by Dan Abnett
‘No, captain.’
‘How many are with you?’
‘I’ve got three squads on port protection detail,’ replies Amant. ‘We can’t find or contact our sergeant.’
‘Do you have vox?’
Amant shakes his head. ‘Nothing working.’
‘There’s a listening station on the far side of the concourse,’ Arbute says. Ventanus looks at her. She’s leaning on Selaton’s arm to get up, wincing at the pain.
‘A listening station?’
‘Part of the port’s original traffic control system, before the upgrade. It has old but powerful casters.’
Ventanus nods at Arbute.
‘Good. Let’s find out what’s going on.’
‘Maybe we can find out about this gunfire too,’ says Amant.
‘What gunfire?’ Ventanus snaps.
‘Reports of shooting along the western perimeter, sir,’ says Amant. ‘I think it’s most likely a payload of munitions that’s been set off by fire, but it’s not confirmed yet.’
‘Let’s move. Quickly,’ says Ventanus. ‘I don’t think this is an accident at all.’
The moment it’s out of his mouth, he regrets saying it aloud.
‘Why not?’ asks Selaton.
‘Because I’m a pessimist,’ says Ventanus.
Selaton looks at him. They start to help the injured seneschal along.
‘Look,’ Ventanus tells his sergeant, ‘I couldn’t have caused this much disruption to Calth’s transport network if I’d tried.’
Amant glances at them.
‘Of course it’s an accident,’ he says. ‘What else could it be?’
Ventanus isn’t listening. He can feel a tremble in the air.
Everything turns black. A deep shadow has swept over them. He hears Arbute and her aides exclaim in mortal fear.
A ship is falling backwards across the sky. A grand cruiser. It’s immense. To see something so big and space-borne in scale comparison with a world’s surface is fundamentally shocking. It makes the ship look like the biggest object any of them has ever seen.
It is falling so slowly. It is sliding down the sky, spilling clouds of debris, trailing the disintegrating remains of its drydock. It’s as though Calth’s atmosphere is a deep lake and the ship is a tree trunk sinking gracefully into it. There is a primal majesty to such destruction. The descent they are witnessing feels mythical. It is like a moon that has slipped from the firmament. A god that has forgotten how to fly. It is like a fall from the old fables. Good’s plunge into evil. The bright to the dark.
‘The Antrodamicus,’ Ventanus whispers, recognising the lines of the cyclopean shape.
It seems as if it’s hanging, but it’s only moments from impact. It’s going to crush the world. The fires of its demise will scorch the continent.
‘Back,’ he starts to say. ‘Back!’
3
[mark: -0.15.50]
Brother Braellen assumes they’re going to head for the city. Captain Damocles has already ordered the transport crews to get ready. Whatever’s going on, it’s bad, and the people in Numinus are going to need help. Disaster control. Lock-down. From the Ourosene Hills, they can probably be there in two hours.
No one’s giving any orders. No one’s giving any anything. There’s no coordination.
So the captain is the ultimate authority 6th Company has. That’s fine with Braellen. They’ll move in, deploy, secure. Rescue and secure, they’ve trained for that.
And if it’s not an accident, if it’s an attack… They’ve trained for that too.
He’s thinking that when things change and their plans change with them.
It starts raining main battle tanks.
The first impact is surreal. Braellen sees it plainly. A Shadowsword superheavy, almost perfectly intact apart from one trailing track section, drops out of the stained sky about sixteen hundred metres ahead of him. The tank’s hull plating is faintly glowing pink from re-entry.
It hits. Hammer blow. Blinding light. Shock-wash.
The impact creates an explosion akin to a primary plasma mine. Battle-brothers are thrown through the air like toys. Some bounce off transports or stacked freight. Braellen’s squad is at the edge of the blast force. They stay upright as their power armour auto-locks and braces, sensing the explosion. Inertial dampers straining. Braellen feels grit and micro-debris spattering off his armour like small-arms fire.
