by Guy Haley
A ship exploded hundreds of metres in the air showering burning bodies and fuel over the armies beneath.
Everywhere he looked, there was only death, death and more death.
The ship rocked again. The defenders on the walls had detected life within.
Shouts came from the corridors outside the hall. The regiment’s last officers entered, shock goads in their hands. Mercilessly, they laid about the warriors still alive.
‘Up! Up! Up!’ they yelled.
Hanis needed no encouragement. He looked around for a weapon and, amazingly, saw his own gun with the octed carved into the stock looking up at him. He smiled at it as if it were an old friend.
He stumbled on Fendo’s corpse as the men were rounded up and bullied into ranks facing the door. Their colonel led them from the front again, like he had on 63-10, when the regiment won its colours from Horus himself. Looking on the Palace filled Hanis with a sense of rightness. All his life had led to this moment.
The colonel had no inspiring words. He did not need them.
‘For the Warmaster!’ he said.
‘For the Warmaster!’ the Thernians responded.
Whistles blew, and the Thernians commenced their last charge.
Herdship, Katabatic Plains airspace, 25th of Secundus
Azmedi no longer knew words.
Gas flooded the transport hold as the herdship came down. It smelled bitter, but by then he was past caring, and with its inhalation the last of his reason fled. The Apostle’s voice never stopped as they fell through the air towards the ground, though his words meant nothing to Azmedi now ’slaught filled his lungs. The ship slammed down hard, staggering the passengers, then ramps blew from their mountings, the explosives that tore them free slaying a score of the beastkin too close to the door.
They needed no encouragement to charge. Azmedi understood nothing. His thoughts were a single sheet of red. With the rest of his kin, he hurled himself from the ship, falling five metres to the ground. He stumbled, but did not fall, and rushed away into the storm of fire and destruction. From half a dozen ramps other holds emptied, and a horde of beasts ran out.
The pounding of the guns could not frighten him, only quicken the racing of his heart. His feet were arranged like a beast’s, with powerful haunches and elongated feet with the ankle held high off the floor, so that he ran on the single toe of his hoof. Such physiognomy gave the beastkin great speed, and they outpaced the pure men and the mutants pouring from their own landing craft. Azmedi ran with the wind, his mane flowing behind him, his swollen tongue lolling from foam-flecked jaws. There was a glow ahead that writhed and shifted. He ran full pelt into it, felt it try to rip him in two, but he forced his way through and out of it, and emerged on the inside of the Palace aegis.
Ahead was the third defence line, prefabricated sections half buried in crushed rock. Sheltered by their defences, a thousand men waited, lasguns resting on the lip, ready to open fire.
At three hundred metres they let fly. Beastkin to the right and left of Azmedi fell bleating, tumbling madly such was their speed, before they came to a broken rest dead on Terra’s soil. Azmedi roared, his eyes rolling. Racing through the hedge of las light towards the line he howled out his pain and his hatred. Men had denied his humanity. Men had trodden him down. Now it was his turn.
A burning shaft of light branded his shoulder, filling his flared nostrils with the smell of singed hair and his own roasted flesh. He barely felt it, but ran on, gathering himself as he approached to jump. His abhuman legs bunched to hurl him over the rampart in a leap no standard human could match. A dozen more of his kind were behind him.
He came down atop a terrified man. In his hand Azmedi clutched a simple maul, a threaded bar with a nut the size of a man’s fist screwed onto the end. Shouting wildly, his cries more bleats than words, he smashed the man’s helmet in with a single blow, destroying the skull beneath. Wrenching out the weapon, he turned quickly, sending the dead man tumbling off the firing step. A pure-blood stared at him, eyes disgustingly large in his flat face. He swung his lasrifle around. Azmedi battered the bayonet aside, dropped his head and launched himself forwards. His horns buried themselves up to his forehead in the man’s gut. Azmedi thrashed them around madly in the soldier’s innards, yanking ropes of gut out when he tore back his horns. The man screamed in agony. Azmedi stamped his face in with one kick, and raced on.
