FOUR
For the third time in as many hours, the wave of black-cloaked cultists charged across the square. And, for the third time in as many hours, they were met with a withering hail of fire from the defenders behind the makeshift barricades.
From his position atop the shattered stump of what had once been a tall statue of the blessed Sebastian Thor, Confessor Johann Devane directed his flock’s volleys of gunfire, heedless of enemy snipers. “Holy Terrors” the commanders of the Imperial Guard disparagingly called the Frateris Militia, believing the religious-inspired armed laity of the Imperial Faith to be as much a danger to themselves and any other Imperial forces they were serving alongside as they were to the enemy. Still, right now, Devane would be glad to match and compare his flock’s resolve and fighting spirit with that of any regiment in the entire Imperial Guard.
“Keep at them!” he exhorted. “Let them draw close and fire only when you’re sure of your target! If you run out of ammunition, take up the nearest weapon at hand and join your brethren amongst the second line of defence!”
A stub gun round whined off the arm of the overturned statue behind Devane. The Imperial confessor looked around, seeing a planetary defence force trooper in a uniform dyed black with smeared mud and engine oil kneeling on a pile of shattered masonry and readjusting his aim for the follow-up shot. Devane raised his own autogun and fired. The deserter screamed and fell off the pile, clutching at his face. With no shortage of targets to choose from, Devane kept firing, sending short, precise bursts of bullets into the body of heretic after heretic.
Devane saw a hail of Molotov cocktails sail up from the cultist attack wave, the missiles breaking in fiery explosions amongst the ranks of the defenders. Fearful screams and the smell of burning flesh rose up from behind the barricades. Devane sighted on one of the firebomb-throwing cultists, a burst of devastatingly accurate autogun fire exploding the missile just a moment after it left the thrower’s hand. A blanket of burning promethium drenched the cultist and those around him, setting alight their robes and transforming them in seconds into living, screaming fire manikins. In their terror and pain, they ran blindly amongst their own ranks, setting others alight and spreading the fear and confusion even further into the cultists’ attack.
“See? The fires of the Emperor’s wrath consume them!” called Devane, knowing all too well how positively the zealots of the Frateris Militia responded to such fire-and-brimstone rhetoric. “Shine the burning radiance of the Emperor’s glory upon them! Cast them back into the darkness of the warp!”
Slight of figure and clean-shaven, Devane knew he little resembled the fiery, wild-eyed and bearded figures of the confessor of the Imperial Faith familiar from so many stirring Ecclesiarchy myths and histories. Yet in the eyes of his flock, he stood taller and more awesome than the fifty-metre tall statue that still guarded the main archway entrance to the cathedral square. A month ago, when he was still a lowly and anonymous preacher in one of thee rural parishes far to the south of the capital, he had gathered his flock together and told them that if they were doomed to die, then it would be better to wait for the end in the sanctuary of the great Ecclesiarchy cathedral in Madina, where they could spend their final days in prayer and contemplation before finally commending their souls to the Emperor. This pilgrimage to the capital had been long and danger-fraught. Many had fallen along the way, killed in the violent chaos that had enveloped all of Belatis, but many more had joined them, drawn by this unknown country preacher’s quiet intensity and the promise of a safe and holy refuge in which to wait out their final days, and when Devane finally arrived in Madina five days ago, it was at the head of something by then resembling a small army of pilgrim followers.
If they had expected to find the planetary capital, the very seat of Imperial authority here on Belatis, exempt from the disorder that ruled elsewhere, they were soon disappointed.
