by Paul Kearney
‘I will, my lord.’
Drake’s voice broke in. ‘The dominus’ forces are moving up, Chapter Master. The enemy advances.’
‘Stay low, Drake. I will give the signal to rendezvous after I break free of the line. We will enter this evil hold together.’
‘As you wish, Chapter Master.’
A roar sounded ahead and the entire side of the great skull-cavern lit up with a long volley of arc-rifle fire, light from the skitarii, and heavier from the kataphrons. A salvo of missiles streaked out in its wake – and half the frontage of the Chaos forces disappeared in a welter of explosions and jagged welts of blue-white energy discharges.
But through the barrage the enemy came charging with a rage-mottled bellow that made the foetid earth under their feet tremble. Out of the smoke and flame they came hurtling, hundreds of them in the first wave; cultists, mostly, the cannon-fodder of the Ruinous Powers, but here and there a tall champion in power armour, one of the Broken, who had once been the proud Viridian Consuls. As they advanced they gave not a glance to the crucified forms of those who had once been their brothers, but urged on the shrieking hordes about them and fired their defiled bolters.
‘Captain,’ Calgar said, flexing his fists in the Gauntlets of Ultramar, ‘we will deploy left in echelon, at the double. Brother Starn, your veterans are with me. Move, brothers. The real battle begins now.’
The Ultramarines broke into a run, maintaining their squads. With amazing speed they sprinted out to the left of the Mechanicus troops, who were now fighting all along their line, and re-formed out on the open flank of the Chaos army. Intent on the first assault, the enemy were barely aware of their presence. Calgar had time to shake out his battle-brothers afresh, the Devastators of Ninth set up their weapons, and Fifth’s line was drawn up once more. Behind it, the Terminators came stomping up, moving more deliberately than their power-armoured brethren.
The first wave of the enemy had been annihilated, a storm of fire mowing them down before they got to within a hundred yards of the Mechanicus formations. But the second was already on the way, and it was heavier, more disciplined. This wave put down a steady covering fire and advanced one section at a time. It was made up of crazed troopers in the broken and defiled remnants of Astra Militarum carapace armour, plus a swarm of bounding, slathering Chaos spawn and enormous slithering beasts. Leading it were three scarlet daemons, their immense swords flaming above their horned heads, their forms shining bright as freshly flayed carcasses.
This line went to ground some three hundred yards from Dominus Hagnon-Cro and his forces, and the beasts within it pelted forward under a hammering fire which knocked down a dozen skitarii. Calgar saw one kataphron blow up in a spectacular explosion which sprayed out burning promethium for thirty yards in every direction. A horned daemon screeched and laughed as it bounded into the Mechanicus line, and at its first blow the hellish blade it wielded cut three skitarii clean in half. Then a kastelan lurched towards it, and the two began a close-quarter duel, oblivious to the carnage surrounding them.
The main body of the enemy second wave moved up now, firing as they came. The Mechanicus kastelans strode forward of their own troops to meet it, and dealt out terrible violence to the leading elements. The line of Chaos troops was broken into wedges by the big automatons, men sent flying through the air, dismembered, set ablaze in a curtain of promethium. But the infantry coursed around the kastelans like waves pouring round rocks, and engaged the skitarii behind. The kataphrons drove forward into the fray, heavy weapons blazing, power claws crackling and sizzling with spilled blood, their tracked chassis riding over whole squads of the enemy, while to the rear of the Mechanicus line more of their kind stayed clear and sent heavy ordnance arcing over the tangled frontage of their own troops and into the packed main body of the Chaos host.
Calgar heard a voice on the vox. It was Dominus Hagnon-Cro.
‘Chapter Master, I am fully committed. I hope you see now that I do not mean to betray you. I have waited to make a fight like this for a long time – longer than you can imagine. Should you choose to aid my forces now, I would take it very kindly.’
There was an element of strain to the voice now that Calgar had not heard before. He smiled inside his beaked helm.
