by Nick Kyme
‘Bore through,’ Bar’dak replied, his expression hard as stone behind his battle-helm. With no time to search, if any civilians were hiding like vermin in the ruins they would likely be killed. Momentum was everything. On Drakgaard’s order, Bar’dak would ensure it was maintained. He relayed as much to the captain through the vox, and the rest of the battle group hunkered down several hundred metres distant until the impediment could be removed.
Siege drills engaged, Ush’ban and Nerad tore through the collapsed tower. The three-headed, triple-bladed boring tools were attached to their armoured fists as a concomitant part of the warsuit’s armature and hungrily ate up the rock. Both Centurions punched and moved stolidly with unceasing momentum. As Ush’ban and Nerad made the initial breach, the other two in the squad stomped in their wake amidst squalls of heavy dust to widen the gap. Bar’dak followed on as rearguard, liquifying any jutting chunks of debris the siege drills had missed with his melta.
‘It is desultory work, brother-sergeant,’ Brother Amadu remarked, igniting his heavy flamer and dousing what remained of the tower. Caution was necessary, even at the risk of harming or killing anyone taking shelter within. Canticus was riddled with insurgents. Like an infestation of maggots, they lurked everywhere. Ush’ban had been fortunate. Others were not so. To die in such an ignominious fashion, Bar’dak could scarcely think of a worse fate for the warriors in his charge. He had vowed they would maintain vigilance.
‘It is also necessary, brother,’ Bar’dak replied, emerging through the slowly diminishing flames and onto the other side of the ruin. The way ahead looked no less restricted as a string of choked streets and rubble-thick buildings dominated the vista in every direction.
‘Such destruction…’ breathed Ramadus. ‘How could any civilisation ever recover?’
‘None could,’ Bar’dak answered, ‘but that is not our charge here, brother.’
Ramadus bowed his head slightly after the mild rebuke from his sergeant.
‘Hold here,’ Bar’dak ordered the squad, who responded by forming a defensive line that faced all directions ahead of them.
It was dark over Canticus. The day was dying fast and smoke still occluded what little light shone over the benighted city. Utilising his omniscope, Bar’dak searched the ruins for any sign of the enemy. After a few seconds, he hailed Drakgaard on the command channel.
‘Report, brother-sergeant,’ declared the weathered voice of the captain.
‘Negative contact. Advancing. Maintain distance.’
‘Understood. On your order, sergeant. You are our eyes.’
With the all clear announced, Drakgaard would lead the others out. Bar’dak watched them form up and deploy in the tactical display shown on his right retinal lens. If desired, he could widen the scope and see Sergeant Kadoran’s troops effecting a similar manoeuvre. All Salamanders and Cadian forces were making deep ingress into the city, bolstered by their allies in the Adepta Sororitas who were acting as relief. Though Bar’dak could not see the Sisters on the tactical feed.
The Centurions reached another fifty metres further in when Bar’dak was forced to retract his earlier remarks. Ush’ban, Nerad and the others saw why at the same time as Bar’dak, so were quick to come to a halt and form up.
‘Is that…?’ Amadu began. The Targons were arranged in a dispersed formation and still relied on the vox to communicate.
‘Two civilians,’ Bar’dak saw them clearly and closely through the omniscope as he answered for Amadu. ‘They’re scavengers.’
‘I was under the impression all the city’s non-combatants had been evacuated,’ said Ush’ban.
‘They were, but some stayed,’ Bar’dak replied.
‘We cannot leave them to die,’ said Nerad, the grittiness of his voice at odds with his ostensible compassion.
‘If I ordered it so, then it shall be done,’ Bar’dak asserted, not needing to see Nerad to know he had been understood.
‘Then what should we do, sir?’ asked Ush’ban.
Bar’dak blink-clicked and two identicons flashed up on his retinal lens display. They represented Amadu and Nerad.
‘You two will secure the civilians immediately and send them back to our lines. The Kasrkin can escort them out of the city, whilst we continue to advance. Make it fast, but know the eyes of your brothers are watching out for you.’
