by Guy Haley
Sanguinius put his legionaries out to strengthen the defence around Bastion 16. The mortal soldiery he also commanded closer to the tower. Even tired and ill, the conscripts found a new energy, moving with purpose they never had before. For the first time, under the gleaming green eye-lenses of the Space Marines, Katsuhiro felt like a real soldier, and the thoughts of inferiority he had earlier in the day were swept away.
All of them felt that way. All of them, except Runnecan. The little man dogged Katsuhiro’s footsteps. Often cocky, his confident air had given way to unease.
‘I don’t think he’s up to any good.’
‘Who?’ said Katsuhiro, who was focused on the White Scars’ attack upon the siege camp. With the bombardment halted, he could hear the discharge of their guns clearly over the wastes. ‘Sanguinius?’
Runnecan spoke a name, but it was drowned out by a cheer erupting along the line as a series of explosions ripped through the distant camp, and the darting hornets of the Khan’s Space Marines swarmed towards the beached warship.
‘What?’ Katsuhiro said.
‘Doromek! Doromek! Listen to me!’ Runnecan was wild-eyed now. ‘All that trudging around in the tunnels. Why? Where did she get that cypher wand from?’ He shook his head and huddled lower. ‘They know each other from before, I seen it. They do.’
‘She can fight,’ said Katsuhiro, recalling Myz killing the giant mutant.
‘Exactly!’
‘But that doesn’t mean anything. Maybe she’s like him, a soldier. There are people in that Palace who can kill in a million different ways.’
‘Yeah, there are, and they’re in there, not out here. We’re out here because we’re not even soldiers, we’re nothing! Do you really think someone like Doromek could avoid the draft, even now? And how come she’s not piped up about her handiness with a blade? They shouldn’t be here!’
‘It’s a mistake,’ insisted Katsuhiro. ‘Someone’s bound to slip through the cracks.’
‘Right,’ said Runnecan darkly. ‘But did they slip or did they creep through?’
That made Katsuhiro look round. ’What are you saying?’
‘There are traitors everywhere, my friend.’ Runnecan sighted down his gun towards the siege camp. ‘There are–’
Once more, an explosion stole his words, this one much bigger. The White Scars fighters and gunships were pounding the encampment. The shields flickered, then gave out. Immediately, the White Scars pulled back, buzzing up in a flurry of white glints to race home. All along the line the remainder of the conscripts cheered.
A ripple of pops crackled across the sky, insignificant to the conscripts, but a warning sound the legionaries knew well.
‘Stand ready, warriors of the Imperium,’ said one of the Blood Angels. He was metres away from Katsuhiro but his vox-amplified voice carried far, strong, pure and proud. ‘The enemy are coming.’
Nervous faces glanced skywards. Hundreds of bright dots were hurtling down through the sky, bursting through the cloud layer with violent speed. Ahead of them came a storm of attack craft.
From the Palace dozens of defence wings raced up to meet them.
The guns all along the section of the wall to Katsuhiro’s back redoubled their barrage, and the siege camp was lost in a storm of fire. The White Scars hurtled through the flames as if the furies of the warp themselves were at their backs.
It was after that point that everything descended into anarchy.
Death among us
Spearhead
The Angel and the Warhawk
Imperial Palace airspace, 7th of Quartus
‘Get it off my tail!’ Aisha screamed.
She yanked the stick of Blue Zephyr hard, sending the Panthera into a bone-crushing curve to escape her pursuer. Enemy ships were all over them. A dual-pilot Stiletto fighter exploded at her left, taken out by the Legiones Astartes ship gunning for her. Bright tracer fire streaked by. The fuselage made a dull clang as a lascannon beam clipped her. She shot out a hand to silence screaming systems and reroute power away from damaged circuits, snatching it back just as quick to the stick.
‘Old gods of Old Earth,’ she snarled. ‘If any of you are still out there, give me a little grace.’
