by Henry Zou
There was a tinny but audible sigh on the other end.
‘That’s a no, sir. Command base is being overrun as we speak. I’ll stay on the line for as long as I can.’
Roth dropped the handset from his mouth and swore softly. ‘Command, save yourself. I’ll keep sharp for Big Game. Keep one round for yourself, soldier. Good luck.’
‘Thank you, sir. Out.’ The message was said with great finality. The command vox-net clicked out for the last time.
The huntsman stole amongst them. Up until that point he had laid low during the day and shadowed them during the night. Now he scampered above the eaves and rooftops, penetrating deep into the ten kilometre long marching column of Ironclad troopers.
Like any good hunter, Silverstein had learnt by watching the behaviour of his quarry.
Silverstein slid over the ridged guttering of a mausoleum roof. He made sure the stair-street was clear before dropping down and slipping deeper into the warren of lanes. Asingh-nu dropped down and followed him.
No more than one city block away, perhaps closer, they could hear the marching orders of the Ironclad and the brief fire-fights that would erupt as Imperial elements harassed them.
Silverstein halted at a corner, peered around the bend and nodded to Asingh-nu. ‘He is close. I can see banners, I see his own men.’
Asingh-nu breathed deeply. ‘Back when I was tilling my paddies, I never had to kill a Chaos warlord,’ he pronounced insightfully.
‘This can be your first,’ said Silverstein, and with that the huntsman disappeared around the corner.
‘Enemy blockade at intersection ahead. Sight confirmed?’
‘Confirmed.’
The backwash chatter of Roth’s vox headset was drowned out by the echoing thump of weapons on cyclical fire. Leaning waist up from the Siegfried’s turret, Roth sighted the Ironclad blockade from his magnoculars.
There was perhaps a company-sized formation of enemy infantry at the intersection. They were still uncoiling razor wire and attempting to forge together a hasty defence as the front of the First Mech-Cav column closed within firing distance. The enemy fired at them from rooftops, windows and side-alleys. A rocket streaked in front of Roth’s tank on a plume of unwinding smoke. As Ironclad troopers appeared in the mouth of laneways, pintle-mounted stubbers from the column spat tracer at them until they disappeared from view. Roth saw the turret gunner from the Leman Russ in front kneecap an Ironclad with a sustained drag of his stubber. As the Chaos raider buckled in two, the gunner yelped in triumph. A shot from an adjacent balcony took his head off and he slid lifelessly back down the turret. The drumming of small-arms fire on armour plate became a deafening rain.
‘Spear Three, this is Spear Two. Enemy blockade sighted at right of advance, engaging – over.’
‘Received. Out,’ Roth shouted into his wraparound vox-mic.
As promised, Spear Two, the second prong of the advance, cut through the Ironclad blockade in a perpendicular direction. They lit up the enemy to their front with a salvo of flanking fire. There was a shattering report and the explosive bark of cannons. One second Roth saw through his magnoculars the running shapes of Ironclad, scarpering behind a makeshift roadblock of rubble and tin sheets. The next he saw the blockade shred in all directions and the running shapes break and bounce into chunks of meat.
‘Two to all spears, the intersection is clear of hostiles.’
‘Loud and clear, Two, good job,’ Roth voxed.
The two prongs merged at the intersection before splitting into opposing pincers around a cemetery block. Paralleling their route, the third column rumbled their way alongside the viaduct, throwing tracer and shell out across the canal. They continued, trading shots with heavy resistance, towards their objective.
The bandit insurgency had never been this bad. Bombardier Krusa had been stationed for eight years at Mon Sumlayit in Cantica, fighting the bandit kings. It had been bad then, patrolling those harsh, windy hinterlands. It was not uncommon for bandits to trap lone patrols of Cantican Guardsmen, surrounding them during the night and butchering them with stick bombs and machete. The war had raged there for thirty years and was as bitter the whole time Krusa served there. Roadside bombs, night raids, close-quarter skirmishes – taking the mountains had been hell. For every one and a half bandits killed, they lost the life of one Guardsman and still the insurgency swelled with the influx of rural, poverty-stricken men. It had been a mean fight and Krusa had lost many friends there, yet this war made the insurgency feel like a comfort tour.