Both Centurions gave signal affirmation then stomped over in the direction of the civilians, roughly a hundred metres away.
Bar’dak watched them very carefully through the omniscope, moving from his warriors to the scavengers and back again.
‘Didn’t see them,’ Bar’dak murmured, forgetting to close the vox-link.
‘Sir?’ asked Ush’ban.
With Amadu and Nerad leaving formation, the remaining two Centurions had moved up to create a wedge of three with their sergeant at the tip.
‘Before, when I surveyed the area. They weren’t there.’
‘Who, brother-sergeant?’
‘The scavengers. It’s as if they just… appeared out of the air.’
The tactical overlay displayed on Bar’dak’s right retinal lens showed Drakgaard and the others had passed through the breach and were moving up behind the Targons. He was about to vox their discovery when he noticed something across his auto-senses.
Movement.
A moment of terrible premonition dawned on Bar’dak with the realisation his martial pride was about to suffer a wound from which he could not recover. In that instant, the truth of his own self-deluded ego was revealed to him along with the arrogance of the belief that the Targons were indestructible.
‘Centurions!’ Bar’dak roared, voice distorting through the vox.
The warsuit was not built for speed, but Bar’dak forced it into a desperate half-run. Ush’ban and Ramadus followed close behind their sergeant but were equally encumbered.
For all the razorwire, the trench-pits and the minefields, the Targons had neglected the most obvious trap. A baited snare: two wretched human scavengers acting as the draw. As it was sprung, several power-armoured forms emerged into the diminishing light to confront Amadu and Nerad.
The edges of their dark armour shone, the dull brass catching the last shafts from a fading sun above. Seconds later, cloud obscured it and threw the streets into shadow so that only the warriors’ weapons glowed with malefic light. A beam shot from the gaping maw of one. It struck Nerad in the shoulder who screamed in pain as his defensives were pierced, his skin and bone seared black.
Black was the hue of these warriors, darker than sackcloth, their armour studded with bone and bestial horns. Their helmets of deformed metal were stretched into the image of the neverborn. Hell writhed within these flesh hosts, Chosen of the Warmaster’s own Legion.
Bare-headed, an eight-pointed star branded into his ivory white pate, the leader of the Chosen made himself known.
‘Vorshkar!’ he declared, then spat a stream of invective in an old language Bar’dak didn’t understand. The meaning was clear, though.
Crackling jags of blood-crimson light were already stabbing towards the Targons as Bar’dak summoned his hate.
‘Targons! Death to the traitors!’
Seconds separated Bar’dak and the rest of his squad, but crucially they were split and thus their formation weaker against an experienced enemy.
Shuddering hurricane-bolters mounted in the torso plates of the Centurions kicked out a frenetic storm of return fire as the air between Chosen and Targon was threaded with beams and shells, so thick that every obstacle between them was destroyed almost instantly.
Ush’ban staggered, clipped by a burst of mass-reactive shells and needing a few seconds for his armour to compensate. Ramadus went ahead of him, releasing a long stream of intense, white fire from his heavy flamers. It caught one of the Chosen who was engulfed instantly and fell to his knees
. Blinding shrapnel erupted around Ramadus as a missile exploded against his shoulder guard, knocking him off balance.
With the pressure relieved, the burning Chosen hauled himself up and recommenced firing. Ramadus ignored the shells and kept on, trying to locate the heavy. He saw the launcher a fraction too late, swinging around his flamers as a second missile spat from the rocket tube. It detonated square in the Centurion’s chest, cracking the ceramite and rendering one half of the hurricane bolter array useless. Ramadus put the other to use, raking the traitor’s armour. The bolter fire on his flank was intensifying, the warning runes flashing up on his battle-helm’s display too insistent to ignore. He half turned, expecting to see his enemy braced and firing but was instead confronted by a third Chosen, charging at him with a power fist.
