by Guy Haley
A part of the plain beyond the wall was visible for a time as the conscripts descended. The ground immediately at the foot of the main defences was obscured by the fortification; further out Katsuhiro saw trenchworks and ramparts. Detail of the plain was lost to the haze of the edge of the aegis, though the violent light of shells hitting the ground flashed through, and he had a hint of a horizon foreshortened by the drop of the Katabatic Slopes to the south and east.
All over the Palace weapons fired skywards. Plasma, shell, laser and rockets roared towards the Warmaster’s fleet. The counter-barrage was so loud that no voice could be heard, and their guiding official was forced to resort to hand signals, or shouted orders directly into the ear of the first man in the group, who passed them back up in a game of whispers. By the time the words reached Katsuhiro, halfway along the line of three hundred, they had lost all sense.
In some confusion the conscripts descended long staircases, exposed all the time to the wind and the roar of the guns, coming eventually to ground level shaken, frozen and half-deaf. The journey was long and nerve wracking, and Katsuhiro relished the relative quiet of the canyon street between the wall and the soaring Palace structures behind. It was but a brief respite. The group was rearranged, orders being more easily given there, and then led straight to a small postern guarded by legionaries in green. Few in the group had ever seen a Space Marine, and they stared at the giants as they shuffled past them. The legionaries ignored the conscripts as they passed between them through the gate.
A tunnel led steeply downwards, going through seven adamantium portals before taking a sharp dog-leg covered by emplaced heavy bolters. Then through more doors which groaned violently and flashed red lights at them when they approached, before the final portal opened onto the ground beyond the wall.
Again the roar of the guns battered the senses, and their guide led them wordlessly through a maze of trenches. They crossed paths with other groups, who emerged unexpectedly from the tangle of defensive ways before being led off to their own fates.
They passed a tall wall of prefabricated sections, going out through a triple gate guarded by a switchback approach. Many groups were using this way, and Katsuhiro’s unit were forced to wait their turn in a side trench, where they jumped and moaned at every explosion spreading over the aegis overhead, and endured the impatient shoves of uniformed soldiers eager to get by.
A second, lower wall came soon after the first. It stood atop a recently piled slope of rubble that led down without the interruption of trenches to a final wall a few hundred metres further out. Of the three main lines, the last was the lowest, the defensive lip being only two metres above ground level, and the rampart running behind easily clambered onto from the back. They headed for this wall, then after reaching it turned north towards the Helios Gate.
By then it was snowing. Gentle at first, the weather gathered itself into a freezing storm that chilled them all and curtailed what visibility there was.
Cold and tired, the conscripts were gathered into a square among several dozen others collected at the outermost line, and introduced to their leader.
The commanding officer was an exhausted-looking man. There was nothing unexpected about that. Katsuhiro hadn’t seen a fresh face for weeks, but their new leader excelled all others in weariness, pushing past to the unexplored realms of misery beyond. His skin looked to be ordinarily a light brown, but it had gone a haggard yellow-grey, like a blanket left too long outdoors. His black hair was plastered miserably to his forehead. His lips and nail beds were unhealthily pale. He gave the impression of being a man who had seen everything, and liked very little of it.
The pad of flimsies in his hand particularly displeased him. He scanned again the cheap bioplastek films, already disintegrating in the snow melting off his skin, then looked down with pouched eyes at the three hundred conscripts failing to hold a parade ground formation behind the revetment. He did not look impressed.
Katsuhiro was right at the front of the group, close enough to hear the officer’s voice over the roaring of the attack. They were now some distance from the walls and the violence of the Palace guns, while the aegis stole a good amount of the noise of the enemy’s bombardment along with its destructive power.
‘Is this it?’ said the man miserably. ‘No officers? It’s just me?’
‘Sign here and here,’ said the official who had brought the group down from the Palace.
‘Ghosts of Old Earth, we’re all going to die.’ The officer made a depressed sound and scribbled at the form. Part of it came away on the nib of his autoquill.