Bombardier Salai Krusa served with the 5th Cantican Colonial Artillery, and they held position on a demolished plateau of an upper-tier burial stack. Up until eight hours previously, their front had been defended by several battalions of CantiCol infantry, allowing the battery to work their Griffons, Basilisks and field guns against the Archenemy. But now the Archenemy had penetrated to the rear lines. The soft belly of field hospitals and comm stations behind the fighting front were the first to go. It was heard over the vox that the Ironclad were running their heavy tanks over surgical tents along with the occupant wounded.
It had been traumatising to listen to the voices of infantry officers he recognised, broadcasting last goodbyes over the vox-net as their positions were overrun, one by one. First it had been the frantic voice of Sergeant Samir of 40th Battalion radioing enemy positions, then it had been Captain Ghilantra, commander of Zulu Company of the 55th screaming sit-reps before his link went dead. They were all men that Krusa had worked with at one point. One after another, and now the Archenemy were on them.
‘Load the case-shots! Case-shots in the line!’ yelled an artillery officer. The call was echoed along the batteries and Bombardier Krusa took the command to his loaders.
His loaders moved quickly despite the ceaseless days of toil. Their cotton shirts were stiff with salt and their braces sagged by their breeches. Sweat rolled in beads along their grimy necks.
‘Case-shot loaded,’ announced Private Surat. A shell of close-range ordnance was loaded into the breech of the sixty-pounder.
Ironclad troopers appeared over the crest of their plateau – thousands of them at once with no semblance of spacing or tactical manoeuvre.
‘Hold! Hold!’ shouted the artillery officers.
The Ironclad charged across the open field of broken rock towards them. There was less than fifty paces of open ground between them. Krusa took hold of the firing chain with both hands.
‘Fire!’
There was a jagged crack of guns. Jets of smoke and muzzle flash rocked the massive field guns. They jerked back on recoil pistons. Eight guns fired in unison, vomiting a dense cloud of hyper-velocity ball bearings. It blackened the open space between them like a swarm of insects. The bandits on Mon Sumlayit had always baulked at a whiff of canister-shot. No matter how hungry or desperate the bandits got during the arid seasons, canister shot had always been enough to scatter, force them into trading shots with poorly maintained autorifles. Never in his service had Krusa seen the enemy run headlong into a wall of shrapnel. Like crumpled puppets the first rank of Ironclad shed away onto the ground. Unabated, the ranks behind them kicked and stomped their way over the wounded. One volley was all they had time for before the Ironclad were swarming over the sandbags.
Bombardier Krusa was amongst the first killed. A beaked warhammer punched through his thin orbital bone and spiked into his brain. His last thoughts, even as the warhammer was protruding from his eye, was that it would have been better to have died like his friends on Sumlayit. Bombardier Susilo had been shot by a machine pistol while on night sentry. Even Private Riau who was shot by a sniper while on border patrol had been killed cleanly by headshot. It took Bombardier Krusa some time to die. He was still very much struggling to live, spasming in shock and bleeding out from his face as the Archenemy stomped over him. This war was much worse than any he had seen.
Chapter Thirty-One
Khorsabad Maw was in his gunsights.
Khorsabad Maw, the King of Corsairs. Arch-heretic of the Rimward East. Sworn servant of the Apostles Martial.
Silverstein had the Chaos warlord wavering under the targeting reticule of his autorifle. With each steadily drawn breath, the reticule rose and fell.
Down from his minaret balcony, three hundred metres down on the streets below, Khorsabad was marching with his garish procession, singing, chanting, the column macabre in its harlequin manner. Spilling out to either side of the Chaos lord were his Iron Ghasts, surrounding him with no semblance of rank or order to their unruly mob. They brandished ornamental paper banners and papier-mâché scenes detailing four thousand years of misdeed. Amongst the forest of vibro-pikes, Ironclad were rattling hand drums, warbling discordant horns and dancing in a stiff-limbed frenzy. As their warlord’s procession ebbed past, Ironclad troopers pushed towards their Arch-heretic in a show of adoration. The Iron Ghasts kept them at bay with their pikes, fighting on the verge of rioting. To the untrained eye it resembled more of a carnival than a military motorcade. Silverstein even spotted an Ironclad trooper, starkly naked but for his face-bindings, dancing about, swinging a smoking censer and cutting himself with a razor in the other hand.