Ramadus desperately geared up his siege drills, bringing them around into a defensive posture. The horned-headed traitor punched straight through them, shattering four out of six drill heads with sheer strength augmented by his power fist’s energy field.
Staggering, Ramadus tasted blood. Some of it had sprayed against his face plate. He could smell it, copper-sharp and indicative of internal bleeding. His suit concurred, but he shut down the trauma alerts so he could focus on surviving. One arm of his Centurion warsuit dangled uselessly by his side, whilst the rest of his armour was studded with drill shrapnel. Ramadus tried to fire his bolters. They were torn from his chest by power-gloved fingers, most of the breastplate ripped out with them and cast onto the ground. Knowing he wouldn’t survive a third blow, he went to turn and use his bulk to overwhelm the smaller Chosen. A glancing missile burst impacting against his shoulder showered both combatants with frag and slowed Ramadus just enough that his chest was exposed when the traitor thrust for his heart…
Ush’ban saw his brother die with his chest torn out. For a few seconds he stood upright, cold as a statue as his killer exulted in the death. Then the missile struck and Ramadus, his Centurion armour and the belief that the Targons were invincible was violently blown apart.
As Ramadus died, Ush’ban was already moving and advanced into a storm of hurled metal: chunks of plate that used to be armour. Bone and blood came with it, a grisly shower of viscera that clung to Ush’ban like guilt. He had fallen behind, and let Ramadus die alone.
Plunging through expulsion smoke from the landed missile, retribution was Ush’ban’s only salve as he met the one with the power fist who had just slain his brother.
‘Engaging!’ Nerad shouted down the vox, and moved to shield the civilians from a torrent of gunfire roaring from the Chosen. Through the tactical feed in his retinal lens, he was aware of Bar’dak and the others trying to bridge the gap between them and him, but right now he and Amadu were on their own. Nerad was hurting, the wound in his shoulder serious but he cut out the pain and triggered his chest-mounted bolters. He counted six Chosen in his eye line, but his auto-senses were picking up three more. Ramadus was dead – the odds against the Targons were worsening.
‘Two squads,’ he voxed to Amadu.
Amadu nodded, reaching down to grab one of the civilians.
‘Female,’ he said to her, though she still had her back to him, ‘we must get you to safety.’
Bar’dak had the one called Vorshkar in his sights, less wary of the flanged mace he wielded in both hands than the trail of ethereal mist it was exuding. He only saw Amadu briefly, approaching the female, and saw her look up at her saviour while at the same time unclasping the collar she wore around her withered neck…
Amadu felt the danger before he saw it in the rising of the hackles on the back of his neck and the acid taste on his tongue, despite his battle-helm’s rebreather.
Psyker…
The thought came too late. Amadu had less than a second to regret his decision as the collar was breached and a flood of power unleashed. Magnesium-bright, searing hot pain overloaded the Centurion’s auto-senses. His indomitable warsuit cracked. Smoke issued from the frame as it partly sloughed away, merging with the slurry of his deliquesced flesh, bone and organs.
A bolt of arc lightning had struck Amadu, spat from the mouth of the female, impaling him through the chest like a crackling, fulminating skewer. His entire body transfixed, he shook with such violence that he cracked the retinal lenses in his battle-helm. Smoke issued from the joints of his armour, which had begun to scar and blacken, then melted before Ush’ban’s eyes.
Ush’ban had fought alongside Amadu for ninety-six years. They trained together. The ceremonial gladius Ush’ban wore at Chapter gatherings had been forged by him, a gift reciprocated by the bolt pistol Amadu had once carried as his sidearm. His death was a physical blow to Ush’ban but the mental upheaval it caused was far more debilitating and he almost missed the Chosen as the traitor sought to add to its kill tally.
The first swing caught Ush’ban a glancing blow on his hip and sent painful shockwaves through his leg and abdomen. He blocked the second with the outside of his siege drill but lost the armature in the process. It freed him up to use his armoured glove as something more than just to trigger the drill, and when the third blow came in Ush’ban seized the Chosen’s arm then hoisted him off his feet. Powered servos grinding and shrieking as he exerted them, Ush’ban threw the traitor across the rubble and into the facade of a partially collapsed temple ruin. Falling masonry buried the Chosen, silencing his roared curses.