Armed gangs of looters and bandits roamed the city, preying on anyone who crossed their path. Much of the city was in flames, with loyalist and renegade PDF forces conducting artillery duels over the ruins. The governor-regent’s palace was still intact, protected by an impenetrable defence shield and guarded by the elite troops of the palace guard, but the rule of the Emperor’s law on Belatis now extended no further than the main Arbites citadel-courthouse and the Administratum buildings and dormitories clustered close within its protective shadow. When he and his followers reached the cathedral, they found it under the fragile protection of a makeshift, defence force mainly composed of aged, non-combatant Ministorum priests, keen but disorganized Frateris Militia laity and nervous young acolyte adepts who barely knew which way up to hold a lasgun. There had also been a small force of Adeptus Arbites, but they had orders to pull out and rejoin the main courthouse garrison on the far side of the city prior to final evacuation. There were reports that heretic cultists were descending on the capital from all directions, and the necessary decision had been made to concentrate all remaining Imperial forces on the defence of the Arbites courthouse and the governor-regent’s palace.
The Ecclesiarch cathedral, isolated from the other two remaining pillars of Imperial authority on the far side of the river that divided Madina, would have to fend for itself in these final few days of the planet’s life. As would the tens of thousands of pilgrim refugees who had flocked to the cathedral in search of sanctuary.
Devane, who had answered the calling of the Ministorum priesthood after almost twenty years service as an officer in the Divine Emperor’s armies, the 415th Mordian Iron Guard, no less—the famous “Old Indefatigables” who had forged themselves a legendary reputation during the months of the bloody climax of the Karnak Crusade—now found himself, thirteen years after being released from service in the Imperial Guard, once again called upon to take up arms against the enemies of the Emperor.
Immediately, he had begun putting his military experience to use. The huge cathedral square, with so many entrances and approaches leading into it was, he quickly realised, indefensible given the quality and quantity of troops and weapons that he had. He had ordered a barricade circle to be built round the towering cathedral edifice, giving the defenders sheltering behind it a clear field of fire across the open expanse of the surrounding square. Statues and monolithic plinths honouring some of the Imperial Faith’s greatest heroes and martyrs were ruthlessly pulled down and dragged into position; vehicles were overturned and employed as barricade building blocks, the contents of their fuel tanks carefully drained and stored away as part of an arsenal of hundreds of guerrilla warfare firebombs. Even the pews, pulpits and choir transepts inside the cathedral great hall had been ripped out and used to build the barricade.
The Arbitrators had left what weapons and ammunition they could, and the cathedral had its own hidden weapons stores, but neither were enough to completely arm his rag-tag army of defenders or fend off their attackers. And so Devane had had to improvise.
Every third defender was armed with some kind of gun, typically a lasgun or autogun, although the Arbitrators had blessedly left them with a few precious autocannons and heavy bolters to supplement the Frateris Militia cache of flamers and heavy stubbers. When one of the gun-armed defenders fell in battle, one of his unarmed brethren took up his weapon and assumed the dead man’s place on the barricades. So far, this strategy was working, and Devane knew that there were men on the barricades whose weapons had been in the hands of four or five previous owners in just the last two days. Meanwhile, those defenders without guns were armed with any kind of close-combat weapon that came to hand, and it was their duty to form the secondary line of defence, engaging in bloody bouts of hand-to-hand combat with any cultist attackers who made it through the hail of fire and attempted to break through the barricades.
And, behind them, was a third and final line of defenders. Women and children, the wounded and the elderly, armed with firebombs or even cobblestones torn up from the surface of the paved square, hurled a rain of missiles over the barricad
es and onto the heads of their attackers.
These people—his new-found flock—would fight to the death, Devane realised. When they were overwhelmed on the barricades, as they surely soon must be, they would fall back and try to hold the gateway entrances to the cathedral building itself, and when the heretics broke through those, then they would defend the cathedral corridor by corridor, chapel by chapel, crypt by crypt, laying down their lives in defence of the House of the Emperor Divine and in defiance of his heretic enemies. They understood their lives were forfeit, Devane knew; now they wished only for their deaths to have meaning, for by sacrificing their lives in the service of the Emperor they would be assured an honoured place in the afterlife, seated by the Emperor’s right hand.
Devane saw the remains of the heretic attack wave break against the barricades, the second rank of defenders sheltering behind the barricades rushing forward to meet them. The battle descended into a series of vicious hand-to-hand struggles along the tops of the barricades. Devane saw a cultist with a brace of frag and krak grenades strapped to his body climb the barricade and throw himself down upon the defenders on the other side, detonating in their midst in an explosion that killed or injured more than a dozen and blew a clear breach in that section of the barricade ring.