His Ultramarines were standing silent to the left of the Chaos host, some four hundred yards out. The enemy was so concentrated on the fight to its front that the flank had been ignored, but he could see the formations coming up on that flank now, being set in place to counter his brothers. It was time.
‘Dominus, the Ultramarines will attack at once. May the Emperor reward us with victory.’
‘My thanks, Chapter Master.’
Then Calgar switched to the company vox. ‘Captain Galenus, Fifth will engage on your command. Keep clear of close-quarter fighting for as long as you can. I want to bleed them, Caito.’
‘Acknowledged, my lord. Courage and honour.’
‘Courage and honour.’
The order went out, and the Ultramarines took a split second to line up their targets, their bolter muzzles momentarily sketching out small movements as the weapons followed the reticule in their autosenses. Not a shot would be wasted. Their targeting displays were interlinked, so that no two Ultramarines would fire on the same foe.
‘Open fire,’ Galenus said calmly.
And Chaplain Murtorius bellowed, ‘For Macragge!’
The ancient war cry was taken up as the first volley thundered out, and a hedge of bright tracer streaked across the battlefield to scythe into the flank of the Chaos host. It was a deadly, supremely accurate barrage of disciplined fire, sent with all the venom and anger which was burning in the hearts of the Ultramarines for these, their bitterest foes. And it struck home with the force of a thunderbolt.
The enemy right flank was torn up and shattered, close on two hundred of the howling foe taken down in the space of five seconds. The heavy self-propelled bolter rounds blasted through two and three of the enemy at a time, shattering armour, dismembering bodies, decapitating and disembowelling cultists and feral guardsmen, slamming into the Chaos champions and making them stagger. Calgar saw a Bloodletter take the strike of a Devastator missile full in the chest. The creature exploded, its daemon sword whirling high across the battlefield trailing a tail of yellow flame.
‘Secondary targets,’ Galenus said. ‘A home for every bullet, brothers.’
There was dark laughter on the vox, but it ended with a second volley, as murderous as the first. The Ultramarines were firing single shots or three-round bursts, and the heavy weapons were picking out the commanders in the enemy ranks, Champions, daemons and Chaos Marines. These were taken down one by one, reducing that flank of the field to a churned-up charnel house, the ground under the feet of the enemy quickening into a mire of steaming blood and body parts.
Calgar stood and watched with his honour guards and Starn’s Terminators standing around him. His autosenses dampened the noise and fury of the battle, and he looked it up and down with a cold eye, gauging the enemy tactics, the dispositions of the Mechanicus troops, and the fresh formations which were moving out now on the left to reinforce the shattered flank.
There was not much tactical acumen on display in the ranks of the enemy; they were throwing numbers at him rather than trying to out-think him – the failing of Chaos since time immemorial.
But his brothers were outnumbered ten to one on this section of the field alone, while the dominus’ troops were now embroiled in a close, deadly fight that stretched for fully half a mile across the great Skull Chamber. And the Blood Keep, far behind the Chaos lines, was still quiet, dead-seeming.
Calgar did not believe that the enemy commander had yet committed all his forces, or even the bulk of them. The Witness, or whatever he called himself, wanted to bring all his enemies into the fight before he showed his true strength.
‘Keep them at a
distance, captain,’ he told Galenus again. Fifth’s captain was standing with Brothers Ameronn, Philo, Salvator, Ulfius and Chaplain Murtorius just behind the line squads. ‘Don’t let them draw you in.’
‘Aye, my lord. Hear me, Fifth – prepare to withdraw by fire and manoeuvre on my word. No one is to advance without orders.’
The squad sergeants acknowledged. Calgar saw senior sergeant Greynius walking up and down the rear of the line, checking on ammunition and casualties. As yet, there were a few minor wounds, but not a single battle-brother had fallen.
‘Devastators, kill their leaders,’ Calgar went on. ‘Don’t allow them to re-form. We must keep them in confusion.’
They met savagery with discipline, hatred with faith, as they had in all their long, proud history. There was not another race in the Galaxy who could outmatch the Adeptus Astartes in a firefight, and Calgar meant to keep that edge as long as he could.