Amadu’s demise happened quickly, the rest of his life measured in no more than a few seconds of excruciating agony. His death flame was like a photon-flare going off, only magnitudes greater. His silhouetted afterimage was ingrained on Bar’dak’s cornea, as his battle-helm tried desperately to compensate for the intense flash of light. It blinded him, and Bar’dak’s last sight was the Chosen advancing on him with that warp-touched mace. He had little time to worry about it. The psyker-witches who had killed Amadu weren’t finished. Emaciated, skeletal, the male wretch staggered unevenly to his feet and unclasped his own collar to begin the crescendo of what the female had unleashed.
Crackling lightning coruscated around the male, his body transfixed like a cruciform banner pole. Particulates in the air around him slowed until suspended as gravity was undone. The effect spread outwards, levitating grit, dust and debris. Amadu’s ruined body lifted with it. Bar’dak was caught in the wave along with the others and felt himself grow lighter as a sliver of air slipped between his boots and the ground.
Reaching its apex in a few seconds that seemingly stretched to minutes, the wave drew back like a tide recoiling from land. Like a long inhaled breath, reverse katabatic winds recalled it to its origin point, the male psyker-witch on the verge of going supernova.
Bar’dak realised this creature was a weapon, a human bomb no different to the ones that had killed so many of Colonel Redgage’s men and scarred Ush’ban’s armour. Only the technological aegis of the Mechanicus would not protect him this time – it would not protect any of them, not from this.
Gravity returned and in the same instant the inhaled breath was released in a terrifying storm.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Heletine, Canticus southern district, ‘the Cairns’
‘What just hit us?’ asked Drakgaard, staggered by the sudden blast wave but on his feet.
Elysius was about to shake his head when he sniffed the air.
‘You smell that?’
‘Soiled meat? Old blood?’ suggested Drakgaard, his gaze flitting between the Chaplain and their surroundings.
‘More like sour milk,’ said Elysius. ‘Warpcraft.’
Captain Helfer was being helped up by one of his troopers. ‘Feels like a damn bomb just went off,’ he groaned. Blood was trickling down his face from a cut sustained across the forehead, and his closely cropped moustache and beard were powdered with a fine layer of dust.
Most of the Kasrkin were down, some of them not moving.
Elysius regarded
the mortal, his tone ominous.
‘I believe it just did, captain.’
Like their officers, the fire-born weathered the blast better and stayed standing, though had to check their advance mid-march. Dust was still rolling across the street in swathes as Her’us of the Serpentia broke formation and went to reconnoitre.
Rubble, indistinct and ubiquitous, lay everywhere but offered no answers. The tactical display was down, whatever had struck them taking out their short-range comms and helm visuals. Based on their previous position, Drakgaard knew the Centurions could not be more than two or three hundred metres away.
‘Did you hear gunfire prior to the blast?’ Drakgaard asked Elysius.
The Chaplain nodded. ‘We should move.’
A slow advance became a run, Drakgaard to the fore with the Serpentia his vigilant shadows. With Her’us back in their ranks, they surrounded the captain like a cloak of drake scale and moved in concert.
Caution was discarded in the wake of whatever had hit them. Gunfire scarcely heard before the blast resumed loudly on the air.
Close on the heels of the Serpentia were Squad Vah’gan. Led by Captain Helfer, the Kasrkin followed on as rearguard and left the slower Devastators behind.
After a few minutes, they found Bar’dak. The sergeant was lying on his back at the edge of a circle of scorched earth, his armour blackened just the same. Smoke clouded the area, seeping through the ruins. Fires crackled in the open, creating flickering shadows.
Warriors moved in the gloom, too indistinct to know exact numbers and disposition, their weapons fire succinctly revealing their allegiance.