Cadia Stands

by Justin D Hill

  As the Unnamed hunted for survivors of the explosion, he came at a run, vaulting a sandbagged doorway, heavy inward-curved Brimlock kukri in one hand, bolt pistol in the other. The first three Unnamed spun backwards as the mass-reactive shells punched into them. The fourth was upon him before Rath could fire.

  Rath ducked an axe and cut upwards, slashing the heretic’s throat out with his heavy kukri, shouldered the corpse out of the way and drove forward.

  He took position in a doorway. ‘Find them!’ Rath shouted to the men who followed in his wake. He did not look behind. He knew they would hear. He knew there were more Unnamed to kill. He shot them as they charged down the street.

  Sergeant Taavi found Yegor first. He was still breathing, but not for long. He moved on. ‘Here!’ Guardsman Gunnel said.

  There was a boot sticking out from the rubble. Taavi pulled at the blocks and threw them aside.

  If one was Yegor the other had to be Minka. ‘Is she dead?’ Gunnel said.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Taavi hissed as he pulled the blocks of rockcrete aside.

  There was rockcrete in her mouth and nose. Minka kicked against the rubble as the hands reached down to free her. They dragged her up. She spat the grit from her mouth, stood unsteadily on her feet, carbine still in hand, and blinked her vision clear.

  Someone was holding her face. It was Taavi – his wide blue eyes staring at her. His mouth was moving. The explosion was still ringing in her ears. She read his lips. ‘Get back!’ he was shouting, but she could not.

  Taavi seemed to understand. He pointed. The blast had reshaped the rubble before her. It had reshaped Yegor too. His arm ended in a torn and ragged mess of cloth and flapping flesh. His legs were wrong; his body was folded in two.

  ‘Get back!’ Taavi shouted.

  One of the heretics had an autogun with a round barrel. It flashed as it sprayed the wall above her head. Taavi shoved her but Minka would not leave.

  ‘Yegor!’ she shouted, but it was too late for debate.

  She was thrown over a shoulder, her ribs bruising as whoever carried her jogged along, and found herself staring down at the ground, eight feet below her.

  Two

  Kasr Myrak

  When the war for Cadia had broken out, the defence of Kasr Myrak lay in the hands of General Stahl, a typical high-ranking Cadian veteran of a hundred and fifty years’ service. Drawn from the aristocracy, he was well liked and effective, and put the defences into good order.

  After the treachery at Tyrok Fields, Cadia was quickly swamped by traitor forces and Kasr Myrak was surrounded by a warband of perhaps ten million, who’d gathered like insects on the plains.

  They were a rabble. Their assaults had been haphazard and largely ineffective against the superior Cadian training and discipline, and their manner of war disgusted the defenders. It was heedless, disorganised, relied on bodies, not tactics, and at first the hopes of the Cadians had been high.

  Kasr Myrak’s turn had come on the forty-second day of the war for Cadia.

  After the void shields of their larger neighbour, Kasr Halig, had been overloaded, the vast fortress had been torn apart by a series of explosions that went from magazine to magazine.

  Finally, the atomic reactor went critical, and chunks of the city were thrown upwards by the force of the blast, leaving a crater half a mile deep. A huge part of the siege army had been destroyed in the explosions, but the elite forces – Iron Warriors and disciplined bands of traitor guard – had already started moving out.

  It had taken three days for the siege armies of the heretics to surround Kasr Myrak. The Cadians had endured a relentless bombardment, partly from orbiting space ships, and partly from the vast armies on the plains. The Shock Troopers had retaliated with wall-mounted Basilisk batteries and vast tower-mounted defence lasers. They had pummelled the forces of the heretics with great blue-white bolts of energy that stabbed out into the gloom.

  Each day the Unnamed attacked like rabid dogs: snarling and slathering, bounding on without fear or pain or order, deploying massed armoured and infantry assaults made up of untrained, inhuman scum.

  On the fourth day of the assault, spotters reported the first sight of iron-clad Space Marines towering over the heretic hordes. Just the rumour of Iron Warriors had brought a solemn air to the mess halls and guard chambers within the outer bastion walls.

