Calgar's Siege

by Paul Kearney

  ‘Lieutenant Einar, how goes it?’ Avila demanded of the militia officer back down the tunnel.

  ‘Sixty charges set, sir. I need ten more minutes.’

  ‘Get clear all your men save those still bearing charges. The enemy is pressing us close.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Enemy advancing,’ Brother Gamelan said. Fire filled up the tunnel to his front, shrivelling the vegetation at water level and boiling the water itself. The interior of the sewer became as humid and rank as an equatorial jungle.

  Out of the flames burst a massive ork, so large he had to crouch under the masonry. And so dark-skinned he seemed almost black, his red eyes gleaming and his jaw agape. He was clad in a tatterdemalion suit of powered armour, layers of ceramite welded carelessly together and running with spitting power cables. An ork-made bolter snapped out automatic fire from one fist, and the other was a gauntlet encased in a glowing power field.

  Brother Gamelan opened up with the heavy bolter at close range, but the ork took the fire and charged on, bellowing. Brother Dextus’ plasma gun lanced out and blew the bolter and the hand that held it clean off, searing the armour black and burning off half the ork’s rabid face. And still it came on.

  It slammed full tilt into the two Ultramarines and the power fist it wielded came down on Brother Gamelan’s helm. There was a thunderous crack, and the Ultramarine fell limp as his skull was crushed in, helmet and all. The heavy bolter fell into the water and disappeared. Brother Dextus was hurled backwards into the rest of the squad.

  Avila battered past him, mag-locking his own bolter and activating his chainsword all in one split second. He rolled into the filthy water below the ork and stabbed upwards. The chainsword shrieked as it hit ceramite, and Sergeant Avila thrust it with all the strength and fury that was in him. The weapon caught a purchase on the plate, ate into it, and found its way through.

  But then the beast’s power fist came down again. It grabbed Avila’s arm and hauled him up out of the water like a landed fish. The Space Marine felt the deadly crushing vice of its grip break his own armoured forearm, the claws of the ork gauntlet searing through the ceramite and fibre-bundles and eating into his flesh.

  The chainsword fell from his nerveless grip. There was a wrench, and his arm was torn off completely at the elbow joint of the armour. Agony flooded his mind, but he blocked it off, reached into his belt with his remaining hand and clicked out another grenade. He stuffed it into a crevice in the ork’s armour and rolled free in the thrashing water. It went off, a bright blast that shut down his auto-senses entirely. For several seconds he was deaf and blind, the only sensation in the world that of pain.

  His armour came back online in twitches and flashes. He felt himself being hauled away, tried to struggle, but could not break free. He felt shrapnel wounds gnawing all over him, and he could taste the foul air in the tunnel, the stink of the gutted ork. When his suit systems finally rebooted he found he was at the rear of his squad, lying with his back propped up against the wall of the sewer. Parsifal had pulled him free of the fight and then rejoined it.

  His helm display was an intermittent wall of static, runes flashing red all over it. His power-pack had been blasted from his back by the grenade, and the armour that encased him was running down, its internal supply also damaged. In a few minutes he would be closed inside a dead metal shell.

  His head cleared somewhat, and he climbed to his feet, swaying.

  Heavy fire ahead, his brethren closely engaged. The big ork was a broken mound of flayed meat and metal in the water at their feet. The tunnel beyond was full of the creatures, far too many. He cursed them with all the venom in his hearts, and keyed up the vox.

  ‘Lieutenant Einar, status.’

  ‘All charges set, sir – we’re retreating up the tunnel.’

  ‘Very well.’ He flicked to the Ultramarine frequency. ‘Brothers, fall back, best speed. Get yourselves out of here.’

  They gave ground at once. He saw Brother Parsifal, his blue and white armour streaked red with ork viscera. ‘Let us get you out of here, Avila,’ the Apothecary said, taking his remaining arm.

  ‘No time. My armour is dying. I’m too slow. Get the rest away – now, Parsifal. My brother, you must get out. I will fire the charges.’

  ‘Fire them all you like, but you’re coming with me,’ Parsifal said grimly. And he hauled Avila half over his shoulder and dragged him away.