Once a long time ago, Silverstein had visited Murahaba during their festival of love lost. The people there had paraded, some dancing in a possessed frenzy that was eerie to behold. The crowd toted papier-mâché masks of monstrous proportions and chanted in tongues. Paper effigies were burned and discordant instruments were drummed ceaselessly. The Chaos lord’s procession had a similar taint of the mystic macabre.
‘Frightening, isn’t it? Do you see him?’ said Asingh-nu, peering down at the dizzying drop below.
‘Yes. I see him.’
Silverstein made sure to see the warlord through the filtered lenses of augmetics. He dared not study the warlord in such clarity with his naked eyes. Silverstein was sure that only bad would come of it. Under the intensified spectrum of his bioptics, Silverstein could measure every detail of Khorsabad Maw.
He was still a man. Or rather, he still held the shape of one.
Khorsabad was not at all the brutal monstrosity Silverstein had expected. Maw was slim, and well articulated to the point of being doll-like. The litheness of his limbs could not be hidden by the overlapping warren of silk, splintmail and chain that wadded him. His face was of elaborately woven iron, slightly reminiscent of a porcelain doll. It was smooth and featureless except for a small, up-turned pinch of the nose. At one and a half metres tall, Khorsabad would have looked like a finely costumed iron toy had it not been for the mantle of quills running along his shoulders and back.
He was borne aloft on a gaudy litter of painted paper and textured fabric, by a solid phalanx of Iron Ghasts. The Ghasts stood upright on a crab-shelled super-heavy tractor, as if forming some unholy ziggurat. Escort FPVs and mounted outriders rolled alongside the pedestrian traffic. Parting the crowds like oceanic leviathans were the hulls of broad, super-heavy flamer tanks, their trawl turrets snorting wisps of fire.
‘Asingh-nu,’ Silverstein began, ‘I only have one shot at this. This is the only shot, of all my shots so far, which matters. I need you to sit here and not say a word. Do not move. Do not sigh. Do not tremor. You have been a good friend up until now and I expect you will not let me down.’
The guerrilla nodded warily and settled down into a hunch, hugging his autogun. Silverstein adjusted his scope bracket and snuggled down behind it.
He began by tracking for a weakness on Khorsabad. His entire spine was exposed and pitted like raw ore and sutured with his silks. The iron quills formed clusters of scaly scuttles at his lower back and lengthened gradually into the fifty-centimetre long pikes that branched out like floral growth along the top of his back. Silverstein decided that shooting the natural armour of any creature would not be a killing shot. He tracked his scope to the Chaos lord’s head. It was dainty and perfectly formed with a complex braid of iron lattices. There were no vision slits or mouth pieces. It was more than likely the Chaos lord’s head, and that was where Silverstein hovered his target reticule.
Silverstein closed his eyes, loosening the muscles of his shoulder and neck. He took two breaths and then adjusted his aim to be several centimetres in front of his target’s expected path. The ambush method was the basic method for hitting moving targets, and Silverstein’s favourite. He settled himself, slowed his breathing and his body’s intake of oxygen.
The huntsman thought back to his days as a scout for the senior hunters of the lodge. Back to his youth in the conifer woods of Veskipine, when the northern lights would shine at dusk and air was crisp with cold. He had tracked exotic off-world game on the estates for days at a time. His favourite had been hunting the sentient primates. Those animals fought back, organised and used tools; sometimes the primates even hunted them. Those had been the best hunts and Silverstein had spent much of his formative years shouldering his brother’s autorifle and mimicking the mating dirges of the meso-ape.
Silverstein opened his eyes. Khorsabad Maw was ghosting towards his centre of aim. Silverstein exhaled, allowing the scope to sink. His gradual inhalation buoyed the reticule back on target. Khorsabad Maw’s polished cranium slid perfectly and precisely within the target’s sights. The huntsman allowed the target a nanosecond shift to the left, allowing for wind direction and the natural curve of trajectory.
Silverstein fired.
The trigger pull was smooth despite the speed with which his nerves had wired the command to the muscles of his hand. The trajectory, the fall of mark, the wind current. Everything was as Silverstein knew it would be.
