by Henry Zou
Orbital reconnaissance from above Aridun revealed the advancing thrust of the Ironclad legions. Scouting elements sent to probe against the advancing enemy returned in terrified states. The Archenemy numbered, even by conservative estimates, in the region of perhaps seven million tanks, fighting vehicles and marching legions. Imperial Marauders sallied forth to harass their advance. Pilots remarked it was like dropping stones into water. There was no effect on the tide.
It took High Command some time to realise that the Archenemy was in no hurry to consolidate the Fortress Chains or the Old Kings. It made no difference to them whether the Imperial armies dislodged the Blood Gorgons to claim the city of the dead… They had no strategic need for time. The Archenemy, since the Medina Campaign, had fought a slow, methodical war, preparing the trap and closing it like a steady vice. Seven million Archenemy did not hasten.
General, commander of Fifth Division made the most resounding quote of the war. He remarked that, ‘They were dead men, dead men defending dead things.’
At 04:57, three days after the Imperial deployment and nine days of the lunar cycle, the Ironclad rose within view of the southern savannah. The banners of Chaos thrashed in the hot wind, the legions marched, the crash of their boots like a sonorous, continuous scarp of thunder. They pounded war drums, sounded braying, plaintive war horns. Columns of armour advanced in the fore, winding like rivers of glistening steel.
The Guard had known the numbers of the enemy, but they had not been prepared for the sight of them. They flooded the open plains. Artillery observers from the upper tiers of the cities reported that the thousand kilometre reefs surrounding the chain had been churned into a marsh of smeared mud in their wake. On the ramparts, Guardsmen penned their last thoughts to paper and cast them into the wind. They hoped the Emperor’s cherubs would deliver their prayers to their loved ones. It was even reported, though unconfirmed, that there were incidences of Guardsmen throwing themselves off the city walls at the sight of the advancing Chaos legions.
Thirteen minutes past the hour of five, batteries of the 11th Colonial Artillery fired the first shell. The Ironclad exchanged siege fire from advancing tank columns. Sabot shells pounded the city-chains with colossal plumes of dust.
These shots heralded the Last War.
‘Sir, the Old Kings are interred deeply, of that there is no doubt.’
The man who spoke was a Cantican corporal, his brown felt jacket matted with salt and grit dust. He leaned heavily on a shovel, panting, sweat plastering his hair in greasy whorls across his forehead. The pale blue rank sash denoted him as a corporal of the Cantican First Combat Engineers, but until the excavations were complete, he was relegated to shovel digger.
‘I propose that we utilise the explosives, at least until we break the silt layers,’ Roth said. He shielded his eyes from the sun with his hand and cast an appraising eye over the excavation site.
‘Heavens no! No more demolitions,’ Madeline called as she climbed over a loose mound of dug-up shale. ‘It’s too much to risk triggering something unexpected. From now on, manual digging only.’
Roth shrugged reluctantly. ‘You heard the lady. No demo, corporal.’
The Guardsman breathed heavily, shouldered his shovel and ran back down the excavation slope, barking out commands.
The dormant site of the Old Kings, as calculated, rested in the centre of Angkhora, exactly ninety degrees from either hemisphere and at balanced angles with the three suns, and with the Medinian moon at the zenith of the lunar cycle.
Unfortunately, that had placed the site directly underneath a tomb stack in the eastern quarter of the city. It was a vaulted, multi-segmented mausoleum of carved stone sixty metres high, its slightly sloping walls resembling a lotus bud with six hundred thousand tightly coiled petals. Each petal was an individual tomb wreathed with bas-reliefs depicting the character and deed of the deceased within.
In the words of Madeline, it made for a ‘delicate endeavour’. Military engineers cratered an opening at the base of the tomb stack, a dry, jagged wound in the ground that led into a steep artificial canyon. Controlled demolitions and pneumatic drills had shattered through eight stratum of sediment, limestone, shale and mineral.
‘We just need more time to extract the ironstone layers,’ Madeline said. ‘If it were so simple to excavate, then even the Traitor Marines would have completed the task already.’