By then, more beastkin were flooding onto the rampart, leaping over the piled stone and the rockcrete. They had no formation, no discipline, only years of hurt amplified by the combat stimms pumping through them. The savagery this alchemy summoned was more than enough. The conscripts panicked. The volleys they fired were poorly coordinated and badly aimed. Azmedi was shot again, but though devolution had robbed his kind of man’s wits and longevity, it had made them tough. Several hits were needed to bring the beasts down. Even when mortally wounded, they fought with undiminished wrath, dragging their killers into the warp with them.
Azmedi shrugged off the hit as he had shrugged off the last. Feeble bayonet thrusts were no match for his strength. His broad fingers wrenched weapons from trembling hands. His maul crushed ribcages, smashed heads, caved in faces, broke limbs. All along the rampart, the hordes of the Warmaster were coming over, widening the opening made by the beastkin. Units of turncoat Imperial Army added their firepower to the beasts’ rampage. Setting up position on the forwards-facing portion of the defences, they began to attack the second line with heavy weapons and concentrated lasgun volleys. Seeing the third line broken, the officers on the second line ramparts some three hundred metres away ordered their troops to open fire on the rear of the third. As reinforcements raced along the second line, the weight of this exchange grew in intensity. The beastkin were caught. The remaining conscripts suffered more. Azmedi hauled a man from his feet, and carried him screaming as a shield against the loyalist fire. Soon he was out of the worst of it, still running purely on instinct, charging with his dwindling herd into the next company of soldiers.
He cast aside his now dead human shield. Lifting his head to the sky he roared and roared, until the self-hate he had carried all his life was all spat out, and murder took its place.
Daylight Wall, Helios Gate command centre, 25th of Secundus
‘Sir, we have a breakthrough in sector sixteen, three kilometres down from the commanding bastion.’
‘I can see it,’ said Raldoron. He watched from the relative safety of the Helios Gate as the first section of the outworks was breached. ‘Move reinforcements outwards from line one to two. Form firing lines between three and two.’ He performed a quick mental calculation. At the rate the enemy were pushing out from their breaching point, they did not have long. ‘One kilometre north of Bastion Fifteen, five hundred metres south of Bastion Sixteen.’
‘This is insanity,’ said Maximus Thane. ‘I have never seen a battle like this. They fight without care for themselves.’
‘I do not believe there has ever been a battle like this,’ said Raldoron.
Above the aegis, fighters duelled, numerous as enraged wasps. The bombardment thundered into the energy shield, but as yet it was holding. Out on the plain, countless ships were setting down under heavy fire. More than half were brought crashing to the earth before they landed. None of them came down undamaged. They landed dangerously close to the wall. With the Katabatic Slopes to the south and east, and the mountains of Himalazia in every other direction, they did not have much choice, but it was a costly strategy. Thousands upon thousands of guns scoured the plains before the outworks. There was no time or space for the enemy to form their own camps. They landed, and they attacked, if they did not die first.
‘None of our traitorous brothers show themselves,’ said Thane. ‘Horus has a multitude of expendable mortals. This is sickening work.’ He looked down onto the outworks, where flashing storms of las-fire marked out points of intense conflict. ‘All the more so because we must wait here, while the men and women we were ma
de to protect sell themselves alone.’
‘We must remain here. This attack is a ploy.’
‘That worries me,’ said Thane, gesturing to the aerial battle. ‘Theoretically, the aegis is invulnerable. But the Warmaster would not launch such an attack if there was not a way through. There are many heavy attack craft within his flotilla. I say they are waiting to breach the shields and attack our emplacements.’
‘We know the shields are not perfect,’ said Raldoron. ‘There are flaws. Perturabo works for the Warmaster. If anyone can find a gap in the defence, it will be him.’
Thane’s voice turned angry at the mention of the Lord of Iron, but he did not dissent. ‘All over Terra, down they come,’ said Thane. ‘The dispossessed, the spurned and the deluded run raging into the full force of Rogal Dorn’s guns. They die by the million, but still they come. Horus has no regard for these creatures he hurls at us, but though they are expendable to him, they will not be wasted. There is reason behind this insanity.’