A human bomb, he grimly realised. They had been seeing more and more of these devastating living weapons in the last few days as the planet’s end approached and the suicidal mania grew in the minds of all those still trapped upon it. There were those amongst his own laity who would gladly accept such a death in the name of the Emperor, Devane knew, but as a former Imperial Guard officer his every instinct was repelled at the thought. In the Emperor’s armies, only the worst kind of penal regiment scum—criminals, deserters, cowards and heretics—were used in this way, and Devane could not countenance employing such a tactic using the Emperor’s faithful and devout servants.
Elsewhere, he saw a young boy wearing the robes of a novice acolyte of the Ministorum—the lad was barely old enough to have started shaving, Devane judged—expertly bayoneting a tattoo-faced cultist, spearing the heretic madman through the heart with one well-judged thrust. The cultist’s lifeless body tumbled away down the barricade slope to join the growing mound of black-garbed copses heaped there.
Another cultist, roaring in defiance, his giant body streaming with blood from half a dozen near-mortal wounds, scaled the barricade, swinging a razor-edged, machine-tooled hand-axe and decapitating the Frateris Militia defender that rose up to meet him. Then, at the top of the barricade, a hurled cobblestone smashed into his head. His skull crashed, he fell amongst the waiting defenders on the other side of the barricade. Bellowing in pain, he was immediately set upon by a pack of women and children who savagely beat him to death with clubs and bloodied rocks.
Devane drew his old Imperial Guard chainsword and threw himself into the fray, hacking and slashing into the press of black-cloaked bodies and shouting whatever stirring exhortations that he could remember from the more bloodthirsty passages of the Approved Litanies of Devotion.
“Father confessor, beware!” shouted one of the frateris in warning, suddenly throwing himself in front of Devane and taking a heretic sword thrust intended for the Imperial preacher. Devane swung his chainsword in fury, severing the heretic’s sword arm with his first blow and laying open their chest with the return sweep. The heretic—a woman, Devane saw, with a shock—fell away with a gurgling death-scream.
Devane knelt down over the dying frateris brother, recognising the man as one of the group of sharecropper farmers who had joined the pilgrimage at the end of the first week of their journey. Devane realised with regret that he had never learned the man’s name.
“Father… My wife and children, my sister’s family too,” choked the dying man, reaching with a wavering hand to grasp the burnished silver medallion image of the Emperor Ascendant that Devane wore round his neck. “They are sheltering inside the cathedral, father…”
“The Emperor will watch over them,” Devane assured him, recognising the helpless fear in the dying man’s eyes, pressing his hands to the medallion image. “As will I,” he added, seeing the man’s features relax in contentment just seconds before the moment of death.
“Walk in the light of the Emperor Divine, brother,” he intoned quietly, touching the medallion image to the dead man’s lips and forehead in the traditional Blessing of the Fallen.
The Imperial preacher took up his chainsword again, keen to take out his rising rage on the Emperor’s enemies, but all around him he saw that this latest phase of the siege of the Ecclesiarchy cathedral was coming to an end. What was left of the cultist attack wave was fleeing back in retreat across the cathedral square. Gunfire from the barricade defenders chased them on their way. Devane understood the gunners’ sense of bloody-handed triumph and desire to punish their enemies further, but there were other more tactically vital considerations to be made.
“Cease fire!” he bellowed. “Conserve ammunition! Don’t waste your shots. Save them for the next time they come at us!”
Other voices took up the cry all along the barricade lines, and the ragged volleys of gunfire quickly died away; silence suddenly and shockingly descending on the open expanse of the corpse-strewn square.
Quickly, while the surrounding cultists were still reeling from the failure of the latest attack, packs of small, nimble figures scurried up over the tops of the barricades and began foraging amongst the carpet of dead and dying heretics. They began collecting weapons and ammunition from amongst the enemy dead, despatching any wounded and still-living heretics they came across with quick thrusts of the sharp-bladed knives they carried.