But the round never made its mark. Khorsabad Maw’s force shields crackled with static film as the round impacted with it. The sudden discharge showed a perfect semi-sphere of iridescent force where it had been invisible before.
Silverstein jumped up from his post, his eyes wide. Suddenly, up on that minaret balcony he felt utterly vulnerable. The eyes of all those Archenemy soldiers below looked up at him, as one.
‘Get down, Asingh!’ shouted Silverstein. He threw himself backwards as the entire balcony erupted and literally shook apart. The assembled masses below opened up on the tower with all their combined arms. The stone balcony became a rapidly deteriorating sponge as chips of rock disintegrated under the storm of fire. Asingh-nu took a round in the stomach. Silverstein dragged the guerrilla into the tower proper. Heavy-calibre rounds punched holes through the walls and shattered the windows. Smoke and brick-dust was making him gag.
As the dust settled, the balcony was no longer there. There was just a scorched hole in the wall and empty space beyond.
‘I’m hit,’ Asingh-nu groaned. He shrimped up into the foetal position, clutching at his abdomen. Blood seeped out from between his folded arms.
The fire died down as quickly as it had started, but the huntsman still heard the frantic pounding of weapons. Only now, he was no longer the sole target of their ferocity. He expected to hear the sounds of forced entry at the tower below, but when none came, he decided to hazard a peek from the holes in the wall. The sounds of fighting below were too enticing.
Fifty storeys down, he saw Khorsabad’s procession engaging with targets to their front and flanks. Further up the road and along a side junction, Silverstein saw an approaching column of armour. Imperial armour. They were charging at full power, turret weapons flashing.
Leman Russes rammed into the procession, pintle mounts throbbing and battle cannons seeking out Maw’s motorcade escorts. The Ironclad replied when the flamer platforms began belching horizontal tornados of fire. They fired indiscriminately, at Ironclad and Imperial alike, spewing masses of flame that consumed oxygen with audible roars.
Amongst them, Silverstein picked up the distinct profile of a Siegfried siege-tank, with a pugnacious snout of its
dozer blades and its swivelling tower turrets. There, leaning out of the cylindrical turret and firing the tank’s pintle-bolter, Silverstein saw Inquisitor Obodiah Roth.
Khorsabad’s victory procession was moving down the central high road of Angkhora, a broad access-way that was wide enough to accommodate the legions of Ironclad streaming out behind the advance of the Chaos lord.
As the Imperial column hooked in at a mid-route intersection, Khorsabad’s procession lurched into view. Immediately, hundreds of Ironclad troopers greeted them with small-arms fire. Some took a knee, their shots spanking off the metal tank hulls. Others threw themselves before the tank treads, laying prostrate in sacrifice to their Khorsabad.
Lancer cavalry burst in ahead of the tank charge, their sabres flashing. There was an audible crunch as the Lancers rushed amongst the Archenemy in a wall of lashing hooves and slashing swords. Men flew off horses, or were trampled in the press. Khorsabad Maw’s Iron Ghasts braced themselves around him, standing back to back and shoulder to shoulder in a semi-sphere of bristling vibro-pikes.
The firing became frantic. The statues that lined the street began to explode, one by one. The walls along the streets looked as if they were being sand-blasted.
Roth didn’t even bother hunching down behind his turret. There were too many rounds in the air and he’d just as likely get hit standing up or squatting down. A frag missile reared up and shot out at Roth’s tank from the jolting mass of Ironclad. The warhead punched through the plating of the turret, the tip of the missile emerging around a flower of ragged tank metal at waist-level. It was suspended there, quivering but dormant. Looking at the unexploded missile, Roth began to laugh. The laughter was solace. It held him together and came easily.
In the pandemonium of shooting, Roth’s Siegfried bulldozed into the line of Ironclad. Vibro-pikes snapped holes into dozerblades and reached up alongside the hull, jabbing at his turret. Someone was blasting a machine-pistol at him at point-blank range, the fat-calibre rounds ricocheting off the tank with angry sparks. The surprise of being shot at overrode the compulsion of fear. Rather than ducking, Roth gripped the pintle-mounted bolter and shot off a few loud, booming spurts.