The layers she referred to were the hard seams of clay and iron ore deposit that had collected during many tumultuous climatic changes. The ironstone formed a porous lattice of dense, rust-red stone. Iron ore was not easily broken by pneumatic drills.
‘Time is something we do not have at the moment,’ Roth replied. To punctuate his words, the sky throbbed with the pyrotechnic light of nearby explosions. The crump of shelling could be heard seconds later, low and ominous.
‘The Archenemy are pounding at the gates of Angkhora,’ Roth said. ‘Thirty minutes ago, the eastern wall district was lost. The 22nd Battalion were routed, and the 9th suffered forty per cent casualties by last report. The enemy are no more than sixteen kilometres from this very point.’
Madeline rubbed her temples. ‘I know what I’m doing, Roth. Four or five days. Give me that and I’ll have reached the Old Kings.’ She paused as another crackle of shelling flooded out all sound before resuming. ‘I’ve never been wrong in all my academic career.’
Just then, an aide wearing the rank sash of lieutenant appeared at the rim of the crater. He had come by horse. Judging by the grit on his cheeks and the scorched, blackened muzzle of his lasrifle, he had just ridden from the front lines.
‘Inquisitor, sir, your counsel is requested by the lord general,’ the junior officer gasped, struggling to rein in his horse as it pawed at the flak board laid out around the excavation site. In his other hand, the officer led a riderless steed, saddled and ready for Roth.
Roth nodded and turned, his obsidian tabard winking with a sharp snap of his heels. Before climbing up the shale slope, Roth turned back to Madeline.
‘I don’t know if you have four or five days. The Archenemy is already in amongst us, street to street, house to house.’
‘Five days or nothing, Roth,’ Madeline called after him.
The first eight hours of fighting were the worst. The white, searing sky of morning could not be seen under the pall of smoke that hung like swollen storm clouds over the southern belt. Throbbing outbursts of fire raged along the Fortress Chains. Manes of flame licked along the connective ramparts and swirled into the urban strongholds. The shockwave of shells that shook the ground became incessant.
Most of the cities along the chain lacked truly defensive walls. The fortifications had been built for an era when war was made with lance and mace, and the walls had since then crumbled into worn stubs of bas-relief and historic friezes. The vast ocean of Archenemy hit them like a tide, crashing into the boundary walls, spilling onto the causeways, saturating the arterial streets. The Ironclad foot-soldiers did not, at first, use their firearms. They came in a seething horde brandishing the brutally pugnacious instruments of close combat, the implements of the raider. They clambered over the low walls, face first into the firepower of CantiCol defence lines, seven million voices thrumming as one.
Within minutes, the frontline battalions were pushed back by the sheer magnitude of the Archenemy offensive. The CantiCol’s close order drill collapsed as punctures opened up across the lines defending the major causeways and connective ramparts. Cantican field officers withdrew from the outlying districts, turtling their forces into civilian housing or anywhere with cover.
The initial trauma of assault was demoralising for the Guard. Despite the tactical firing lanes set up along the causeways, the defensive bottlenecks along the outer perimeters, the overlapping firing arcs, gun nests and wire cordons, despite every tactical advantage, they were swept aside. Across the Fortress Chain, entir
e brigade positions were perforated and dismantled by the spearing advance of Ironclad. Companies and platoons became isolated and encircled. H Company of the 46th CantiCol Battalion took shelter in a textiles mill on the outer districts of Chindar City. Cut off and besieged, the company held out for almost an hour before they ran dry of ammunition. Their bodies were chained and dragged through the streets by Ironclad FPVs. Several kilometres east, in the chain city of Barcid, a platoon of CantiCol led by an inexperienced lieutenant actually tried to surrender as their temple was overrun. The captive platoon was marched within view of the 19th Battalion, holding a static defence across the eastern Barcid viaduct. In view of their comrades, each man in the platoon was strangled by an Ironclad Elteber, by hand, until dead. Their bodies were rolled unceremoniously into the canal.