  The Iron Warriors were here; every Guardsman knew that the fight for life had begun.

  Overnight the heretic Space Marines raised great earthworks and began to push towards the outer walls, keeping up their momentum despite the approaching barrage. Tech-priests detected the tremor of mole-mines excavating ponderously towards them, while a storm of lance strikes rained down on the void shields, making the air fizz with ozone.

  For a week the fighting was ferocious and bloody. During the day flocks of arrow-shaped black bombers rained vast spiked frag charges and incendiary canisters down on the city streets. At night, the skies were barred with the beams of streaming search lights and the red tracer fire of Hydra defence platforms; each dawn brought the sight of the Iron Warriors’ earthworks creeping gradually closer to the outer walls.

  Demolition squads rushed out of armoured sally ports in up-armoured Chimeras, their multi-lasers spewing out searing bolts. The Cadians threw themselves at the Iron Warriors but had to fight their way through cultist slaves, who blunted their advance with melta bombs and demolition charges.

  Few Cadians returned from these missions, but each attack slowed the relentless assault for precious hours. On the fifth day, troops on the West Gate felt the tremor of mole-mines approaching the walls and teams of Cadian civilians dug counter-mines. The Cadians sent in demolition squads of their own, then flooded the Iron Warriors’ tunnels with toxic slime and radioactive coolants.

  It was on the afternoon of the fifth day that the first Iron Warriors mole-mine exploded under the North-East Bastion. The blast was immense. A whole section of wall lifted into the air and then crashed down in ruins. With a howl, tens of thousands of cultists charged. The number and fury of their charge rocked the defenders back and brought them right up to the cliffs of rubble. A few cultists started to clamber up the sacred walls of the kasr before the blizzard of las and autocannon rounds cut them down in heaps.

  On the sixth day, two more mole-mines exploded near the south gate, and there was ferocious fighting, this time hand to hand, as the heretics crested the rubble walls and had to be driven back with flamer and bayonet.

  The battle went on into the night, with repeated assaults of daemon tanks, heretics and kill-teams of Black Legion Adeptus Astartes that swooped in, bolt pistols barking with each shot, chainswords spraying blood and gore across the walls.

  On the seventh day, whole sections of the outer walls were reduced to ash and rockcrete rubble.

  Rath’s 94th kasrkin had held the line that night and the enemy’s grand assault began after dawn – a frenzied, howling charge of mutants and heretics and those driven insane by the violence and the darkness.

  Ten thousand Unnamed made the first charge. They died to a man, cut down by scathing salvos of disciplined lasrifle fire, withering support from heavy bolter and autocannon squads, and precise shots from the surviving gun turrets and bastions. The heretics lay in heaps ten-deep, when at last they fell back, mewling and howling curses at the defenders.

  That evening a mole-mine penetrated the magazine, deep in the bowels of the rockcrete bastion. The armoured walls acted like a seal on the explosion, which vented out through the doors and loop-holes before it tore the ancient rockcrete fortress apart. The void shields flickered and fell. Under a barrage of orbital bombardments and massed assaults, the walls had been attacked at all points at once, hemmed in to the south banks of the Myrak River.

  On the morning of the eighth day, the warband of the Black Legion champion Druxus Bale battered the defenders
with close-range Vindicator shells. Once the Cadians had been driven back, Druxus’ warbands charged across the open ground in Land Raiders that mounted the rubble cliffs, shrugging off a blizzard of las-fire.

  Flamers gouted out under the smoke-filled sky. Assault ramps slammed down as bolters killed the last Guardsmen, then power armour-clad Black Legion warriors stormed out, the mass-reactive shells of their bolters hitting the defenders with unerring aim, punching through carapace and flak armour and exploding the Cadians from within.

  The sudden, precise and overwhelming assault swept the defenders away from the Southern Gates and down into the city. The hand-to-hand fighting was fierce and brutal, as tens of thousands of heretics swarmed up behind them and drove the Cadians back.

  General Stahl led the defence in person, a bodyguard of elite carapace-armoured kasrkin about him. For a moment they had thrown Druxus back, knocking Black Legion Terminators off the walls, but then the Chaos Warlord had shoved his way to the fore.

