by Steve Lyons
As a young man, he had thought he would die on the battlefield. Of late, he had begun to anticipate a more peaceful passing, at a ripe old age in his bed. It had never crossed his mind that, in the end, he would be gunned down by his own men. He could almost have laughed at the ignominy of his fate.
‘Let your soul be at rest now,’ said the quartermaster, ‘and know that the Emperor is pleased with your sacrifice. Your life was worthwhile.’
Then he passed a gloved hand over the commissar’s eyelids, and closed them.
The last thing Costellin felt before he surrendered to the darkness was the quartermaster easing his chainsword out from under his hand.
Chapter Twenty-Four
There had been no sign of necron scouts on the way into the city, no spy craft glimpsed overhead. Still, the necrons were prepared and waiting for their attackers, arrayed before their night-black tomb, and their numbers had grown again as the Death Korps’ generals had expected they would.
What the generals had not anticipated was that the necron army would have grown to outnumber their own, at least this regiment of it. When he saw the odds against them, a PDF officer let slip with a curse over an open vox-channel.
The necrons concentrated their initial fire upon the remaining Gorgons. Gauss blasts scythed through armour plating, heavy stubbers spitting back while they could. The Gorgons endured long enough to disgorge their passengers, who advanced with hellguns blazing. As before, ghouls burrowed into the heart of the Death Korps’ ranks, and as before the Death Korps was ready for them. This time, however, the melta-wielding grenadiers were the primary targets of the ghouls’ blade-claws, three of them flensed to death before a full minute had passed.
Gunthar followed all this over the vox-net, struggling to sift through overlapping, frenetic reports to build a picture of the battlefield in his head. His Centaur was fitted with a periscope in the co-driver’s side, but so far this had been of little use, he was too far from the action. He could see the vast face of the necron pyramid, but he couldn’t work out where the gateway into it might be.
His gunner, an on-loan Krieg Guardsman, had a better overview from his turret, and his updates were invaluable. To Gunthar’s right, a civilian farmer, more used to handling tractors than tanks, held the steering wheel in a white-knuckled grip. His four squad mates – the remaining five had been packed into another vehicle – were almost as tense. They couldn’t take their eyes off their sergeant, off the deadly payload that was strapped to his chest.
They didn’t look like much, the mining charges: four batons, each wrapped in yellow and black tape stamped with warnings and skull symbols, but Gunthar remembered the care he had been mandated to take when arranging transport for them in his overseer’s role. He had certainly slept more soundly for the fact that the charges were conveyed in unmarked trucks, along lower-level skyways, a long way from his bed.
He had sanctioned their use just once, to blast through stubborn bedrock in a mine in which yields had been down for almost a year. To this day, those tunnels could not be entered without a rad-suit, other than by the expendable servitors.
No officers had accompanied him to Thelonius City to collect the charges from a storage depot. A grizzled ex-miner had lifted the lid from a lead-lined crate, and at his first sight of its contents, Gunthar had taken an involuntary – and entirely futile – step away from them. Since the charges had been attached to him, he had been afraid to walk, to sit down, to make any movement at all lest he set them off.
He ordered his driver to edge forward. Now that the ghouls had been deployed, their positions known, it was probably safe to do so. The Krieg gunner reported necrons skimming towards them, and for a moment Gunthar thought his heart would stop, but then they were intercepted by a squad of death riders, held at bay.
The gunner had asked for permission, more than once, to cut loose with his stubber. It was imperative, however, that the Centaur drew no attention to itself. It was up to the rest of the regiment to draw the necrons away from it, and away from that gateway. Until they could do so, Gunthar could only sit and watch, helpless.
He squinted through the periscope again, saw a blur of ghosts dropping upon a grenadier platoon, an explosion of hellguns greeting them, cutting through some of them. He heard the familiar voice of Colonel 186, promising reinforcements. It seemed that the 42nd and 103rd regiments had met with only token resistance to the north and south of the tomb, so the bulk of their forces were en route. The 81st regiment to the east, almost three kilometres away, were taking a different tack, sending forth their cannons to break through the pyramid’s back wall.