  The remaining Ultramarines followed. Brother Dextus fired four more blasts from the plasma gun at the advancing orks to cover the retreat, then darted back as his brethren took up the fire. The orks staggered and were halted for a few seconds. The Space Marines used that brief respite to sprint away, down the tunnel in a welter of spray. They passed by the first of the explosive charges Einar had set on the tunnel wall.

  Avila began to recover, his training and brute strength overcoming the agony of his injuries. He shrugged free of Parsifal. He could function, for a while at least.

  ‘Lead them out, brother. Frequency sextus. Blow the charges when you are all clear.’ He drew out his bolt pistol.

  ‘I will not leave you – this is no place for you to end, Avila.’

  ‘We end where we must – there is no choice in the matter. In a few minutes my armour will be out of power. I will stand here and hold them until you are all clear. Blow the charges before any of this scum gets up the tunnel into the city – they will be dismantling them as they find them. I must halt them in their tracks here, before the whole mission is compromised.’

  Parsifal looked at him, a blank mask. They had known each other a long time.

  ‘Our Master shall know what you did,’ the Apothecary said. ‘Farewell, brother sergeant.’

  Avila did not speak again. He stood hefting his bolt pistol, then began wading down the tunnel towards the packed mass of the advancing orks.

  Nineteen

  The explosion came through to the city, a dull distant boom, no more, just one more noise in a universe that was full of it. But Calgar knew. Even with the interference that was skewing all augur relays, he knew that Avila was gone.

  Parsifal came up on the vox soon after.

  ‘My lord, our mission is accomplished. We are making our way back up the sewer tunnel, and should be in the city in less than an hour.’

  ‘Sergeant Avila?’ Calgar asked.

  ‘Gone. And Brother Gamelan also. I failed to retrieve their gene-seed. There were too many of the enemy.’ Parsifal’s voice was dull and toneless.

  ‘We all bleed when one of us does, my brother,’ Marneus Calgar said. ‘You do not need to tell me how he died – I know that he would have ended well. It was in him.’

  ‘It was.’ Then Parsifal clicked off the vox.

  Marneus Calgar closed his eyes for one moment. To take the rage and the grief and use it, like some kind of moral fuel. The conditioning of centuries let him do that. It did not lessen his grief – he had seen so many of his brothers die they were beyond count even to his superlative recall – but it let him move past it.

  ‘He did his duty by us and by the Emperor. No one could have asked for more,’ Mathias said at his side. The Chaplain had heard the vox exchange. ‘Now we must make his sacrifice meaningful of something.’

  ‘In His name,’ Calgar said quietly. He came back to the present, the dust-thick heavy air of the bunker, and the battle below, which was approaching a climax.

  The lascannons in the casements were flashing out bright streaks of energy that arced across the plain at the advancing tanks. Their barrels were glowing dull red and their muzzles were black with carbonised dust.

  As he watched, Calgar saw one of the Leman Russes struck some four hundred yards from the gate below his feet. Smashed full on the turret by the high-energy weapon, the vehicle clanked to a halt, stood silent for a second, and then its hatches were thrown open and the ork crew b
egan to scramble out of the smoking interior.

  Lasgun fire from the walls cut them down, dozens of the red beams zeroing in on each ork. As the last fell, the abandoned tank brewed up, a muffled explosion lifting it clear of the ground. Then it exploded again, and the heavy turret was sent flying two hundred yards across the battlefield, flattening a whole rank of advancing ork infantry.

  But other tanks were grinding up behind it, their tracks throwing up fountains of muck from the soft ground, the heavy vehicles lurching in shellholes, churning their own dead into the mire. They had come together here, a compact formation of some eight or nine aimed right at the tall gate that stood in the Vanaheim fortress.

  ‘How is lascannon ammunition holding out?’ Calgar asked Colonel Boros, who stood, a dust-pale ghost, to one side. The colonel tapped on his slate, receiving direct feed from every emplacement on the walls. He looked up with a grimace. ‘We’re down to a dozen shots a gun.’