The battle sphere was a tempest of metal, hard light and fire. Fighters of dozens of different marques duelled over the Palace walls and the outworks, while through the storm of flame and ships the drop pods of the traitors punched like iron fists. Aisha’s mission was supposedly to destroy as many pods as she could before they touched down, but they were denied even the most unlikely shot by the enemy air armada, which protected the pods with furious tenacity. Her own auspex returns and what little sense she could make from flight control’s messages suggested larger landers were coming in, almost certainly laden with heavy equipment. Such slow-moving beasts were meat to Blue Zephyr, but they were even better protected. The enemy were everywhere, over everything, flights and flights of them, and now they had an additional Legion’s worth of air support to bolster them. The Imperial defence squadrons attempted to block enemy craft from penetrating the outer rings of the air defences, but some were bound to get through, and although most of them died in clouds of fire before they got far over the city, a handful wrought havoc, unleashing clouds of incendiary bombs. Phosphex fire had a special shine all of its own. Glaring magnesium white, it filled canyon streets with a deceptively beautiful light as it ate through metal, rockcrete and flesh with equal voracity. There were poison smokes and acid fogs and other vile weapons deployed. Gas blanketed a part of the outer city. Heavier than air, it sank down through ventilation grilles and fractured pavements to smother the people hiding below the Palace.
None of that would matter to her any more if she couldn’t shake her pursuer.
Orders screamed in her vox-beads along with panicked calls for aid. The enemy was throwing more and more craft into the fight, and with the air defences already damaged and their own numbers whittled down by every engagement, the loyalist squadrons were suffering. Gunfire flashed over her cockpit. She heaved Blue Zephyr to the side, and burst through a streamer of flame, almost slamming into a Fury void-fighter spinning out of control across her flight path. A quick jerk of her stick sent Blue Zephyr skipping over it.
Still the legionary craft came.
She got barely a glimpse of it, it was so fast, but she’d seen enough to get an identity: a Xiphon interceptor, XIV Legion, one of the few machines she’d ever been afraid of facing in combat. Streams of missiles burned past her, shot with terrifying rapidity by the interceptor’s rotary launchers. She was getting boxed in by the pilot. Where she dodged the missiles, lascannon beams waited for her. He was closing in on the kill, and she was running out of options.
‘I’m coming! I’m coming!’
Aisha almost cried out with joy when she heard Dandar Bey’s voice. ‘I’ve got him. Hold your course. I’ll free you up, get you back into it.’ He swore. ‘This is a mess.’
The fire from behind broke off as Bey joined the deadly game. Aisha caught another glimpse of the Xiphon; its green-and-white heraldry was dirty, and its engine exhaust an unhealthy black, but it flew true enough, breaking off its pursuit of her to dodge Bey’s counter-attack. She immediately reacted, pulling herself up. Although she loved her ship as dearly as she did any person, she cursed Blue Zephyr’s comparative lack of agility as it sped out wider than her foe.
‘I’ve lost him! Aisha, watch out, I can’t see him in all this–’
There was a brief growl on the line, then nothing but static. So little to mark a man’s death.
Aisha climbed. She found the Xiphon and opened fire with all her armaments. The Xiphon plunged down in an evasive dive impossible for a baseline human to tolerate. She couldn’t follow to finish him, and knew it was going to come again behind her.
‘Bright Hawks, Bright Hawks! Squadron Mistress Daveinpor requesting immediate support.’
Nothing came back. She glanced at her unit markers. Half her ship li
ghts were red. Another blinked from green to mortis glow as she watched. There was a garbled message from somewhere, then nothing but the howling of interference and the half-heard shouts of orders blasting over the vox-net.
She was on her own. Warning signifiers bleated that the Xiphon was lining her up again. Gritting her teeth, she pushed Blue Zephyr into a punishing dive, penetrating the weakened aegis and coming down behind the walls of the Palace. An obvious manoeuvre, but designed to goad her foe to follow. She yanked up a few hundred metres above the deck, skimming fast down burning streets. The Palace was taking damage directly now. The aegis still held back the worst of the orbital bombardment, and doubtless would for months more, but Palace airspace was dense with enemy attack craft that rained down bombs on everything. She punched through a firestorm, narrowly avoided a toppling spire. All the while the Xiphon was closing. The pilot chanced a few lascannon volleys, herding her again like livestock to the slaughter.