Gunthar relayed this news to his men, who lacked the benefit of comm-beads with which to have heard it. One middle-aged rookie opined that the Death Korps could switch to defensive tactics now, keep the necrons occupied until their fellow regiments arrived, at which point it would all be over. Gunthar set him straight. The rookie hadn’t seen the necrons up close, hadn’t seen that, against their armour-piercing gauss weaponry, the only possible defence was a fierce offence.
They waited.
The reinforcements were here, but they hadn’t turned the tables as completely as Gunthar had prayed they might. Both regiments had arrived in unison, capturing the besieged necrons in a pincer movement, taking out scores of them before they could begin to defend themselves, and yet…
And yet, it seemed to Gunthar, watching through his periscope, that there were as many necrons between him and his goal as there had been from the start.
He had to get to that tomb. The source of the necrons’ power was held in there. Once the tomb was destroyed they would be unable to regenerate themselves, unable to blink out of a difficult spot to appear elsewhere. At any rate, that was the theory.
The 42nd regiment was going in hard against them, the 103rd falling back, luring the necrons south. Gunthar didn’t need the colonel’s voice in his ear to tell him it was time to move forward again, and to circle around to the north.
His driver hit the brakes as they were buffeted by an explosion, vox-traffic confirming that a Centaur had been hit only twenty metres from them. Gunthar swallowed nervously and agreed they should stay put for the present.
Through his periscope, the tomb appeared tantalisingly close, but the figures fighting in front of it provided a more realistic sense of scale and distance, of how far Gunthar still had to go. From the turret, the gunner announced that he could now see the gateway, and as Gunthar swung his scope in the indicated direction, he could see it too, see the green light blazing from it. There were still too many necrons in the way, however, far too many, so they waited.
One more surge forward, another interminable wait, then Gunthar made up his mind.
A phalanx of necrons had just vanished, and reports suggested they had gone to the pyramid’s far side to repel the invaders there. The way ahead was as clear right now as it would likely ever be, and this close to the enemy guns a Centaur was as vulnerable as any foot soldier. His squad, therefore, had more chance of survival as ten small targets rather than riding in two larger ones. They could also arrange themselves, on foot, so that their sergeant, their human bomb, was the hardest of those ten targets to hit. So Gunthar gave the order to disembark, and relayed this through his comm-bead to the senior trooper in the second Centaur.
The battlefield was as crowded, as chaotic, as his last one had been. Hadn’t he been told that this battle would be easier? He suppressed an echo of the feelings he had had back then, the fear, the uncertainty. They were unworthy of him. Gunthar was an experienced soldier now, a leader no less, and everyone was counting on him. Still, he couldn’t help but feel exposed and vulnerable, even more so than he had the first time. The mining charges made him vulnerable.
The Centaur rumbled away, its gunner making up for lost time. Gunthar crouched behind a stout Medusa chassis as the rest of his squad formed up around him. He could see the gateway’s green light, diffused by a mortar smoke haze, and there were soldier
s fighting in that smoke but, to his horror, Gunthar couldn’t tell which were necrons and which Death Korps.
He had to get closer still. He motioned to his men – he had no hope of making his voice heard – and they tucked themselves in as best they could behind an advancing platoon, then raced for the shelter of a rubble heap. They were in the open for no more than a second, long enough for a ghost to pick off one luckless trooper. As it opened his throat with its blades, a second trooper faltered in his tracks, almost turned back, until Gunthar grabbed his arm and hauled him away from there. There was nothing he could have done, nothing any of them could have done. Only three of them were even armed, the colonel’s view being that lasguns were still scarce and that the moment Gunthar’s squad needed them was the moment they were dead anyway.
He peered around the rubble, saw that green glow closer than he had imagined it would be and the way clear to it. He almost gave the order, almost started forward, then smoke tendrils parted to uncover the shape of a necron tank, the tomb in miniature with that same dreadful green light streaming from its hatchway.