‘They’re all yours now.’ The official rolled up the disintegrating plastek and shoved it inside his coat. ‘For Unity and the Imperium.’ He made a full aquila over his heart before marching off down the rampart, where he disappeared into the snow. The officer pulled a face and fetched a vox-horn from his belt. Feedback squealed when he activated it.
‘Right, you lot,’ yelled their new officer over the thunder of the bombs and the moan of the wind. ‘My name is Adinahav Jainan. I’m…’ He held up the flimsies again. ‘I’m an acting captain, lucky me. That makes me your commander. Do what I say, or you’ll get shot.’ He made an expression that could equally have been a scowl or a smile. He didn’t have enough enthusiasm to form either properly. ‘That is, I’m sorry to inform you, the full extent of military training that is currently available under the circumstances. You are all now members of the Kushtun Naganda, one of the Old Hundred, from Ind, not that you’re worthy of the honour, and not that it matters any more anyway.’ Pent-up emotions forced themselves up through his world-weary exterior, where they bubbled, briefly visible, on his face before draining away into a general lassitude. ‘There was a time when that meant something. But at least you will all have the satisfaction of dying under a famous flag. Our role,’ he said, raising his voice over a sudden upsurge in the bombardment’s volume, ‘is to reinforce the third line outworks,’ he kicked the wall, ‘near Bastion Sixteen.’ He pointed down the line, where there was nothing visible though the whirling snow. ‘You will form reserves to the very first line of defence! More of that honour when we get there. Yes, I’m afraid that does mean more walking. No, I don’t have anything to shelter you from the weather. The sooner we get there, the sooner you can get warm. We go at the pace of the slowest. Feel free to beat a bit of speed into them. But we do have a little bit of time.’ He looked upwards. ‘The enemy won’t be coming today.’
Katsuhiro gave a small sigh of relief.
‘Don’t get too excited,’ said the thin man Katsuhiro had seen cleaning his nails with a knife in the city. He leaned in from behind and whispered into Katsuhiro’s ear. ‘Reservers aren’t for keeping back. They’re for doing all the scutwork, and if the enemy don’t come today, they’ll come tomorrow, or the day after.’ His voice smiled, but his words were meant to hurt.
‘Shut up!’ Katsuhiro snapped behind him. ‘There’s no need to make it worse.’
‘Got some teeth after all, eh?’ said Doromek, who was a file over from Katsuhiro.
‘Leave me alone!’ Katsuhiro said.
‘Hey! Hey, you!’ Jainan’s amplified voice thumped into Katsuhiro’s ears. ‘Yeah, that’s right. You. Just so we’re all reading from the same manual here, talking when I’m talking is definitely not allowed.’ He patted the laspistol at his hip meaningfully. ‘Got it?’
Katsuhiro nodded.
Acting Captain Jainan sighed. ‘Right then, this way.’ He turned off the horn and hooked it on his belt, then executed a lazy left turn. ‘Quick march.’ He stopped and held out his arms when half a dozen of the new soldiers went to the rampart to get out of the mud.
‘Nope,’ he said. ‘I stay up here on this relatively dry prefabricated wall. The rest of you have to trudge through the snow.’ He straightened his snow-damp uniform. ‘There has to be some privilege of rank.’
Their march north allowed Katsuhiro a little time to take in his new surroundings. The walls
proper soared to improbable heights to his left. Though the spires of the Palace were far higher, from his position the walls hid nearly everything behind them, so huge were they. The outworks were tiny in comparison. Being stationed in the maze of walls and trenches that fronted the main fortifications was alarming. His fears increased as the thousands of conscripted men and women continued to pour into the complex, splitting and splitting again as they were directed down differing trench ways already ankle-deep in snow. His dismay continued to rise, while never hitting the peak he expected. There seemed to be no end to how much fear he could feel. It surprised him he was able to walk, or talk, or do anything, but he did, his terrified mind operating his limbs through a buzzing fog of terror. He felt numb inside and out. The bombardment pounded endlessly down. Millions of tonnes of ordnance exploded upon the Palace’s shields every minute, their released energies stolen by the voids’ displacement technology. The aegis must have been thinner out past the walls, not that Katsuhiro knew the first thing about military shielding, because periodically a shell the size of a heavy hauler would pass through and impact the ground beyond the last rampart, sending up a plume of rock splinters dozens of metres high, and shaking the soldiers on their feet.
