Cadia Stands

by Justin D Hill

  He prepared, as best as he could, in depth around the domed hab-block. About it there were walls of stacked containers, the kitchen block, a line of wrecked Arvus lighters. Heavy-weapons teams dug foxholes. Any gaps were filled with Aegis lines and ice trenches that offered wide fields of enfilading fire.

  Grüber divided the command of the line into four. Each of his best commanders was put in charge of a quarter. They set up their own HQ bastions. Each of the bastions was independent of the others so that if one should fall the others would not be affected. Grüber set up his defence in the domed hab. He kept his tanks back, in a central, mobile reserve, while half his available Baneblades were dug in as massive support bastions, ready to pummel the enemy with their devastating firepower.

  A hand-picked bodyguard of Cadian kasrkin accompanied the general as he made his rounds of each of the points of defence. About half his forces had hostile environment suits. The rest made do with greatcoats and a triple issue of Cadian drab, which sufficed.

  It was not as if the campaign would last that long, Grüber thought.

  Lalinc was scanning the horizon with his scopes. ‘They’re moving in,’ Lalinc said as he faced north.

  Grüber gave the skyline a brief glance. He was not worried yet. ‘They’re just taking their time,’ he said. ‘We’ll know when the attack is coming.’

  The first ranging shots came half an hour later: lance strikes from orbit hammering down. The first three hit the ice fields before the bastion. The superheated beams sent a gout of steam and ice up into the air. The fourth hit the void shield and the air crackled with blue light, and then the shot was dissipated and the void shield held.

  Grüber looked up and seemed satisfied. He hated the waiting. He just wanted the thing to start. It was easier to react than to kick one’s heels.

  For twenty minutes the strikers hovered overhead and pummelled the ice fields about them. Lalinc seemed jubilant. ‘They’re fools!’ he shouted over the din as the flat ice fields were churned up. ‘They’ll have to get through that!’

  Grüber put his hand on his sword hilt. ‘That won’t slow them down.’

  Lalinc didn’t understand. Grüber pointed. ‘They’re giving themselves cover.’

  Lalinc looked again and saw the flat kill zones were now a confused landscape of ice and crater fields.

  At that moment a thin white cloud appeared in the blue of the sky above them. Within seconds there were fifteen, twenty contrails arrowing down towards them. Grüber nodded to Lalinc, and the alarm was sounded, orders repeated, prayers said to the Golden Throne. ‘Cadia stands!’ Grüber shouted, and the warcry was echoed from trench to trench as the Hydras and Sabre weapon platforms opened up with streams of tracers burning liquid red lines into the sky.

  A thrill went through the thousands of Guardsmen. After a hundred days in the burning hell of Cadia, Faith’s Anchorage seemed hard but clean. The first drop pods impacted. As the petal doors slammed down, a hail of missiles and bolter fire hosed out in all directions. The effect on the Cadians was minimal, but it forced them to keep their heads down as the second wave of drop pods hit; and this time the giant figures of Renegade Astartes leaped out in their suits of power armour, their once-proud livery of black and white quarters now defaced with heretical symbols and carvings.

  Sanctioned Psyker Ruut stood with the command squad of Fifth Bastion, on the north side of the base. Behind them sat the metal bulk of the Baneblade, Pugilist. Ruut could feel the fear of the men, the anticipation of battle. It was a heady, almost overpowering sensation as the psychic tension rose to the ultimate pitches, and then the shooting started and he felt the relief and focus of the men about him start to tingle in his toes and fingertips.

  ‘Are you well?’ Ivann said.

  ‘Well,’ Ruut responded.

  Ivaan nodded. It was his job to shoot Ruut should the psyker show signs of corruption. Ivann had shot two of the last three psykers he’d been assigned to. It was good practice to check in regularly. Corruption could come almost instantaneously.

  If in doubt, his instructor had always told him, shoot.

  ‘Do you have faith?’ Ivann said.

  Ruut swayed. ‘Faith in the Emperor,’ he responded as he felt the wave of psychic power building in him. The natural instinct of an untrained mind was to unleash one’s powers the minute a target presented itself. But Imperial-sanctioned psykers were not like wild men and shamans. They were as well honed as a standard issue bayonet, as well disciplined as the troops they served with.