The shock passes, the auto-lock relaxes. Discipline wavers for a second. No fear, just bemusement. A tank doesn’t just fall out of the–
A second one does. A Baneblade, this time. It’s tumbling end over end. It hits the company shelters a kilometre west, and causes an impact blast that splits the ground and triggers a landslip on the facing hill. Then two more, both Fellblades, in quick succession. One crushes a pair of parked Thunderhawks. The other hits just off the trackway a split-second later and punches a crater, but doesn’t explode. It actually bounces, disintegrating. It bounces and tumbles through a scattering line of battle-brothers, mowing them down, shedding torn plate and wheel assemblies.
More fall, all around. Like bombs. Like impossible hail. Like playthings tipped out of a child’s toybox. Some explode. Some fracture on impact and bounce. Some bury themselves in the open ground like bullets in flesh.
Braellen looks up into the sky. It’s almost blue apart from the smoke stains from the city. It’s full of falling objects: tanks, armoured fighting vehicles, troop carriers, cargo pods, lumps of debris. They turn in the air, catching the sunlight, glinting, spinning, some fast, some slow. Ash and metal-fibres rain down with them. Strands of cable. Wire. Optical leads. Pieces of haptic keyboard. Pieces of data-slate. Glass and brass splinters. Flakes of ceramite.
Somewhere, far above, a low orbit depot has broken up and the packed contents have spilled out like treasure from a sack. Enough war machines and equipment for a full division have been thrown down to be smashed by gravity. They’re too low to fully burn up. Air friction is simply heating them.
To his west, amongst the impossible skyfall, Braellen spots the flashing delta-shape of a Stormbird, rotating as it falls.
Then he sees falling bodies too.
They have not endured the drop as well as the machine parts. They have scorched and cooked. They land like bundles of wet branches, and burst.
They do not gouge vast craters and explode like the falling armour, but their impacts are somehow far more devastating.
[mark: -0.15.48]
The Watchtower sensori start shrieking in anticipation. Even half-blind, unplugged and shock-numbed, they can feel the immensity of the material objects sweeping towards them, the radiation flood, the momentum, the displacement of atmosphere, the distortion of gravity.
The Antrodamicus looms through the tortured sky, electrical discharge clinging to its hull like a neon spiderweb. It comes through the vast palls of smoke spreading horizontally from the burning starport, and parts the bright plumes of volcanic flame that are suddenly emanating from a fusion plant on the estuary. Coming through the thick and wallowing smoke, it looks like a galleon from Old Terra running aground, a great barque of the sea, gilded with fretwork and figureheads, coasting through foamy breakers onto the foreshore.
It fills the windows of the Watchtower. It is as tall as them, as high as them. It is like a city swinging towards them on a slow pendulum arc. Shooting-star chunks of falling debris streak down around it, tiny bright specks, fast moving compared to the starship’s slow descent. Some debris meteors strike the ship, producing flowers of flame. Others whizz past and hit the ground, the city, the river.
Tawren knows each one of those strikes would, on another day, be a civic disaster, a hab block or a street area laid waste by a massive impact blast.
Today they are minor and extraneous injuries.
‘Arook!’ she yells. She holds up a stretch of Hesst’s permanent MIU link like a coil of mooring rope.
The skitarii looks at her. One red eyeslit fizzles.
His tulwar is drawn in a second. The blade slices clean through the plaited cables. Sparks crack and spit. Hesst goes into a grand mal seizure.
Arook sweeps the server up, flops his jerking body over one massive shoulder. He grabs Tawren’s left hand in his right fist and starts to run. Around them, on the server’s platform, the sensori and magi are shrieking and weeping. Some are fleeing to the stairs. A few have jumped to their deaths from the shattered tower windows.
The massive engine ducts of the Antrodamicus, cold and dead-black, their fires unlit, dwarf the windows, growing bigger and still bigger.
Hesst is dead. He has stopped spasming. Bloody matter is streaming from his mouth and nose and down the master of skitarii’s burnished back plate. Tawren scoops up her skirts so she can run. Arook is so fast.
Where does he hope to escape to? She trusts him, but she has no idea. She has no idea what she was hoping he could do when she got him to cut the MIU. There’s not enough time. Not enough time for anything. Is he trying to reach the tower-top landing pads? A shuttle? A lighter? There isn’t enough time to unseal a hatch, let alone fire its engines and lift off.