‘This isn’t so good, is it?’ said the thin man conversationally. ‘I just love being cannon fodder. Isn’t that right, darling?’ he shouted at the woman from the station, who was a few ranks ahead. She scowled at him.
‘I wouldn’t call her darling, if I were you,’ said Doromek.
‘Why? She’s a looker, I could do with a taste of that.’
‘I know her kind, my friend. She’ll kill you.’
The thin man snorted.
‘I mean it,’ said Doromek.
‘Will you shut up?’ said Katsuhiro, addressing both the thin man and Doromek. He was by now more miserable than he had ever been. Outside the city was even colder than inside. His hands were unfeeling claws clamped upon his gun. His teeth chattered. The snow had turned black with ash, and wind chilled the exposed side of his face so that it burned. The air was thin and oxygen-poor away from the Palace’s atmospheric cycling system. Some provision had been made for this; every half-mile or so giant snakes of soft tubing emerged from the ground and whooshed thicker, warmer air over the outworks. The conscripts noticed these quickly, and ran between them, desperate for the heat and nourishing airflow, though the distances between caused them to flag, and their provision was meagre overall.
While approaching the fourth of these outflows, the thin man spoke again.
‘This snow, you know it’s toxic, right?’ He jogged alongside. Katsuhiro was too breathless to tell him to be quiet. The man took his silence as interest. ‘Void shields will stop fast things, or big things, and especially big, fast things, but small stuff like this, or slow stuff like an infantryman or a tank, it can’t stop that. Rain or snow’ll fall right through it. This is black snow. The Palace is covered in layered void shields so deep it’ll take the enemy months to pound their way through. Everywhere else on Terra? Not so well provided. So what’s falling on us is the vaporised remains of the rest of the world. It’s full of rad and poison. Kill us all dead eventually, not that we’ll last that long.’
‘I think he said shut up, you. I’m asking the same,’ said Doromek to the man, causing him to back off a bit.
‘What’s he mean?’ Katsuhiro asked Doromek.
‘It’s a defensive layer thing,’ said Doromek. Near the pipes the snow melted, and they splashed through freezing water running over the ground. He appeared bothered far less by the cold and the thin air than just about everyone else. ‘They don’t need to keep us safe. We’re the first line of defence.’
‘First line?’
An aircraft screamed overhead, making them all flinch and more than a few throw themselves into the muddy snow. A soft explosion thumped bare metres over their heads, prompting a lot more of the conscripts to scream and fling themselves down, Katsuhiro included.
‘Get up! Get up!’ shouted Jainan. ‘It’s just a bloody leaflet drop. Get up!’ He jumped down from the wall, and hauled weeping conscripts to their feet. Those who were too tightly curled he kicked until they stood. ‘Come on! Come on! Get up!’
Katsuhiro unclamped his hands from his head. A white sheet of paper floated face down in a puddle in front of him. He reached out and picked it up.
‘Get up! Get up! Everyone, come on!’ Jainan glowered after the aircraft. ‘Bloody propaganda. Does nobody any good!’
On the other side of the paper was a poorly printed image of a warrior. A Space Marine, Katsuhiro thought at first, but closer inspection revealed it was in fact a primarch. A large ‘XIII’ was printed beneath him.
Lord Guilliman is coming, it read. Stand firm and survive.
‘Lot of use, that,’ Doromek said. He reached down. Katsuhiro clasped his arm. ‘If he gets here at all, we’ll all be dead.’
‘That’s right.’ The thin man nodded sagely as Doromek pulled Katsuhiro to his feet. ‘First line of defence. They’ll keep the Legions back behind the main walls for the real fighting.’
‘Then what are we for?’ asked Katsuhiro, dreading the answer.
Doromek laughed ruefully. ‘We’re here to die, my boy. Soak up bullets. Cannon fodder, as our friend…’
‘Runnecan,’ the thin man said.