  He was a giant warrior in baroque warplate, bald head covered with obscene tattoos. In the hands of the Chaos champion was a crackling sword of blue fire. He singled Stahl out.

  ‘For Cadia!’ the general shouted, and threw himself at the enemy. He had fenced with the finest in the Cadian Shock Troop, and with an heirloom power sword and faith in the Emperor, he felt sure of victory.

  His first blow scored a deep groove in the Terminator’s pauldron, the second drove through the layers of ablative armour – a fine blow that drove Druxus back for a moment.

  But Druxus was ancient long before Stahl was born, and it took more than a power sword to lay him low. He caught the blade in his open hand and broke it in half with a crackle of energy.

  Stahl refused to give way. He drew his hot-shot laspistol and stood his ground. ‘In the name of the God Emperor of Mankind,’ he shouted, as Druxus laughed.

  ‘The False Emperor,’ the Chaos champion snarled as he tossed away the shards of the power sword. He caught Stahl by the chest and threw him to the ground.

  Stahl staggered back to his feet as his kasrkin ran to his side.

  Druxus killed them all with a sweep of his axe that cut Stahl in half.

  With the breach in the wall and the death of the commander, Kasr Myrak had, as far as the forces of the Black Legion were concerned, fallen. Iron Warriors, Black Legion and elite mortal units moved on to the next siege and left Kasr Myrak to be plundered by the maddened hordes of heretics and cultists.

  Hopelessly outnumbered, the Cadians were driven back, block by block, exacting massive casualties on the enemy – but losses they could afford to take.

  Rath was on the West Gate when that last assault began. His regiment, the 94th, ‘Brothers of Death’, massed heavy bolters that cleared broad kill zones about their bastion.

  ‘Never!’ he shouted shortly after the heretics’ grand assault began. Their manner of war disgusted Rath. It relied on insane, bestial ferocity. It lacked training and discipline. And worst of all, it was winning.

  The next assault came minutes later, with the same result. Rath cursed and shouted as the enemy fired wildly, casually squandering supplies. The dead lay six-deep before the eastern gate, where Rath stood with his men when news broke that the southern walls had been breached.

  Cadia was not a planet; it was a fortress built on a planetary scale, its natural geography reshaped to allow defence in depth. Its cities, known as kasr, were fortresses with resident garrisons of hundreds of thousands designed, not for the comfort of their inhabitants, but to be death zones to invaders. Market places and street corners were set with bunkers and redoubts and emplacements. They were designed to be defended for months, or years, if necessary. The long-dead architects of the Imperium had made no concessions for comfort or fashion. Any attack would be mired in tunnels, switchback roads, blockhouse ground floors, overhanging buildings, with pill-boxes and gun emplacements built into living rooms, public auditoriums and mess halls.

  There were ammo dumps deep in the bunkers of bakeries and hab-blocks; hab-blocks with reinforced buttresses and vision slits for windows; and there were bastions with landing pads on their roofs, and roofs so thick with reinforced rockcrete that they were practically invulnerable to anything except the heaviest bombardment.

  ‘Take to the city!’ his commanding officer had shouted to Rath. ‘Make them pay for every inch! Understand?’

  It was the last order Rath had been given by a superior officer. He was his own master now.

  No one else knew how to drive him harder.

  Three

  Statue Square

  For the last six days, Rath’s company had made their base along the south side of Statue Square. The monumental buildings there offered good cover from air attacks and they had a symbolic significance. The Cadians held on, despite all attacks.

  The field hospital filled the narrow gap between the museum and the veterans’ hall. Morag Geran had to turn sideways to enter the gap. He set Minka down with a gentleness that belied his size.

  Before the war, all Minka had known about ogryns was that they were giant abhumans whose strength made up for a lack of intelligence. But Geran was anything but stupid. His wide mouth and blunt brown fangs did not work well on a human level. Speaking Gothic seemed like a great effort for him, as if he were translating everything he said from grunts to words, but his mismatched eyes – one brown, one blue – spoke louder than his voice. He kept saying her name. ‘Ninka. Ninka.’ His brows knotted, and he stared down at her, full of compassion and worry.