No. No. He’s making for the escape pods. There are concussion caskets in bays around the tower-top. They are intended to let senior magi descend to the armoured bunkers under the Watchtower’s foundations. They’re crude things, just counterweight mechanisms.
Would they be enough? Is there even enough time left to reach the bunkers? The bunkers might protect from an air raid, but this? A starship is falling on the city!
Arook yanks open a pod hatch. He throws Hesst in, then hurls Tawren after him.
The Antrodamicus hits. Its dipped tail strikes first, biting into the land just short of the north curtain wall of Kalkas Fortalice. The keel and hull are designed to withstand the stresses of the empyrean. They only slightly deform on impact.
They dig in. The starship, all twelve kilometres of it, continues to move, sliding backwards, cutting a groove in the planet’s crust five hundred metres deep. The keel splits the earth like a giant ploughshare, turning it up on either side of the immense furrow. Soil and subsoil rip open. The furrow rips across arterial highways and a memorial park. It hits the curtain wall, annihilating it. Still sliding, the Antrodamicus demolishes a path through the teeming city of Kalkas Fortalice, a path two and half kilometres wide. Meteoric debris is still slicing down from the sky all around it, bombarding the city and the landscape. The starship’s impact is lifting a wall of dust higher than the Watchtower, a smog of particulates from atomised buildings.
The planet’s crust is shaking, a long, drawn-out vibration of the most apocalyptic sort. There is a tearing, screeching shriek in the air as hull and city grind each other apart.
Now stress fractures win. The Antrodamicus starts to crumple. Its entire mass lands, belly down, splitting its massive frame across the waist and the prow. Hull skin rips. Command towers and masts buckle and topple. The remnants of the drydock cage, wrapping it like a garland, slough off.
Internal explosions begin to riddle it. Upper plating sections blow out. Ribs are exposed, backlit by nuclear coals in the starship’s stricken heart.
It is still moving. It is still grinding backwards, disintegrating, ploughing the city in half, uprooting hab towers and hive stacks, flattening steeples and palaces. The quake-shock of the impact is levelling parts of Kalkas Fortalice that the ship hasn’t even touched.
The orbital Watchtower shivers as the mounting vibrations begin to overwhelm its structural integrity. Pieces of it start to splinter and fall off. It begins to sway, like a tree in a typhoon wind.
When the sliding tail-end of the starship finally reaches it and rams it down, it is starting to fall anyway.
The Antrodamicus ploughs it into the ground so hard that no trace of its proud structure remains whatsoever.
[mark: -0.14.20]
At Barrtor, they can feel the earth quaking under their plasteel boots. Aftershock. Calth’s tectonic system shivering from the appalling blow. The forest is thrashing, shaking loose leaves.
‘Theoretical?’ Phrastorex asks.
Ekritus is utterly cold and focused.
‘A major orbital incident. Accident or attack. Considerable fleet loss, considerable loss of support infrastructure, catastrophic collateral damage suffered on the surface due to the orbital destruction…’
He pauses and looks at Phrastorex.
‘The starport’s gone. All comms are out. No link to the fleet. No link to other surface units beyond anything we can establish. No data feed. No estimation of the type or extent of the situation.’
‘Practical?’ Phrastorex asks.
‘Obvious,’ replies Ekritus.
It is? thinks Phrastorex.
‘We form up. Everything we have. Your company and mine, the Army, the Mechanicum, the XVII. Everything that’s this side of the river and still intact. We form up, and we pull it back east into the Sharud Province. All hell’s falling out of the sky and this world is turning, Phrastorex. If we sit here wide-eyed, we could end up in a debris bombardment. Or worse. Let’s salvage everything we can from this muster point and pull it east, out of harm’s way, so it remains intact and battle ready.’
‘What if this is an attack?’ asks Phrastorex.
‘Then we’ll be battle ready!’ Ekritus barks.
Phrastorex nods. His instinct is to run towards the danger. To know no fear and advance into hell, but he knows the younger captain is right. They have a duty to preserve what they’ve got and re-form. The primarch will be expecting no less. Between them, he and Ekritus and the captains of the Word Bearers companies in the valley command an armed force that could crush a world. They have a duty to move it out of harm’s way into a holding position, so that it’s ready and able to do whatever Guilliman needs it to do.