An opportunity presented itself. A bridge ahead, grandiose, huge, typically Imperial. Her auspex was a welter of confused signals, but she knew it was there, in the poison fog and fire. She hoped only that her foe did not.
Accelerating as fast as she dared, she lessened her evasive movements, luring the Xiphon closer. Rockets stormed past her cockpit. Las light flashed by.
The bridge was there, somewhere.
She misjudged. The bridge, ablaze from end to end, burst from the gas almost too suddenly for her to react. She pulled up to nearly vertically, making Blue Zephyr scream in machine pain.
The Space Marine, for all his gifts, could not avoid the unexpected obstacle. The Xiphon slammed into the bridge and burst out the other side as a wingless stub in a shower of broken armourglass and masonry.
She took a breath, then another, and banked back round.
There was enough time to register three more fighters closing in on her from three separate directions. From that position, there was no escape.
Her fingers stretched out to the pict glued to the instrument panel. They did not reach her husband’s face before Blue Zephyr was torn to flaming pieces.
Palace outworks, Daylight Wall section 16, 7th of Quartus
Ahead of the drop pods a brief but widespread bombardment of shells detonated over the outworks with soft, floury bangs. As they did not hit the ground, they seemed no threat at all, but then the defenders saw a paint-burst spread begin its rapid sinking, and they understood the danger that these bombs posed.
‘Gas! Gas! Gas!’
Whistles blew. Men shouted. Though millennia old, gas was still a much feared weapon. An attack by the very air induced an atavistic response deep in the limbic system, a fear of drowning, of suffocation, a fear common to all creatures that must breathe.
Runnecan swore in fluent underhive gutter slang. A thousand hands went for cases at belts. The Space Marines salted among the lines remained impassive, protected from all environmental harms by their power armour. Katsuhiro was nervous of the Space Marines, for all the awe he felt. He had never wanted to be one, but at that moment he envied them their protection and their lack of fear.
Though the conscripts had started out poorly equipped, the rate of attrition was so high that by that time most of the troops on the outworks had some form of protection against the poison, a gas mask at least, looted from the dead if not assigned to them personally. Katsuhiro fell into the former category. He had no training in how to use the mask he’d acquired, and nearly didn’t manage to get it on. In his panic he yanked on the straps all wrong and got the mask twisted about. A brown fog sifted around him as he struggled. He smelled acrid chemicals, then, mercifully, he managed to pull the mask down to cover his face. Stinging eyes made him fear the worst, but they stopped streaming after a moment and his breathing steadied.
Katsuhiro’s hearing was muffled by the mask. The gas mask had an unpleasant, rubbery smell. The odour of gas stuck to the back of his throat and irritated it, but he couldn’t spit, and he swallowed his gathering phlegm down repeatedly, until he felt nauseous.
The cloud, now a rich mustard brown, closed in over the troops. At first all he could hear was his breathing, in and out, roar and hiss with the click of the mask’s simple purifier. The gas thickened until Runnecan was a grey shape, though he was only a couple of metres away.
False calm descended, peaceful and poisonous.
A man, blood running from blinded eyes and blistered lips, burst from the fog. Katsuhiro fired reflexively at him, missing in his fright. The man was clawing at his face, his screams turning to gurgles. His shoulder clipped Katsuhiro hard as he ran by and the gas swallowed him again.
Screaming came out of the fog. Not all of the troops had gas masks. Many that did couldn’t work them, or had equipment that was damaged. They ran about in terror. One with greater presence of mind turned over bodies for a gas mask, finding one, slipping it on just in time. Two men brawled over a mask neither had any hope of donning. Others tried to run, but fell, screaming froth from burning throats.
Time slowed. Katsuhiro moved as a man underwater. Images of horror appeared as sheets of gas shifted like weeds in currents, each waft of poison opening a curtain on another scene of suffering. It seemed to go on forever, as awful things do, though according to Katsuhiro’s chronometer less than two minutes went by.
The screams died as men died. Vapour drank the sound of the wall guns, squeezing them down to subaquatic thumps. Laser flash dispersed by the gas turned the rolling clouds into alien thunderstorms of yellow and brown lit by red lightning.