  The shooting grew closer. Ruut groaned as he held his power back inside him. A drop pod hit fifty yards to his left, the superheated metal melting a hole in the ice as the assault ramps slammed down.

  In an instant, there was a furious firefight as the men and women of Cadia unleashed all they had on the warriors within. A storm of las-bolts and heavy bolter rounds pummelled the drop pod openings, but despite it all, from the steam and smoke and fumes ten power-armoured figures leaped out.

  One landed in a trenchwork, his upper torso visible as he slaughtered the unseen Guardsmen within. Another swung his flamer in a low, wide arc, incinerating more Cadians. A third knelt and singled out the bastion’s commander from his shoulder epaulettes.

  ‘Sir. Look out!’ one of the command squad shouted, pushing the captain sideways, and the round hit the man behind him, spraying red across the back of the trench.

  The Baneblade Macharius Star covered the southern approaches, where the men of the combined 34th, 98th, 664th and 2003rd Cadians drove the attacking Traitor Marines back into the crater fields. A ferocious firefight strobed the ice. As the Cadians’ heavy-weapons teams were engaged, the tanks of the enemy rolled forward.

  ‘Predator,’ the chief gunner, Ruslan, reported. He could see its turret, just peeking above an ice shelf, the twinned lascannons traversing as it lined up a shot at them.

  ‘Krak,’ he ordered, and the long, pointed, anti-tank shell was slid into the breech of the Baneblade’s main battle cannon. There was a slam of metal and the low squeak of the locking mechanism, and then he fired.

  The whole tank shook with recoil. It took a moment for him to zero in again. The shell had taken the top off the ice bank, but it looked like the enemy vehicle had escaped. He panned round, looking for another target as the foredeck Demolisher cannon fired, and the fore gunner team whooped.

  ‘Got them!’ Yury shouted.

  ‘Well done!’ Ruslan called down to him. Yury had started the war as a powder boy, and now he was a better gunner than Ruslan himself. As long as he kept his cool. ‘Look for the next one now. Keep focused.’

  Ruslan sighted a squadron of bikes racing towards them. There were three, the sidecar gunners engaging the bastion alongside them.

  The riders had not seen the Baneblade’s turret swing towards them. It was almost too easy. ‘Ready?’ Ruslan called. He was so eager for a kill.

  ‘Ready!’ his team replied. Ruslan did not wait for a second longer and fired.

  The recoil threw them back once more.

  The ice erupted in a blizzard of snow. When it cleared there was a crater scattered with dark scraps of burning wreckage. ‘Kill,’ he confirmed. ‘All three of them!’

  There was a cheer from the fore and aft gun teams.

  ‘About time you lot helped,’ Daniil called out from the port sponson. His lascannon had been jamming on Cadia and he’d spent the entire journey stripping the gun mountings down and fitting it all back together.

  Ruslan felt magnanimous now that he’d got his first kill in. ‘How’s the lascannon moving?’ he shouted as he panned for another target.

  ‘Very nicely,’ Daniil called back. There was a flash as the lascannon fired. ‘You should ask that frekking power-armoured giant…’ he said. ‘Oh, but you can’t, I just shot his head off.’ Daniil swung his weapon mountings round, and then there was a sudden flash
and bang, and the chamber was filled with fumes.

  ‘What the hell?’ Yury shouted, but they all knew what had happened, even before the smoke cleared and Leonid pulled Daniil’s body from his seat. Daniil’s clothes were burned and smoking. His whole right side was red and raw, the skin burned away.

  He flopped sideways, his head chiming a low, dull note on the Baneblade’s metal hull. ‘Dead,’ Leonid said. He dragged Daniil’s body to the back, by the magazine.

  ‘Did it overheat?’ Ruslan called down, and Yury bent and waved away the smoke. He saw the lascannon trigger at the same time that he saw the neat, round hole that had been blasted through the Baneblade’s four-inch ceramite hull.

  He was about to speak when a grenade was thrown through the hole.