Its guns lashed out, and as Gunthar dropped he was pelted by debris and his cover reduced to half its height. He dared raise his head, after a minute, to find the tank floating away from him. A squad of Krieg Guardsmen rushed it, and although most were disintegrated by its green energy whips, two leapt for its hatchway and dragged themselves through. A moment later, the tank combusted, blown apart, if Gunthar was any judge, by a concentration of krak grenades in its belly. The Guardsmen, of course, did not return, but their deaths had counted. They had done what Gunthar was struggling to do, granted on a smaller scale, but they had made it look easy.
He could see the gateway again and he knew that, the longer he waited to make his run for it, the more of his comrades would give their lives, but it was impossible to judge his moment, to predict the ebbs and flows of the combat, and he couldn’t afford to get this wrong. With every second that passed, he became more anxious, more fearful that he might have missed his chance already.
The decision was made for him.
He didn’t know where the colonel was, but presumably he had found himself a good vantage point or was in contact with somebody who had, because his voice was in Gunthar’s ear again, screaming at him to move. He moved.
He raced headlong into that chaos, and he kept his eyes fixed on the gateway and swore he wouldn’t stop for anything. He didn’t stop when the ground exploded a metre to his right, taking out two of his bodyguards and showering him with rock fragments. He didn’t stop when a third trooper lost his nerve and fell to his knees, his hands raised in surrender for a second before his head exploded, the victim of fire – from which side Gunthar didn’t have time to tell.
He didn’t stop as the first necrons saw his plan and turned their guns upon him. The Death Korps closed ranks, took the brunt of the gauss beams, and Gunthar was more than halfway to his goal now. The green light was all he could see, the Krieg colonel’s voice all he could hear, urging him to run faster, ever faster.
‘Once you’re inside that pyramid,’ his own colonel, Braun, had briefed him, ‘you are to waste no time. Remember, we don’t know what’s in there, and one gauss blast could disintegrate you and the charges you carry without setting them off. That said…’ He had averted his eyes from Gunthar, awkwardly. ‘That said, if you do see a chance… The deeper in you can get, the more damage you’ll do when… and the more walls you can put between you and… well, the more protection we’ll have, from the blast I mean and from the fallout.’
There was something new in the gateway’s green light. A thousand dark spots, bubbling to the surface. Gunthar blamed the smoke at first, then his eyes.
Then a swarm of metal insects was belched out from the gateway to engulf him.
They alighted upon him, scratching, biting. Gunthar tried to plough on through them, but the combined mass of their small bodies repulsed him. One of his bodyguards was already down. An insect was crawling on the mining charges, and he brushed it away frantically. The colonel’s voice sounded from somewhere, distant and tinny, drowned out by the rustle of the swarm. They had dislodged Gunthar’s comm-bead from his ear, so he didn’t know if his orders were to advance or retreat.
The latter seemed to be the only practical option.
Casting about, he saw another rock pile and gesticulated wildly towards it although he didn’t know if his remaining squad mates could see him. He ran, leapt, and as his feet left the ground he was lifted from behind by a shockwave, carried further than he had intended to go. He just had time to wrap his arms about himself, protecting the mining charges, before he landed on his stomach.
He recovered his breath, looked up. The insect swarm had gone. No more than a handful of aimless drones remained, the rest incinerated by a well-placed mortar blast. Well-placed, but insanely risky. Two of the four charges had become dislodged, were hanging from Gunthar’s bruised body. It was a miracle they were intact.
Three of his bodyguards had stayed alive, stayed with him. Their faces were cut, weeping blood. The gateway was less than two hundred metres away, but the necrons were strafing the area in front of it, keeping them pinned down. The Krieg soldiers were fighting to suppress their enemies’ fire, to block it where it couldn’t be suppressed, to give Gunthar a second chance, so he waited.
The light in the gateway flared again, and this time it was a veritable legion of foot soldiers that was disgorged. Gunthar watched in horror as the air was filled with green lightning, and a platoon of Krieg Guardsmen harvested like so many cornstalks. A moment ago, it had seemed like his comrades were making headway. Now, their front line had collapsed, and the necrons were closing on Gunthar’s own position.