‘As Runnecan says.’ Doromek smiled sympathetically, attempted to scrape the mud off Katsuhiro, shrugged at the amount and gave up. ‘The way this battle will play out is so – you see the batteries there, there and there?’ Doromek pointed out the giant guns mounted upon the wall’s towers. Flashes and rods of coherent light marked out the presence of thousands more.
‘I can’t really miss them,’ said Katsuhiro.
‘Now you’re getting it,’ said Doromek, and slapped him on the shoulder. ‘There are lots more deeper within. Lord Dorn cut a thousand towers flat to take guns, guns and more guns. They stud every high structure, clustering most densely around the space ports, gates and, especially, especially, the Lion’s Gate.’
‘Yes?’ said Katsuhiro tersely. They began to trudge through the mud again.
‘Well, yes, obviously. My point is, no real attack can come down until those guns are taken out. If I were the Warmaster,’ he said – Doromek’s arrogance was astounding – ‘then I would attempt to clear an area of crossfire, and begin to land my first forces. With men on the ground, the walls will be threatened. All this out here,’ he swept his hand about, ‘will come under intense attack. Some guns will fall, some guns will be reoriented to target the ground. The weight of fire will decrease. That will enable more ships to come down, then more, until the surface of Terra is crawling with the enemy, and the guns will cease to speak at all. But first, he has to get through that.’ Doromek pointed upwards. ‘The Palace aegis. It’ll last, but not forever. As soon as that starts to fail, then we’ll see the real bombing start, and after that, the proper invasion.’
‘So we’re safe. For now?’ Katsuhiro sneezed. Feeling in his toes and fingers was a fond memory.
‘If by “now” you mean for the next few hours, then yes we are, safe as the Emperor Himself. Not that He’s particularly safe at the moment.’
‘We’re all going to die!’ tittered the thin man. Several of the conscripts within earshot were rigid with fear.
‘You! Talkative man.’ Jainan strode out of the rain. He alone out of the unit wore a rain cape, but it was thin and he was as cold and wretched as the rest of them.
‘Yes, sir?’ Doromek gave a coprophage’s smile. The thin man grinned.
‘I heard you, giving all these wretches the benefit of your wisdom. Are you a military man?’ snapped Jainan. ‘Don’t lie to me. I can check. Save us the time and tell me now.’
‘I was once,’ admitted Doromek.
‘And you are again,’ Jainan said. ‘Sir.’
‘Indeed. Sir.’
‘How many years, and what regiment?’
Doromek rubbed at his h
ead. ‘Atlantean Rangers. Fifteen years.’
‘Role?’
‘Sniper.’
‘Good one?’
Doromek waggled his free hand. ‘So they say.’
‘Then how come you weren’t called up in the early drafts?’ Jainan’s eyes narrowed.
Doromek shrugged. ‘Lucky, I guess.’
‘Hiding you mean. Well your luck’s run out. You’re my new lieutenant. Congratulations.’ He stalked off back into the storm, hollering at the group to get a move on. ‘And stop diving into the ground at the sight of every aircraft – they are all ours!’
‘An officer? Me?’ shouted Doromek.
‘Don’t get excited. Acting officer!’ Jainan called back over his shoulder.
Doromek grinned at Katsuhiro. ‘That makes you my first sergeant.’
They staggered on for another few hundred metres. A dark shape loomed out of the snow to meet them. Katsuhiro peered fruitlessly into the storm. The shape grew firmer with every step, until it stopped being a shape and became a great drum tower, a hundred metres tall and almost as wide across, set back some fifty metres from the outermost ramparts. Guns mounted in the walls tracked back and forth across the artificial plateau beyond the aegis. Lights shone through tiny windows in only one place, halfway up the front.
Doromek whistled. ‘I guess that’s Bastion Sixteen.’
Jainan’s vox-amplified voice cut over the rumble of the Imperial guns and the muffled thunder of the bombardment.
‘This is it. Follow me. Our section is to the south-south-west. Stay close. Don’t get lost. There are uniforms, shelter, food and water waiting for you. Alternatively, you can blunder off into this blizzard and either freeze to death or be executed by the Marshals Militaris. I hear they are itching to shoot something. Your choice.’