  ‘I’m fine.’ Minka pushed herself up gingerly. Her body hurt all over. Images came back to her: the explosion, the darkness, Yegor crumpled in the dust.

  ‘Frekk,’ she said. ‘There was a stubber.’

  Geran looked almost bashful as he showed her the stubber with its ammo feed. ‘I got it,’ he said. He pulled the bolt back. It pinged with a satisfying sound of a round being loaded into the firing chamber. He grinned blunt brown teeth. ‘Works!’ he said.

  Minka forced a smile. It seemed a poor trade.

  ‘I kill for Yegor,’ Geran said.

  ‘Good,’ she said.

  The six hundred men and women of Rath’s company were all that was left of the hundred and thirty thousand defenders of Kasr Myrak who had started the siege a hundred and eight days earlier. Six hundred fighting men, women and children – at the last count, which was two days before. Two days of constant retreat, when they had fallen back to the southern side of Statue Square.

  They were Shock Troopers, mostly of the 94th, 45th, 772nd and Kasr Myrak’s own 87th. But there were others too, Whiteshields like Minka, civilians, and survivors of other units who had come to fight on Cadia – regiments whose roll calls had once numbered in the thousands, but were now only a bare handful of names.

  On that morning they held all the ruins between Statue Square and the river, where the tightly packed habs and warehouses and gantries lined the banks. They had about a month left of fighting before they were all wiped out. Less, if the Unnamed kept up this rate of attack.

  The Unnamed had been attacking solidly for fifteen days now, the waves of heretics rising and crashing and falling back, like the waves of the sea. The tide was rising as Medicae Rone cleared Minka and she dusted herself down and picked her way to the barricades on the south side of the blockaded street.

  She looked out from the sandbagged doorway as the Unnamed came down the broad thoroughfare of Imperial Parade. Minka winced as she pulled her carbine to her shoulder, which hurt. Twenty, then fifty, and suddenly there were hundreds of them, a wall of bodies with axes and clubs and serrated knives. She aimed and fired and winced, and aimed again.

  All around her Rath’s company took up their positions. They lay behind loop-holes, knelt in sandbagged windows and doorways, perched in the ruins as the Unnamed charged into the open.

  They howled as they
charged, and were mown down by enfilading fire from heavy-weapons teams hidden in the flanking buildings on Gold Street and Museum Street. Minute after minute, hour after hour, they kept coming, until Minka’s shoulder was agony and her trigger finger ached, and she willed – prayed – for this to be over.

  ‘Hold fire,’ Rath shouted suddenly. ‘Hold your fire!’

  Minka paused, and one by one the fighters about her lowered their rifles. But the Unnamed were still falling, and Minka suddenly saw what Rath had seen. Their enemies were falling to shots fired from behind.

  ‘Think our relief has come?’ Sergeant Taavi asked.

  Rath gave him a withering look. There was no relief. ‘The forces of Chaos understand only force. What this means is that there’s something bigger and tougher pushing the Unnamed forward. And we need to know who they are…’ He gave Taavi a meaningful look.

  Five minutes later Sergeant Taavi was crouched in the sewer with five hand-picked men. He loosened his knife in its boot-sheath and nodded to the rest of his makeshift squad: Theo, Malfred, Ulant and Delunt.

  ‘You should have kept your mouth shut,’ Delunt said.

  ‘Should have never joined the Guard.’ Taavi laughed. He’d grown up in Kasr Myrak and if he was going to die it seemed fitting that he should be back here to do so.

  He knew the sewers well. It had been part of his cadet training – to know the city above and below ground – and before the war, Taavi had known a pretty young cadet who lived in one of these blocks. They’d hung around in the sewers together until he was shipped off-world. Alyona was her name. Her smell came back to him, for a moment, despite the stink of smoke and ashes all about him. Taavi checked the grenade on his bandolier. He’d taken it from a fellow Cadian’s corpse that morning, and he patted it for luck.

  Rath’s signal came – a simple tap-tap, tap-tap-tap of a finger on a vox-bead.

  Taavi gave each of his squad a curt nod. His shotgun was loaded with all the shells he had left. He made a silent prayer to the Golden Throne and threw the wooden cover back.