They moved fast, trying to keep one step ahead of the enemy snipers who were now beginning to open fire at them from the far side of the square. They were women, children, the walking wounded and any other non-combatants who had volunteered for this perilous but very necessary task; better to risk their lives to a sniper’s bullet, ran the cold-blooded tactical doctrine, than that of an able-bodied fighting man. Devane knew the tactic was a good one, but still it sickened him to have to put it into practice.
Children, he thought to himself, wondering how much further the planet-wide madness would go as Belatis’s final extinction loomed ever closer. Now we are using children to wage our wars.
Suddenly a chattering stream of heavy stubber fire ripped across the square, shattering cobblestones, making corpses jump and dance under the impact of high-speed bullets into flesh and cutting across the path of one of the small running figures. The child screamed and fell, and kept screaming as it writhed in agony amongst the corpses, in clear view of the enemy snipers. A second burst from the same weapon would have mercifully finished the victim off, but Devane knew that mercy was not something the enemy was capable of.
It was a trap, he knew. The injured child was bait designed to lure others out into the snipers’ sights, and, even as Devane watched, two frateris brethren scrambled over the barricades and ran to the child’s aid. Devane cursed aloud their foolishness and at the same time offered a silent prayer for their protection. Neither man was truly a fool, Devane saw. They ran in crazy zigzag patterns, defying the snipers an easy shot at a linear-moving target, and made sure to keep their distance from each other, forcing the snipers to choose between them. It was a brave and bold action, well thought-out and properly executed.
It almost worked.
The first man went down five metres short of the child’s position. A las-bolt caught him high in the left shoulder and spun him. He staggered, fell to the ground and attempted to rise again, but by that time the other snipers too had found him. Seen from the barricades, he looked like a puppet being jerked on its strings as the volleys of bullets and las-blasts plucked and pulled at his flesh.
The second man took advantage of the gruesome display his comrade was performing for the enemy’s entertainment. He ran to the child, scooping him up into his arms and turned to ran back towards the barri
cades, taking only a few steps before the snipers tired of their sport with their other victim and turned on him instead.
Bullets and las-blasts ricocheted off the cobbles around him. He tried zigzagging again to evade the snipers’ aim, but this time he was moving more slowly, weighed down by the body of the child, and now the snipers had only one target to concentrate on.
The first shot caught him in the small of the back. He staggered, but did not fall. Still carrying the now still form of the child, he abandoned the zigzagging run and instead made straight for the safety of the barricades, sniper fire snapping at his heels. From the barricades, men shouted praise and encouragement, every defender there willing their brother on. Seeing the man’s plight, the Ecclesiarch protector in Devane won out over the military tactician.
“Open fire!” he ordered, telling himself that the expenditure of their precious ammunition reserves would be worth it in terms of the morale boost if by some Emperor-ordained miracle the man actually made it back with the child to the cover of the barricades. “Cover him. Lay down suppressing fire on those sniper positions!”
A wave of gunfire crashed across the square, peppering the ancient stonework facades of the public buildings and rich mercantile townhouses that lined the fringes of the square where the main body of the heretic forces was sheltering. Devane doubted that this noisy and profligate expenditure of their limited ammunition supply would result in many enemy casualties—the range was too great for accurate shooting, and the accuracy of the frateris gunners was variable, at best—but it would hopefully force some of the snipers to keep their heads down, giving the man all that more chance to make it to safety.
Devane could not hear the snipers’ fire over the sounds of the defenders’ volleys, but he knew that at least some of them were still shooting. He saw the man stumble twice more on his journey back to the barricade, assuming with a sinking heart that each stumble came from another bullet hit. When, at last, he somehow made it to the foot of the barricades, half a dozen defenders scrambled down to help him, a sea of hands reached out to lift him and the child up over the top of the barricade.
[Battlefleet Gothic 01] - Execution Hour Page 16