Half a mile away on Calgar’s left flank, Inquisitor Drake watched the battle rage with a mixture of brutal elation and professional detachment.
Part of him wanted to be in the fighting with Calgar’s troops, dealing out death to the twisted scum who profaned the very fabric of the universe with their existence. But he held himself in check and watched as the Ultramarines line chewed up the flank of the Chaos army, while in the centre, the troops of the renegade Mechanicus fought in a desperate milling slaughter. He saw Dominus Hagnon-Cro himself wade into the fight as the line wavered, and the tech-priest took on a Bloodletter in single combat, slaying the daemon with a shattering blow of his cog-headed power-staff, mechadendrite limbs rising out of his torn robes to blast back the enemy with plasma-pistol and arc-fire.
The Mechanicus line steadied, and the aether was filled with the clicking spurts of binharic communications as the dominus’ minions re-formed their units and sent in their reserves. Only four of the great kastelans were still on their feet now, but they fought on like towering engines of slaughter, carving great swathes of mayhem in the enemy lines. Drake saw a daemonic hound grasped by one and flung fifty yards through the air, its innards streaming out of its ripped side like a bloody flag. Another kastelan broke open the skull of a red-skinned daemon in its massive clawed fists while the creature’s sword lay buried in its mechanical bowels, sparking and flaring with diabolical energies. The renegade Mechanicus forces on Fury had been waiting a thousand years for this day, and they intended to have their victory.
But the forces opposing them seemed in no way diminished by the fearful slaughter they were enduring. And now Drake saw the towering gates of the Blood Keep boom open once more, and from its yawning darkness a second army began to march out, scarlet and green banners held high, roaring with eagerness to join the fight.
‘Chapter Master–’
‘I see it,’ Calgar said on the vox. ‘There can be no victory here, not against these odds. They are merely toying with us. The real enemy is in that stronghold, biding his time.’
‘I shall join you.’
‘Not yet. I intend to draw out as many of them as I can before we make our move. Keep me informed as to the status of that side gate.’
‘It is deserted.’
‘I am not surprised. He is dangling it in front of us.’
‘Is it wisdom then, to take that bait?’
‘We are low on options, inquisitor. But I do not intend to walk blindly into all his traps. I mean to upset his calculations here, on the field of battle, before we try for it.’
‘How?’
Drake sensed the cold smile even over the vox.
‘By killing more of this scum than he intended to lose. Wait for my word, Drake, and then be prepared to move fast.’
‘As you wish, Chapter Master.’ Drake was alarmed, but he trusted Calgar. If there was one thing the Lord of Macragge never made, it was an idle boast.
Twenty-One
The second army was splashing through the stinking moat that surrounded the Blood Keep, extending their frontage yard by yard and coming on at a run. Before them fanned out a screen of flesh hounds, baying with rabid hatred, their eyes gleaming and the water steaming on their crested backs.
This formation came on at a gallop, and was slammed by a heavy volley of fire from the left-flank squads of Fifth Company. But the momentum of the great daemonic beasts was too great to halt. Though dozens went down, a score or more made it all the way into the midst of the Ultramarines line, and there set about them with snapping jaws and rending claws, the impact of the heavy creatures knocking many of the Space Marines off their feet with a thunderous crash.
Brother Tersius was in the midst of that howling scrum. He took down two of the Chaos hounds with headshots before the creatures were upon him. Shunted aside by one that raced past him, he felt the horny excrescences of the creature tear the outer skin of his armour and gouge a furrow in the ceramite. He drew his gladius and stabbed at the hound as it seized Brother Darius in its smoking maw and lifted the Ultramarine clear off the ground.
Tersius’ blade took the creature deep in its ribs, broke through two, and carried on into its dark heart. The beast collapsed, bellowing, and Tersius finished it off with a round in the head that blasted an eye free of its massive skull.
