, the golden, eagle-stamped portal that sealed the route to the Via Rex.
Sibiya’s gaze took in the vast, implacable strength of the walls as devotional banners unfurled from the high ramparts and catechisms of battle were broadcast over the vox.
‘Impressive,’ she said at last.
Olantor laughed at her understatement. ‘These walls have a strength in them that has endured for centuries and will withstand this brazen attack.’
‘Let us hope you are right,’ said Sibiya with real feeling.
Olantor nodded and looked beyond the walls to where glittering clouds of frozen oxygen and fuel obscured the farthest extent of the ruined southern pier. It was impossible to tell exactly what was going on, but flaring bursts of retros and signs of great industry boded ill.
‘We’ll give
them a fight they’ll not soon forget,’ said Decimus, and Olantor nodded, relishing this chance to prove his mettle once more.
He heard the click and whirr of lenses from Sibiya’s helm.
‘What’s that?’ she asked. ‘Some kind of standard?’
Olantor narrowed his eyes, peering through the haze of ice crystals to where the interrogator was pointing. A huge berm of stone had been thrown up at the end of the docking pier and his enhanced vision picked out the hazy outline of a dull, iron coloured banner pole wedged in the rubble.
Set in the centre of an eight-pointed star was a grinning skull-masked helm, the icon of a dread foe from the ancient days.
‘Iron Warriors,’ he hissed.
A phrase of which his tutor on Macragge had been fond flashed into his mind.
Be careful what you wish for.
THREE
Within moments of landing, the Iron Warriors were at work. Tonnes of materiel were ferried down to the fort’s surface in the opening minutes of the landing, along with thousands of warriors, slaves and specialised labourers. The ruined edges of the southern docking pier and the smashed buildings to either side were bulldozed into enormous contravallations to protect the flanks.
Unable to dig into the adamantium structure of the star fort, gargantuan earth-moving machines instead shaped the rubble into high walls of debris and statuary in jagged lines of saw-toothed ramparts. No enemy force could now threaten the main thrust of the Iron Warriors’ attack without being forced to fight over a defensive wall at least as powerful as those facing the invaders.
As the flanks were made secure, the high gun towers on the farthest end of the pier were rebuilt and strengthened. On solidly anchored iron platforms, hulking interceptor guns and flak batteries were positioned and linked to the surveyors of the ships above. The defenders would almost certainly launch bombing raids and strafing runs from the launch bays still under their control, but these guns raised an umbrella of cover over the siege works.
A rain of frozen particles drizzled over the battlefield, shimmering in the copper light of the planet below, and the first captured fighters and bombers streaked from the landing bays seized by Cadaras Grendel. The fight to secure the hangar bays had been brutal and bloody, but the outcome had never been in doubt, for the defenders were cut off and vastly outnumbered by a foe that offered no mercy and was relentless in the business of killing.
Even as the Iron Warriors’ landing was being secured, the ships of Honsou’s fleet fought in the space around the Indomitable, keeping the few remaining escorts of the Ultramarines at bay.
Enormous earthworks of pulverised rock were swiftly thrown up before the Iron Warriors’ positions, banks of heavy stone and steel that provided protection from the many guns mounted on the two colossal towers overlooking the seized pier. Pounding blasts of fire hammered the newly-established positions, but it was already too late to prevent the invaders from securing their hold on the pier.
Behind these huge redoubts, the carriers of the Iron Warriors ferried a constant stream of men and supplies to the Indomitable’s surface: great tunnelling machines, diggers, augurs – equipment at least as important as the artillery pieces, armoured vehicles and warriors who came in equal number.
The Iron Warriors had their bridgehead.
Honsou felt his soul thrill at the sight of so much martial industry. Within minutes of setting foot on the enormous star fort, he had felt his old instincts returning. Every structure became a focal point for launching an escalade, every shattered cloister and ruined thoroughfare a potential lynchpin of a defence in depth. No sooner was an avenue of attack identified than a fortified wall arose to block it.
‘I’ve been away from this for too long,’ he said, stood atop the remains of what had once been a vast lance battery. The monstrously huge barrels were twisted out of shape and looked like enormous brass tunnels laid out in a haphazard manner on the surface of a moon.
‘What did you say?’ said Cadaras Grendel, his armour bloody from the slaughter in the hangar bays.
Honsou swept his arms out to encompass the siege works taking shape around them. A dozen raids on outlying Imperial worlds too far from help had furnished Honsou with thousands of slaves to dig his trenches and raise his walls. An army of men and hundreds of machines laboured to raise defensive bulwarks and armoured redoubts.
The first parallel, a defensive wall studded with hardened bunkers, buried magazines and vacant battery pits, was almost complete, giving the Iron Warriors the perfect place to begin the first approaches to the walls.
‘This,’ he said, as dozens of chained guns crunched through the ruins under the wary supervision of the gunnery masters towards their assigned firing positions. ‘I’ve been so busy orchestrating things for a distant goal that I forgot how good it feels to take the iron to the stone once more. This is what I was made for, and it’s about time the Imperium learned why they fear the Iron Warriors.’