A roaring scream sounded right over Katsuhiro. Glaring yellow appeared overhead, and a wash of heat blasted the poison fog aside. A huge metal ovoid bore right down on him. He was frozen, sure he would be crushed. Other men, revealed by the backwash of the descending pod, were close to breaking, but a giant in red stood among them, his bolter ready, shouting.
‘Stand firm, servants of Terra!’
Their panic quelled, they held. A storm of tracer bullets ripped around the vehicle, puncturing it many times. Half its thrusters went out, and it tilted over, hurtling off into the wastes beyond the third defence line.
It was only the first.
A drop pod assault was an intentionally terrifying spectacle. The pods fell so fast they seemed to be upon the verge of destruction, only firing their retro thrusters at the last minute to slow their descent from fatal velocity. They smashed into the ground with a force that would kill an unmodified human outright, even one lucky enough to wear power armour. The noise they made was tremendous, like containers full of scrap metal slammed into rock. Explosive bolts went off in crackling bursts, and the huge petal doors fell down with metallic booms. There were hundreds of them, suddenly, crowding the sky, jets roaring, some exploding. The fury of the wall guns was cutting over the third line, streaks of bullets and las light almost close enough to touch, and all the roaring added to the havoc.
More soft thumps overhead. More gas floated down. Different colours, copper-oxide greens and heavy yellows, powder reds and blues. Electromag munitions blew, filling the fog with crackling energy that earthed on the ceramite of the Space Marines in crawling displays of lightning.
‘Stand firm!’ roared the Space Marines, their deep voices pushed into inhumanity by the harshening of helmet voxes. ‘Stand firm!’ they shouted, and no one dared run.
Katsuhiro had only an impression of the warriors disembarking from their pods before the thickening gas hid them all. Again so much transpired in so short a space of time, seconds maybe, but fearful years crawled by.
He saw nothing in the murk, but the Space Marines’ auto-senses penetrated it easily, and they called out once again.
‘They come! Ready weapons! For the Emperor!’
The Space Marines brought up their bolters to their shoulders and opened fire.
There were perhaps two dozen Blood Angels on that section of the rampart, nothing compared to the massed thousands who had fought on alien worlds the length and breadth of
the galaxy, and yet the report of their bolters firing even in such thin numbers struck Katsuhiro with terror. They barked like hellhounds out of ancient myth, each round the equal of another age’s cannon shot.
Bastion 16’s guns raked past the rampart’s front. Katsuhiro saw large shapes collapse. The wall guns still fired over their heads at the drop pods. So much noise.
The first of the enemy legionaries came out of the gas in a line, their own bolters firing.
A human voice bellowed along the rampart. ‘Troopers of the Kushtun Naganda! Present arms!’
Two men down from Katsuhiro a soldier was hit in the shoulder by a bolt-round. When the mass-reactive detonated, the man’s torso from his right shoulder to his hip ceased to be. A mist of blood joined the fog. The end of his left arm was blown clear; the right arm and the head, connected by shredded bridges of tissue, collapsed inwards.
‘Ready!’ the human officer bellowed.
Katsuhiro rested his gun on the rampart’s lip. Though the men were sheltered by the fortification, in most cases only their heads exposed, they were still being hit, still dying. The Blood Angels knelt, but they were so big their chests protruded over the defence line. Bolt-rounds blew on their armour, taking out chunks of metallo-ceramic from the plates. The enemy were targeting them in favour of the lesser men. Incredibly, so it seemed to Katsuhiro, one of the crimson angels fell, his chest a bloody ruin.
‘Aim!’ the officer roared.
Katsuhiro did his best to ignore the carnage among his fellow defenders. He’d played his part in repelling six assaults upon the defence line; he’d been bombed; he was ill, hungry, cold and exhausted. But he had not yet faced Traitor legionaries.
He struggled to draw a bead on the warriors coming to kill him. Just aiming at them seemed profane, somehow, a final inversion of how things were meant to be.
Then they came from the fog, and terror showed a new face.