  ‘Grenade!’ His shout gave everyone a moment’s warning.

  It was not enough. The explosion filled the Baneblade with a storm of metal fragments. The smoke was still clearing when Ruslan saw a leg. He had no idea if it was his. He was still dragging himself up from the floor when heavy footsteps rang out on the top of the tank.

  They seemed almost casual as they strode to the back of the great tank and then stopped. Ruslan suddenly understood. The figure was standing above the magazine.

  He panicked for a moment, then saw that his gun team had closed the magazine doors.

  ‘Thank the Throne,’ he thought, as the silence went on a few seconds longer. The magazine was heavily reinforced with layers of ceramite and ablative shielding. It would take a–

  The multi-melta tore through the inches of shielding as if they were wet paper.

  Macharius Star was the first Baneblade to die that day.

  Sanctioned Psyker Ruut was crouching in the angle of the trench. He kept his head low. The air above him sizzled with ozone. Las-bolts hissed as they hit the snow. The bark of bolters was constant. His pistol remained holstered. His fingers tensed and stretched. He felt the power ready within him.

  ‘Where is your faith?’ Ivann hissed. His mentor was just behind him.

  ‘In the Emperor,’ Ruut said.

  He could feel them coming towards him. Cadians were backing down the trench, their lasrifles at their shoulders, ready.

  Suddenly they flew backwards, mass-reactive shells jerking their bodies like marionettes. The ice walls dripped with gobbets of human flesh. There was wet on Ruut’s face. He wiped it off, saw blood on his sleeve. He had seen worse.

  ‘Ready?’ Ruut said.

  Ivann nodded.

  ‘Right,’ Ruut said. ‘Let’s go for it.’

  The sanctioned psyker stepped forward. Down the stretch of the trench a black-and-white-armoured Space Marine was striding towards him. The trench reached only as high as his abdomen. In one fist he carried a massive bolter, a dripping chainaxe in the other. The blade buzzed as he came towards Ruut.

  The look of the enemy was like that of a lion on its prey, taking in all that it needs to know in an instant. It lifted its boltgun and pressed the trigger down long enough for three mass-reactive bolts to fire. The spent brass shells flew left, across the path of the Space Marine, as the bolter exploded.

  It had taken just a finger of Ruut’s psychic force to plug the barrel of the boltgun. It was a trick he’d used before. Surprise gave him a moment’s advantage.

  The Space Marine kept striding forward. If he was at all perturbed he did not show it. He casually dropped his bolter, drew his bolt pistol, gunned his chainaxe to full, and accelerated into a run.

  Ruut braced his feet into the trampled ice. He envisaged a fist of steel in the air about him. He put up a hand, closed his eyes and sent that fist straight towards his foe. His power propelled it forward, as a breath of wind will lift a feather in the air and carry it along. It hit the Renegade full in the chest, went straight through power armour, bone and one of its hearts, came out the other side and buried itself thirty feet into the ice.

  Ruut felt its power. He opened his eyes, saw the chainaxe descend.

  Ruut’s blood sprayed over Ivann’s face as the minder fell over himself in horror.

  The Space Marine turned and caught him by the foot.

  Ivann kicked and squirmed. He fired his laspistol and hit. He must have hit, but the thing seemed immune. Throne! It had a fist-shaped hole through its chest.

  Ivann thrashed as the Space Marine dragged him up to its helmet. It lifted him high enough to bring Ivann’s face right up to the Space Marine’s face plate.

  ‘Are you frightened, little man?’ the Renegade hissed in a voice that was chillingly quiet.

  Ivann lost control of his bowels. ‘How can you still live?’ he asked, staring at the gore that dripped from the hole in the thing’s chest.

  ‘Because I want vengeance,’ the Space Marine hissed, and with a sudden jerk of his power-armoured fist he snapped Ivann’s neck.

  Six

  Grüber’s Last Stand

  On the west side of the base, where the kitchen block met the sunken habs, the survivors of fifteen regiments faced off against a horde of howling cultists and mechslaves that had been harvested from Agripinaa’s hive forges when the planet had been destroyed. The cultists charged barefoot across the ice and were mown down as they caught on the lines of barbed wire.