‘So then,’ Raldoron said, ‘we watch, and we wait, and we slaughter the enemy on the plain. When they draw nigh to the wall, that is the time for the Legions to fight. Until then, we hold.’
War in the air
Blue Zephyr
Shield breaker
Imperial Palace airspace, 25th of Secundus
It was like no flying Aisha had ever done. The airspace was a conflicted mess of shock waves that turned every manoeuvre into a bone-jarring fight with turbulence. Compounding the problem were energetic wave fronts. Electromagnetic discharge disrupted her instruments, forcing her to rely on her own, dazzled senses, while gravitic disruption from exotic weaponry flipped ships over and sent them crashing down to oblivion against the aegis.
Amid all this, Aisha’s wing managed to kill. Blue Zephyr stabbed a swift enemy with lascannon flash, blowing out an engine. It spun out of control into the path of an incoming plasma stream before it could recover, and was vaporised.
That kill under those conditions would have been the highlight of any of her previous battles. In this fight, it was barely remarkable.
‘Enemy Raptor, stooping low, on the tail of Ninth Legion fighter.’
‘I see it.’ Aisha barely heard Yancy. A blurt could have been an affirmative from Accinto. Most of the vox-net was a smear of crackles and whoops; nevertheless, two of her ships peeled off and down, Yancy’s jinking to avoid a missile strike hurled at her from a higher level in the battle sphere. Missing her, the missile contacted the shield and vanished in a flash of displacement light. Yancy and her wingman blasted through the backwash, gaining on the enemy craft tailing the Blood Angels strike fighter.
Aisha lost them after that. She had her own problems. Proximity alerts bleeped all round her cockpit. Aisha swore, flicking switches to bring a wireframe image of her tailing foe slewing around crosshairs that blinked every time he came close to locking on. Luckily for her, that part of her ship’s tech was robust enough to withstand the energies boiling around her.
‘You’ve got a friend down there,’ Bey voxed.
‘I see him.’ Aisha yanked hard on her stick. The ship fired thrusters down its port flank, sending it screaming sideways out of her pursuer’s fire arc.
‘Do you want me to help?’
‘No,’ Aisha said. Blue Zephyr bounced through a violent thermal rising off a low-yield atomic strike. Flames flashed over the cockpit. Rad counters clicked like maddened insects.
‘Only way is up,’ she said, heaving back on her flight stick. G-force pushed her into her seat, smoothing back her skin until her lips peeled back. The world turned upside down. Through the upper part of her canopy, the Palace aegis flashed and writhed. Then the loop was complete, she was up and over, jinking through screaming shell-fire, coming down hard on the tail of her pursuer. Seeing she’d given him the slip and manoeuvred behind him, her foe threw his craft about, trying to shake her, but her wingman boxed him in with a stream of blue-white las light.
Now it was the turn of her targeting reticule to blink. It turned green and her instruments shrilled.
‘There’s a cliche to be said about hunters and the hunted,’ she said.
Las-beams pulsing at an eye-watering flicker chopped through the firestorm, puncturing the wing of her foe in a row of holes as neat as a tailor’s stitch. The wing flapped loosely, then tore off. She put a double hit into the fuel tank as it spiralled away, just to be sure.
The explosion was lost in the greater inferno curling over the aegis.
She was already hunting for her next target when something caught her eye. A tight formation of ships was coming down from orbit perpendicular to the shield. The bombardment around them had a precise, neat patterning and beat. As she watched, the outer layer of the shielding gave out with a sparkling dance, but there were two more layers beneath, at least.
The formation continued its plunge.
‘What are they doing?’ she breathed.
The first of them, a pair of escort fighters, smeared themselves to nothing on the aegis, the remains shunted into the empyrean by warp tech. She expected the same fate for the three bombers coming behind, but an instant before they hit, a dozen lance strikes battered at the shield. Collimated light shafts wide as road tunnels pummelled the voids. Her augurs shrieked. Her visor dimmed to compensate for the glare, but she found herself half-blind. When the lances snapped off she had flown near, five hundred metres and closing, and saw that more bombers were hurtling towards one, precise point. One exploded into pink fire on the voids, but the others punched through without harm. She saw them pull up steeply once through, chased by anti-aircraft fire over the Palace as they split up.