By the sixth hour of fighting, there was very little semblance of a war front. The Archenemy were out-manoeuvring the beleaguered Imperial positions. Units were constantly ordered to withdraw in order to protect their rear-line artillery and command positions.
In the roiling mass of street fighting, Imperial Navy aircraft were unable to pin-point enemy targets. The Archenemy pressed hard, fighting in and around the Imperial defences. It was a tactic that the Imperial High Command coined ‘hugging’ and it robbed them of their one advantage in air superiority. Marauder bombers were relegated to strafing runs of the rear Archenemy lines, bridging the role of mobile artillery.
Angkhora, the resting place of the Old Kings and the concentration of the heaviest fighting, was the most firmly held. The plazial causeway from Angkhora’s monument gates was heavily contested; its stone-slabbed thoroughfare would allow the conveyance of Ironclad heavy-tracked vehicles into the city, five abreast. The Imperial Command could not allow that.
Colonel Isa Batam had been given charge of holding the central causeway, an assignment he considered a forlorn hope. He nestled his men down behind the animal statues that flanked the overpass, creating a firing lane bristling with cannons, rockets and serried ranks of las. They had waited as the constant stream of vox reports crackled over their comms channel, relaying the enemy advance as they broke through the struggling defences of the outlying Angkhora region. The muffled screams and stilted report of gunfire washed with static unnerved his men. They chewed tabac to relieve the tension – jaws set, eyes wide, breathing hard through their nostrils.
The advance of the Ironclad was pre-announced by the vox-broadcast death screams of the commanding officer assigned to the defences of a neighbouring district to Batam’s direct east. The Ironclad burst through the ceremonial gates, a full deca-legion of foot-soldiers in a sweeping phalanx of ten thousand. Batam had exactly six hundred and ninety men under his command.
Although the approach was heavily mined, the advance of the Ironclad was undeterred, unhurried, marching to the rhythm of a sonorous war drum. At the front of the column, an Ironclad Naik brandished the paper lanterns of Khorsabad Maw.
His men fired shots. Batam almost wondered if the Archenemy realised they were there, and if they did, whether they even cared.
But care they did. The Archenemy broke ranks, surging apart to assail Batam’s flanking positions. Threads of las-fire connected his thin lines of Guardsmen to the swell of Archenemy fighters. They managed three seconds of unopposed fire before the Ironclad swarmed over their positions.
An Ironclad trooper wearing a wedged breastplate leapt over the hippocampus statue that Batam had crouched behind, slashing the air with a palm razor. Batam plunged his spike bayonet into the Ironclad’s hip, at the seam where his breastplate met the fauld petals. The spearing strike arrested the Ironclad’s airborne momentum, jarring Batam’s shoulder sockets. Batam fired a burst of las into the Archenemy, point-blank, and stomped him off the end of his rifle.
‘Hold now, die where you stand!’ the colonel shouted. He looked around at the heaving scrum of flashing blades and desperate bodies. One of his company captains, Siem, appeared by his shoulder, draining his clip on auto.
‘Sir, I think it’s time. We’re doing less than we expected,’ Siem shouted above the clash.
It was indeed time. Colonel Batam could see the twin pylons of the Angkhora gate, about a kilometre down the causeway. The monolithic tines were wreathed in gunsmoke, solid and unaffected by the carnage below. Captain Siem was right. They could not hope to hold the causeway. As a pillar of Guard doctrine, when position becomes untenable, deny all strategic utility for the enemy.
‘Trigger the charges, captain. Damn it, man!’ Batam called. The colonel turned and realised the captain was already dead, his jostling corpse held upright by the press of bodies. A razor slashed at Batam’s head and the colonel ducked under. The blade took his right ear and part of his scalp clean off. Batam, clutching the bleeding ruin of his head, fumbled for the wired detonator around his belt webbing. He grabbed it and frantically scrunched the charge receiver with his palm.
Demolition charges secured around the base of the gates blew out in an expanding ring of smoke and fragments. The three hundred metre tall pylons buckled and began to topple with ponderous speed. Thousands of tonnes of carved stone – with the cavorting animals that revered the dead – came crashing down onto the causeway. The avalanche tremors could be felt by the men fighting at the furthest chain cities, even above the shock of shelling. Six thousand tonnes of limestone falling from a height of several hundred metres was a sound one did not hear often.