  ‘Beta Primaris,’ Calgar said into the defence vox. ‘I want earthshakers on grid zero right now. One round from each tube, then wait for repeat orders. Confirm.’

  ‘Acknowledged,’ came back the crisp reply from the Basilisk battery back in the city. ‘My lord, one of our guns is destroyed – an ork aircraft. We have three currently ready to fire, and six earthshakers left for each.’

  ‘I hear you. Fire when ready.’ He raised his voice to resound through the bunker. ‘Lascannon crews, hold your fire. We have ordnance inbound from our own batteries. All other weapons, take up the slack. Target their infantry.’

  It was like sparring against a heavyweight foe. Flat-out punching would not be enough. He had to come in from different directions, keep the foe off balance.

  Calgar pulled in extra mortar tubes from farther north in the city, sending Lieutenant Janus’ Chimeras to fetch them south. The bombardment was unrelenting. The plain before the Vanaheim Gate stretched like some maniac’s view of hell for fully four miles. Burnt-out vehicles, broken Dreadnoughts and shot-down aircraft were strewn across it like the broken toys of a mad child, and in between them the ork dead lay in mounds, in unmourned and stinking thousands.

  And through it all, the artillery of both sides continued to plough the blood-soaked ground into a morass, transforming it into another element entirely, a soup of filth and flesh and metal through which the orks waded with insane persistence, their losses only goading them to a higher pitch of bestial fury.

  But the city had suffered too. Ork artillery had overshot the walls and hit the central districts of Zalathras, laying waste to whole city blocks. The immense ork shells had rained down on the spires, too. Alphon was burning from half a dozen severe hits, as was Kalgatt.

  The civilian casualties were already in the tens of thousands, and would climb higher. In one shelter off Dromion Square alone, two thousand people had been entombed when it had received a direct strike from something resembling an earthshaker.

  Grievous though these casualties were, they did not affect the fighting strength of the defences, and Calgar found himself once more thanking the Emperor’s Grace that the ork guns were poorly pointed, their munitions badly made and unreliable. For every shell that exploded, another crashed to earth within the circuit of the walls and lay at the bottom of its own crater, inert or ticking ominously.

  The militiamen defending the walls were standing at their posts, agri-hands and Administratum clerks and outright criminals, all holding a few yards of wall each. But a steady stream of these men were dying also. In the last three hours, Boros reckoned they had lost four thousand men, and already Calgar had redeployed an entire division from the northern perimeter.

  Attacks were going in there too, but not on the same scale as here. They were probes, no more. This – this apocalypse in front of the gate – this was where the ork warlord was throwing the bulk of his armies, and it was here that the breakthrough would be made or foiled, and the fate of Zalathras decided.

  ‘He must have lost fifty thousand,’ Colonel Boros was saying in a shocked croak. ‘How can even orks take such ruinous casualties and keep coming?’

  ‘He has five times that behind them,’ Brother Mathias said calmly. ‘Orks do not lose heart at the sight of their own dead. In some ways it stirs them to greater efforts. The xenos are inspired by violence and war – it brings forth a latent strength in them, a berserker rage. The enemy warlord is utilising this. He counts on it.’

  ‘Then when will he stop?’ Boros asked.

  ‘When we are all dead,’ the Chaplain said simply.

  The earthshakers were falling, so close to the walls that the spattered earth of their concussion plastered the stone of the defences. Ork body parts and corpses were hurled clear over the battlements, and upon them the militia cowered from their own artillery, and the shrapnel smashed scars and gouges out of the walls that protected them.

  Two of the Leman Russes disintegrated in that great convulsion, but there were still six of them powering onwards, several trailing fire and smoke, one with its turret blown off and the ork crew visible in the hull. In their wake staggered a column of Dreadnoughts, stiff-limbed giants lurching through the muck. And behind that were mobs of heavily armed ork infantry, the elite of their kind.

  The Russes fired, one after the other. Calgar felt the strike in the very stone under his feet.

  ‘The gate is taking a pasting,’ Boros said.