  But they were just the first assault. Behind them came industrial mechslaves pumped full of stimms, their data-coils replaced with a searing litany of heresy and Chaos bile. It sent their lobotomised minds into a state of frenzy.

  A single platoon of Cadian Shock Troopers held the front trench. A Sons of Malice kill squad turned their flank, so they fell back to the Aegis defence line.

  The first line knelt as the second fired over their heads, and the third line reloaded. Their lieutenant had lost an arm on Cadia, but he’d taught himself to shoot left-handed. ‘First rank!’ he shouted, and a salvo of shots stabbed out.

  ‘Second rank!’ And again, the shots scythed into the enemy.

  ‘Third rank!’

  The mechslaves scrambled over the barbed wire. They leaped the front trench and charged towards the Aegis with all the ferocity of arco-flagellants. The men held their line. ‘Fire at will!’ The order went out when the mechslaves were twenty feet off, and the lieutenant lowered his bolt pistol and fired, hitting one in the chest and blowing its frail factorum body apart.

  The first mechslave attacked the metal Aegis, its buzz-saw throwing yellow sparks into the air. A las-round to the heart stilled the thing, but more of them were gaining the line. The Cadians were mowing the insane creatures down, but it was not enough. Even the wounded bounded and skidded on their own entrails. Only death could stop them. They came forward in a blizzard of razor-scythes, forge-hammers and pain-lashes.

  The line of Cadians held firm. Not one man flinched, even as the tide of mechslaves tore into them, and the first, second and third lines disappeared in a spray of red.

  On the east side of the compound, the line of wrecked Arvus lighters gave the heavy-weapons teams a broad field of fire over the top of the trench and defence line networks.

  There the elite Cadians drove the assault back three times, leaving a field of burning tanks and dying cultists. As the day wore on the enemy withdrew, but none of the Cadians was fooled.

  The heretics had just been testing them.

  Now they knew their strengths and weaknesses. The Sons of Malice had bidden their time. They launched their assault under cover of dark, an armoured spearhead plunging straight over the trenches on the west side, right up to the line of stacked containers. The heretic tanks mowed heavy-weapons squads down beneath their tracks, while stragglers were cut down with chainsword and axe before las-bolts drove them back.

  The surviving Cadians were pushed back towards the central habs, where Grüber stood, sword in hand.

  ‘We cannot hold!’ Lalinc shouted. His left arm was in a crude sling, but he’d draw
n his chainsword.

  ‘We will hold,’ Grüber told him, but he’d known that this moment would come. ‘To me!’ he shouted, and gathered his kasrkin about him.

  In the darkness, las-bolts flashed. Grüber marched out, bellowing the warcry, ‘Cadia stands!’

  The kasrkin shielded the body of General Grüber with their own.

  Their hellguns flashed a bright orange, but many of them were armed with plasma and melta. Their unerring aim punished the enemy; when the cultists charged, they were met with a wall of flame. The kasrkin held their ground as the fiercest made it to their line. There was a furious hand-to-hand struggle, a brutal combat decided by bayonets and knives, rifle-butts and courage. After what seemed an age, the cultists withdrew, dragging their wounded with them.

  ‘Have we won?’ someone asked, confused.

  Grüber laughed. ‘Not until we’ve killed the Renegade Astartes. Until we meet them there will be no victory.’

  As dawn came, the survivors could see the cost of the night’s fighting. Their western defences had been overrun, the trenches filled with the bodies of their enemies.

  Grüber reorganised his defences. The doorways of the central hab were barricaded, each room and window made defensible. The cultist attacks came again and again, interspersed with bombardment from space. The void shield lasted for two days before the generator overheated and there was nothing the tech-priests could do.

  Then the base was subjected to a maelstrom of lance and bombardment cannon. At the same time, waves of cultists charged against them.

  Mist rose as the bombardment melted the ice. When it seemed that there was nothing worse to come, the onslaught ended, and the handful of stunned and scattered survivors crawled out of the ruins of the hab-block and trenches, looked skywards and saw – in all its terror and magnificence – another orbital assault.