He should have fallen back, but he couldn’t bear the thought of losing what ground he had gained. He had reinserted his comm-bead, but the Krieg colonel had nothing to say to him. Even now, Gunthar was waiting, watching for his chance, for an opening no matter how small. Then a trooper tugged at his sleeve, pointed with a trembling finger, and he looked at the gateway.
Another necron had appeared there, more substantial than the others, taller than the tallest of them by a head, wearing a tattered blue cloak, wielding an arcane staff. Gunthar had not seen its like before. He had heard but not seen the giant hololithic images that had hovered above Hieronymous City two months ago. He had heard enough descriptions, though, to recognise the image made incarnate, to know he was crouching less than two hundred metres from his enemies’ leader.
The necron lord flung its skeletal hands skyward, and Gunthar saw that cradled in its left palm was a large, black orb. Something flashed green in the depths of that orb, and he could taste metal, feel the hairs on his neck standing to attention. His flesh was tingling, and the air felt pregnant as if a great storm was coming.
And the necrons were rising – in their scores, in their hundreds, even those that had lain dead and blasted apart for minutes, and those felled by melta fire. Necrons weren’t supposed to recover from melta fire… were they?
Something shifted, slithering beneath Gunthar’s hands, and he recoiled as a stream of molten metal flowed around him, meeting other streams, coalescing into the form of a necron ghost, which immediately took flight. It was too much for one trooper, who ran screaming, but his cowardice proved a boon of sorts: he offered the creature a tempting target, and it swooped after him without seeing his huddled squad mates, three of them remaining now where there had been ten.
Revenant ghouls crawled out from beneath a Medusa and set about it with their claws. It ought to have been impossible but, where they struck, armour plating rippled and distorted, and fell apart. Gunthar could hardly process what he was seeing. This wasn’t how it was meant to be. The necrons were meant to be depleted, denied the resources of the city’s generatorums, in hiding. Instead, they were fighting back with new and more lethal weapons, and their numbers were growing still; there were as many of them on the battlefield now – no, more
– than there had been at the start of this fight.
The tomb was well and truly guarded, and Gunthar’s comrades were on the back foot, too busy defending themselves to even think about changing that situation. The necron lord raised its staff, and three great green blasts erupted from its prongs, finding and destroying three Krieg death riders. Flanking their lord in the gateway, a pair of mechanical spiders squatted, waiting, and Gunthar knew then, before the colonel’s voice confirmed it to him, that their cause was a lost one.
All the same, when the order to withdraw came, he railed inwardly against it. He had been so close. He even wondered, where had the Emperor been when He was needed, though he was immediately ashamed of that thought, and he asked himself: What if I just did it, blew the charges now? I might still damage the tomb, and more importantly I could kill the necron lord, and if I took the rest of my comrades with me, well, wouldn’t they understand? Wouldn’t they consider that a worthwhile sacrifice?
He almost did it. His hand was on the detonator. Then, he thought maybe he should vox the colonel first, request sanction for his plan, and then he knew what the colonel would say. He would point out that half the necrons, their leader most likely included, would take the atomic blast and stand up again, while the soldiers of the Death Korps would die and remain dead. It wasn’t worth the price.
There was nothing Gunthar could do.
The process of disengagement was as difficult and costly as might have been expected. The grenadiers exhausted their melta guns laying down covering fire for retreating Guardsmen. The necrons still pressed them hard, although Gunthar noticed that their parting shots were mostly aimed at ordnance and vehicles, reducing their enemies’ capacity to mount another attack like this one.
He slipped away when he judged it safest to do so, his remaining bodyguards falling into step behind him. Their mission might have been aborted, but the charges at Gunthar’s chest still had to be protected. Both troopers died providing that protection, shot in their backs, and it was a weary, desolate and solitary Gunthar who stumbled out of the range of the necron guns at last to join the departing column of soldiers.