  They had piled up masonry and girders against the gate, but they had not sealed it like they had the other entrances to the city. It was still a way in, and the orks knew it. The defenders had made a deliberate decision not to seal the Vanaheim completely, in order to draw the enemy to the strongest bastion on the walls.

  They had succeeded too well, perhaps. The adamantium-faced gate below them was as strong as any Calgar had seen in Ultramar – Kurt Vanaheim had spared no expense, especially since the Administratum was footing the bill for its construction. But no gate could take that kind of hammering for long.

  ‘Lascannons, resume fire,’ Calgar instructed.

  He longed to come to grips with the enemy, to unleash the rage that simmered in him, to grapple with the orks on the ground, hand to hand, and feel their lives give out under his fingers. But they had to be kept back, here. If they closed in on the Vanaheim, a breach would follow, as inevitably as night followed day. It could not be allowed. Calgar had only one card left to play.

  ‘Governor Fennick, do you read?’

  ‘Fennick here – yes, my lord.’

  ‘I need the Furies, right now. Armour is almost at the gate. It must be destroyed, at all costs. Do you understand, Fennick?’

  ‘Yes, my lord.’ There was the sound of burning over the vox. Forward Command itself must have been hit. ‘I shall see to it.’

  The Furies swept in low over the city, released from their secret hangars. Six of them had survived the initial fleet action and the bombardments since. Their pilots knew what they were up against and flew them like fearless veterans. Calgar heard the screech of their approach as they swooped down on the ork vanguard like vengeful angels.

  They came down from the near-vertical, released their bomb loads, and then soared up again in tight curves that blazed against the dying light in the sky. Two were shot down as they came in, and they crashed full tilt into the ranks of the orks below. Calgar saw an ork Dreadnought flung half a mile through the air by the blast.

  The rest did their job. The Leman Russes before the Vanaheim Gate were engulfed in a series of massive explosions that rippled around them and sent concentric shockwaves through the rain, radiating out to bounce in hollow booms off the walls.

  None of them made it back to their hidden hangars. All were shot down in a flailing cloud of ork fire that spanned the southern horizon. Their pilots had known it was a suicide run and had taken off without hesitation.

  There is hope for us yet, when these tyros can show such courag
e, Calgar thought.

  Multi-meltas were blurting out brightly now from the casements, and one or two missile launchers. The ork armour was finished off there before the gate, blown to blackened wreckage. The Dreadnoughts staggered to a halt in the thick mud amid the blazing wrecks of the Russes and were picked off one by one. Calgar felt the balance of the thing shift. He looked up at the sky. There was a roseate glow in the west; the long day was ending at last.

  The orks were retreating, like a tidal sea which has reached the fulcrum of its farthest point and now must ebb. Mortar fire followed them across the plain, taking a huge toll on the withdrawing troops. They pulled back sullenly, some turning to roar hatred and defiance at the walls of Zalathras as they went.

  For three to four miles in a great arc along the southern perimeter of the city, the ork hosts marched in untidy mobs back to their camps north of the Dromion River. Calgar called a halt to the mortar fire; they had to conserve ammunition. The orks did not seem like an army that had been beaten, but more like one that had tried one tactic and found it wanting. They were not going anywhere.

  ‘They’ll be back,’ Mathias said, echoing Calgar’s own conclusion. In the bunker, the militia were cheering and embracing one another and Colonel Boros had a grin that stretched from ear to ear.

  ‘I must take a look at the gate itself, Mathias,’ Calgar said. ‘Take over here. I want ammunition brought forward to the walls, and rations for the men. They may rest half a squad at a time.’

  ‘Night is coming,’ the Chaplain told him. As he looked out of the firing slot the red light of it gleamed in the lenses of his skull-helm. ‘The militia should be allowed as much rest as they can get. You know how these kind are. They fight one battle, and believe they have won a war.’

  ‘They did none so ill, brother,’ Calgar said.

  ‘For amateurs,’ Mathias retorted.

  Calgar met Fennick at the rear of Vanaheim’s great gate. The governor’s usually dapper uniform was dusty and torn. He looked as grimed and tired as a common trooper.