He helped up Darius. His brother had a mangled wreck of mashed armour and bleeding flesh for an arm, but the bleeding soon stopped, halted in its tracks by the Larraman organ. Darius sank to one knee, then rose again and drew his bolt pistol, firing single shots at the other Chaos beasts that were whirling among them. ‘My thanks, brother.’
Tersius grunted a wordless acknowledgement as he slashed and fired, left and right, amber runes springing up in his helm display, his autosenses tuning out the deafening shrieks of the beasts that coursed around them, the rattling gunfire, the all-encompassing roar of the battle that rose up on every side.
He was smashed off his feet by another of the creatures that had come up on his left, out of nowhere. It lunged for his face, the breath steaming out of that snapping muzzle, the yellow teeth as long as his fingers. He dropped his bolter, strove to hold off the jaws, stabbing with his gladius. But though the blade pierced its hide time and time again, the hound settled both forefeet on him and forced its great head downwards until the teeth scraped his helm. Then there was a flash of light, a great blare of noise which his autosenses could not quite protect him from, and the hound was off him, flung free. He climbed to his feet, retrieving his bolter. Beside him towered a Terminator, the storm bolter roaring out from one fist. It was Brother Starn.
‘Up, up, brother,’ Starn said. ‘This is no time to take a rest.’ And he strode forward, batting aside another flesh hound with a thumping crackle of his armoured fist that took the thing’s head clean off, then firing a blaze of storm-bolter rounds that took down another.
‘Re-form,’ Sergeant Gaden said on the vox. ‘Withdraw thirty yards. On me, brothers. Pick up your feet.’
‘Thank you, brother,’ Tersius told Starn.
‘Move off,’ Starn said. ‘I will cover you.’
The Ultramarines line bent back. The flesh hounds were all dead, but they had taken a toll. Tersius saw Apothecary Philo bending over three slain brethren, retrieving their gene-seed with his narthecium, ignoring the shots that whined past and clipped his armour.
The Terminators of First covered the withdrawal, and at the sight of those four massive figures, the advance of the second Chaos formation seemed to check for a moment, as if even they quailed at the thought of attacking such warriors. But it was only for a second. They came on again, waving their banners and roaring out insults and curses which were lost in the awesome sea of noise that now rose up in a storm on all sides. They drew out into a great crescent, widening as though to swallow up the Ultramarines, overlapping them. There were more of the Broken in this force, towering over the lesser warriors and cultists. And now the stabbing lance of heavy bolter fire
began to burst out towards Fifth Company in lines of tracer.
The Terminators fell back into reserve once more, and Captain Galenus detached four brethren of Ninth with melta-guns and missile launchers to reinforce the harried left.
Marneus Calgar watched Galenus’ dispositions with approval, his gaze ranging over the battlefield. He had known scenes like this since he was a boy, centuries of carnage which his cold intellect dissected and analysed, a cogitator of slaughter. He was able to identify the weak spots that were going to arise in the next few minutes, and he was already planning past them.
‘Captain Galenus, I want you to start peeling squads off from right to left, by fireteams. The line will move left in echelon.’
‘Acknowledged.’
Calgar was going to shift the Ultramarines line sideways, a perilous move with so few troops, but he had to counter the advance of this second army. If it managed to outflank his brothers, then it would all be over. He looked over the Mechanicus lines. They were holding there, though now they were fighting atop mounds of dead. Hagnon-Cro had lost a third of his troops, and the enemy was trying to move out on his right. There was only a skirmish line of skitarii out in that direction, a very thin line indeed.
He was about to call up the dominus on vox when a sight stopped him. From the entrance to the great Skull Chamber at the rear of the renegade Mechanicus forces, a new body of figures was marching out. Skitarii and sagitarii in scarlet cloaks, more kataphrons, and another maniple of kastelans. Apparently, Dominus Hagnon-Cro had kept a little something up the sleeve of his robe.
Calgar contacted the Adeptus Mechanicus renegade.
‘Dominus, I intend to draw the enemy out to our left. If you have anything in the way of reserves at that point, then I suggest you strike as they expose their flank to counter me. That way this second army can be thrown back.’