‘Shield breach! Shield breach!’ she reported. ‘Daylight Wall anterior, sector sixteen.’
Bey responded. ‘Not just here. Five points on this section alone.’ He stopped speaking, his engine noise increased, and he swore. ‘Hang on. Someone’s trying to kill me.’
‘Be advised, fighter control. Some kind of anti-harmonic fire pattern, weakening the aegis,’ said Aisha. Blue Zephyr screamed through the bombers streaking down from space, dodging through them, firing as she went. ‘They’ll be going for the void projectors and anti-air cannons.’
‘Noted, Blue Zephyr. Freedom granted to pursue.’
Aisha grinned wolfishly. This was more like it! ‘Five years sitting behind lines. A great reward for being a good pilot – now I finally get to fly. Wing one, form up, follow me in.’
Four ships answered her call. Three of her squadron were dead, and she hadn’t even noticed.
‘You can’t follow them down!’ voxed Bey. ‘There’s no space. The flight ceiling is too low. If you come back up through the void shields, you’ll be caught in the bombardment.’
‘It’s days like this that made me want to fly. Hold position here, Bey. Help the Legions hold the ships back from the holes. I’m taking flight one down with me.’
Thrusters firing all over her ship, she powered upwards, weathering a fusillade of solid shot from enemy fighters, flipped over, and dived down at the aegis. Her wing, expert pilots all, stayed in perfect formation with her all the while.
The surface of the aegis rushed at her. The upper shield kept rising, only to be torn down over and over again. The taxed lower layers remained up, but wavered forever on the edge of existence at the sort of strength that might – might – permit her craft through. There was no telling if it would work; the aegis made no distinction between friend and foe, but operated solely on esoteric calculations of mass and velocity and dimensional interface.
She flicked a look at her husband’s picture.
‘You always told me I was reckless,’ she said. ‘I guess you were right.’
Blue Zephyr hit the aegis. The stick jerked in her hand as three layers of void shields attempted to hurl her bodily into the warp, but they were stressed, feeble, and she powered through to the other side.
The ground was alarmingly close.
‘Up we go!’ she sho
uted. Again the push of force on her body threatened to squeeze her into unconsciousness. Implants in her chest cavity squirted chemicals into her bloodstream, and she fought off the blackness.
More enemy aircraft had got through than she’d expected. They were wasting no time, emptying their payloads of missiles at the towers and wall tops, aiming especially for the flattened spheres of void projectors and the larger anti-ship cannon emplacements.
Explosions bloomed in fiery chains along the Daylight Wall.
‘Targets of opportunity,’ she voxed. ‘Split up. Let’s put a stop to this before it gets out of hand.’
Her flight divided instantly, each Panthera chasing after a separate target. Aisha upped her thrust and shot after a pair of Reaper ground attack craft. Their missiles spent, they were turning inwards, pounding the roads and marshalling yards behind the wall with unguided bombs.
She used one of her precious stock of air-to-air missiles to knock the first from the sky. The other lumbered aside as its companion plummeted down and crashed into the side of a hive spire. Aisha drew a bead on it, and fired her lascannons, but the pilot anticipated her move. He turned hard, and her beams seared past, scorching up the ground.
‘Dammit, dammit, dammit!’ she swore, accelerating after it. The bomber was slow, but the pilot was good. He took the Reaper down, close to ground level, using the tangle of spires and canyon streets to stay out of her firing line. She searched overhead, but there wasn’t enough room to climb to come down on top of her target without flying right into the bombardment. In such close confines, her speed was of no use.
She chased the Reaper down one of the Palace’s immense processional ways, jinking to avoid fire from its tail gun. Her own shots were spoiled by her evasions. In the end, the pilot’s luck ran out. She dived down behind him, coming so close to the ground her jet wash shattered windows, and fired up beneath her prey. His attempt to get out of her way saw him clip a starscraper, and that sealed his fate. The craft tumbled viciously from the sky, exploding on impact.