‘Start leading the disposition out through the forest,’ Ekritus begins. ‘I’ll link up with the Word Bearers and the Army and–’
‘No,’ says Phrastorex firmly. ‘You lead the march. Get the men behind you, literally. Show them the way. I’ll order the XVII around, the Mechanicum too. Go. Go!’
Ekritus holds up an armoured fist.
‘We march for Macragge,’ he says.
Phrastorex punches the fist with his mailed knuckles.
‘Always,’ he agrees.
He starts away down the slope, through the ranks of his own men and Ekritus’s cobalt-blue warriors. Behind him, he hears Ekritus, Anchise and the other officers of both companies calling the men to order, getting them mobile. The aftershocks keep coming. Light-flash and thunder rattles the sky.
He sees 23rd squad.
‘With me!’ he yells. They fall in with him, moving fast. Phrastorex wants an escort. If he’s going to order around Word Bearers officers and Army stuffed shirts, he needs an honour company to emphasise his authority.
‘What’s the order, captain?’ asks Battle-brother Karends.
‘The job right now is to salvage and preserve as much of this fighting strength as we can,’ says Phrastorex. Ultramarines units are moving past them on both flanks, heading in the opposite direction. Down on the floodplain, tank engines have hit start-up. Lights are coming on. Phrastorex is surprised how impressed he is by the Word Bearers’ response time. Maybe he needs to revise his opinion of the wretched XVII.
He sees figures in red armour. They’re advancing up the hill. Word Bearers, moving already. That’s good. Maybe they won’t be so hard to persuade.
Phrastorex raises a hand, calling out to the nearest Word Bearers officer.
A boltgun fires.
Battle-brother Karends explodes at the waist and collapses.
The second bolt blows the fingers off Phrastorex’s raised hand.
Coming uphill at the hindquarters of the Ultramarines companies, the Word Bearers form a line. They’re advancing through the dry, ferny brush, weapons raised, firing at will.
Phrastorex has fallen to one knee. His ruined hand hur
ts, but the wounds have already clotted. He tries to draw his weapon with his left hand. His mind is where the real pain lies. Sheer incredulity has almost crippled him for a second. There is no theoretical, there is no comprehensible practical. They’re being fired on. They’re being fired on by the Legiones Astartes XVII Word Bearers. They’re being fired on by their own kind.
He’s got his gun in his sound hand. He’s not sure what he’s going to do with it. Even under fire, the notion of firing back at Space Marines is abhorrent.
Phrastorex looks up. Bolter rounds are exploding in the ranks of the Ultramarines, blowing blue armour plate apart, throwing men into the air. Plasma beams, searing like blatant lies, rip through his company. Ultramarines fall, shot in the back, in the legs, split open, sliced in half. Men topple face down, the backs of their Praetor helms caved in and smoking.
It’s a massacre. It’s a slaughter. In seconds, before the main strength of the men can even turn in surprise, the ferny slope is littered with dead and dying. The leaves of the nodding fern brush are jewelled with blood. The trees shiver and hiss in disgust. The ground heaves as though it cannot bear to touch the proof of such infamy, as though it wants to shake the Ultramarines dead off itself so it is not implicated.
Heavier guns open fire. Lascannons. Graviton guns. Meltas. Storm bolters.
Rotary autocannons wither the rows of men in the forest space, shredding the brush cover into a green haze, spattering tree trunks with blood and chips of blue metal. Splintered trees collapse alongside splintered men.
The brothers in the squad accompanying the captain are mown down around him. A broken fragment of armour, outflung from a toppling Ultramarine, gashes Phrastorex’s right eye socket, damaging the optics. The impact snaps his head sideways.
It snaps him awake, out of his stupor, out of his shocked daze.
He rises, aiming his weapon.
The crimson Space Marines are advancing towards him, up the blood-soaked slope. He can hear them chanting. Their weapons are blazing.
‘You bastards!’ he yells as a headshot slays him.
At the top of the slope, in the deeper forest, Ekritus turns as he hears the gunfire.