Colonel Batam and all his men died instantly. The central Angkhoran causeway was reduced to a broke back ridge of rubble. Dust debris thrown up by the force of collision continued to rain back down in a deluge for many minutes after. Across the Fortress Chain, the fighting resumed unabated as if nothing of great significance had occurred at all.
Inquisitor Roth rode to Joint Command as fast as he dared to press his horse.
In an unassuming crypt, vaulted in one of the oldest burial districts of central Angkhora, Lord General Murat Faisal presided over the Last War. Incidentally, the crypt was also the family tomb of Aridun’s first post-Reclamation Governor. Roth thought it was a poetically fitting place to orchestrate the Last War.
The war room was much more orderly than Roth had expected. General Faisal had dismissed most of the staff aides, junior officers and non-essential personnel from clogging the dark confines of the crypt. Bays of vox and communications equipment surrounded the circular, vaulted chamber. In the centre of the tomb, the stone coffin of First Governor Faribault had been converted into a makeshift chart table. Amid a hunched ring of staff chiefs, General Faisal received incoming reports of the collapsing front with a level stoicism.
Faisal was a native Cantican by birth, with fierce angular features mantled by dark wing-like eyebrows and skin the colour of sand-blasted wood. He wore a lengthy ceremonial coat of brown Cantican felt with simple, hand-painted shoes of cerulean silk that gave way to leather bindings up his calves. His ivory rank sash, wound around his waist and diagonally across his shoulder, denoted the deeds of his ancestors, and his long martial bloodline. Roth knew little of his reputation except that he was a fastidious, efficient yet altogether uninspiring commander. Having known that, anything was better than his predecessor Khmer.
‘I was requested, lord general,’ Roth said, bowing slightly but making no military salute. Although he had not meant to, Roth’s mind could read Faisal’s red-hot panic beneath his facial wall of weary calm. He noticed that Faisal’s top collar buttons were popped open, and his laspistol sat loosely in an unbuttoned holster.
‘Inquisitor, what news of the Old Kings?’ Faisal asked. The terminology, or rather the acknowledgement of the relics, coming from the mouth of a high-ranking commander seemed awkward, like his tongue was reluctant.
‘We have located them but it will be some time before we can excavate to the required depths.’
‘The entire western flank of the Fortress Chain is collapsing. We lost contact wit
h Fifth Division Command in the city of Argentum. Gone. Overall casualty reports estimate anywhere between sixty thousand to one hundred thousand in losses.’
Faisal let his report hang in the stale tomb air.
‘Sir, are you… attributing such losses to the Conclave?’ Roth tested.
‘Should I be?’ Faisal asked wearily. ‘I don’t truly blame you inquisitor, rationally I shouldn’t. But it’s hard to send these men to their deaths. Show me something of substance, inquisitor.’
‘Angkhora is of substance. We need five days, lord general.’
‘And what of the Old Kings? What will you do once you have them?’
‘If circumstances allow, we will ferry them off-world. Hell, sir, I’ll eat them with a knife and fork if I have to, as long as the Archenemy does not reach them.’
Faisal nodded sagely, concentrating on the map before him. ‘How do you propose my armies bide the time required?’
Roth crossed over to the map of southern Aridun. It was a good map, military-grade, with precise grid referencing and good aerial outlay. Tapping the eastern-most tip of the Fortress Chain, Roth indicated to the city of Bacaw. ‘Start a fighting withdrawal from here, contract our defensive lines,’ Roth traced the Fortress Chain down with his finger towards the middle, ‘and concentrate our defences on Angkhora.’
‘I agree, sir,’ said Major General Ashwan. ‘Our only hope of defending Angkhora is if we initiate a fighting withdrawal. We can’t hold a four-hundred kilometre stretch of city. Ours lines are too thin. We have some sectors where one or two kilometre stretches are being held by a single platoon and one support weapon.’