Grendel’s lip split in a feral grin. ‘Aye, it’ll be good to get in the dirt and blood of a trench, storm a breach and carry a wall.’
Honsou nodded, feeling a rare camaraderie with Grendel. The moment passed as he saw Ardaric Vaanes and the Newborn climbing the slope of rubble towards him. Vaanes’s armour had been bulked out with the addition of his jump pack, and the Newborn’s patchwork face was hidden by a battered iron helmet with chevrons of yellow and black. Its armour had been repainted in the colours of the Iron Warriors, as had Honsou’s and Grendel’s. Alone of the gathered warriors, only Vaanes was a warrior without visible allegiance.
‘You know what you have to do?’ asked Honsou.
‘Yes,’ confirmed Vaanes. ‘Get behind their lines and sow as much fear and confusion as we can. Cut supply lines, destroy communications and divert troops from the front lines.’
‘You think you can do it?’ said Grendel. ‘We won’t come get you if you run into trouble.’
‘I didn’t think you would,’ replied Vaanes. ‘But this is just the sort of work I trained for.’
‘What about that?’ said Grendel, jerking his thumb at the Newborn. ‘Can it cut it?’
‘It can hold its own,’ said Vaanes. ‘And we have the loxatl brood-group of Xaneant too. I think we’ll be fine.’
‘Too bad if you’re not,’ said Grendel.
‘Yes, too bad,’ snapped Vaanes, his lightning-sheathed claws sliding from his gauntlet. Ever since New Badab, Grendel and Vaanes had been at loggerheads, but that was nothing new, for Grendel was an easy man to dislike. Honsou sensed an undercurrent to Vaanes’s anger, as though his true hatred was more directed inwards than upon Grendel.
‘Go,’ said Honsou. ‘Get inside however you can and wreak havoc. I’ll see you in the basilica when the fight is done. Me and Grendel will be taking a more direct route.’
‘Through the walls?’ said Vaanes.
‘Aye,’ grinned Honsou. ‘With big guns and brute strength. It’s what I do best.’
The guns of the Iron Warriors opened fire en masse less than an hour later. A hundred artillery pieces spoke with one cataclysmic voice and a volley of high-explosive rounds slammed into the walls of the Gauntlet Bastions. The walls vanished in a firestorm of impacts, screeds of masonry and sheet steel falling like rain to the ground.
Yet the defensive engineers had done their work well, strengthening the walls with all manner of reinforcements and refinements to withstand such pounding. The guns fired again and again, gangs of slaves working in shoddy vacuum suits that leaked or provided little protection from the rigours of working in such a hostile environment. Scores of men died every hour as their suits failed or they came too near one of the daemonic artillery pieces and paid for such incaution with their lives.
Gunners of the Iron Warriors plotted optimal fire patterns and orchestrated simultaneous firings to increase the force of their barrages tenfold. Shells impacted within seconds of one another, tearing cracks wider and deepening craters in the walls with every earth-shaking deton
ation.
Under the cover of each barrage, a thousand slave labourers worked in the shadow of the vast bulldozers, pushing angled walls of rock and debris forward from the opening parallel to form a pair of sheltered walkways that inched towards the mighty bastions. Honsou oversaw the approach to the left bastion, Grendel the right, and a keen sense of rivalry drove each approach forward as much as the picks, shovels and back-breaking labour of the slaves.
Counterbattery fire hammered these walled approaches, but as each Imperial battery unmasked to fire, Adept Cycerin identified its position and passed its precise coordinates to the Iron Warriors gunners. Ruthless bracketing fire hammered the battery, destroying it before it could retreat beneath its armoured hoardings.
In their eagerness to push forwards, some of the bulldozers exposed themselves to the two towers behind the bastions and were obliterated by deadly accurate return fire. Against these guns, the Iron Warriors had no defence save hunkering down behind their walls or in hardened bunkers.
Slaves and labourers were forced to press themselves into whatever cracks in the stonework they could find and many were buried beneath tonnes of rubble as the day’s work was undone by the Imperial guns. Still, no matter how much damage the counter battery fire inflicted, it could not keep up with the relentless, implacable pace set by the Iron Warriors.
Imperial bombers launched attack after attack on the siegeworks, but aircraft from the captured launch bays kept the majority of them at bay. Even those that penetrated the screens of fighters were soon brought down by the interceptor guns under Adept Cycerin’s control. The corrupted Magos unleashed a scrapcode infection into the star fort’s outlying systems, a burbling corruption that caused system failures and power blackouts throughout the mighty fortress as it replicated and worked towards the central logic engines of the Basilica Dominastus.
Day by day, the approaching ramparts of stone crept closer to the walls, zigzagging towards the tips of the bastions so that no matter how cunningly the defenders sited their guns, they could not enfilade the approaching troops.
Iron Warriors - The Omnibus Page 47