by Mike Lee
As they approached the end of the access road, Nemiel summoned up the layout of the perimeter fortifications in his memory. Just ahead and to the right was a lascannon post, with a heavy stubber post further west. Just ahead and to the left was another heavy stubber. He waved Ephrial to the corner of the furthest building to the right, while he angled off to the left.
Nemiel put his back to the wall of the manufactory and glanced across the road at Ephrial. He battle-signed for the Astartes to hit the target to his right. Ephrial nodded, and without hesitation he whirled around the corner and fired a shot with the meltagun. There was an immediate, crackling boom as the lascannon’s power supply detonated, followed by the screams of its maimed and dying crew. Immediately the heavy stubber to Nemiel’s left opened fire, spitting a long burst of tracer rounds at Ephrial’s back. He spun around the corner and levelled his bolt pistol at the four men in the sandbagged emplacement just five metres away. The Redemptor fired four quick shots, and the skitarii slumped to the ground.
Nemiel turned back to the squad and waved them forward. They left the foundry sector and headed quickly for the sheltering warehouses further south, taking fire from two more heavy stubber emplacements as they went. Vardus was limping from an unlucky hit in his leg. Askelon was driving himself onward with ruthless determination, but Nemiel could tell that he was fighting the weight of his own armour, and was nearing the point of exhaustion. The Redemptor ran on, dropping the empty magazine from his bolt pistol and slamming in a fresh one.
He reckoned they were four-and-a-half kilometres from the warehouse barracks of the ground force. Nemiel could still hear the sounds of bolter fire up ahead, so he knew at least some of his brothers were still fighting. Several times he tried to call out over the vox, but the jamming was still underway. Pillars of black smoke were rising from more than a dozen points out beyond the forge’s curtain wall, and he feared the worst for Kulik’s brave Dragoons.
As they drew closer to the barracks, Nemiel suddenly heard a flurry of lasgun and stubber fire, answered by the snarl of an assault cannon. It was Brother Titus, he realised; the Dreadnought had been standing watch outside 2nd Company’s barracks when they’d left on their reconnaissance mission earlier that night. On impulse, he led the squad in that direction, listening as the sounds of battle increased.
By the time they drew within sight of the warehouse, a pitched battle was raging on the street outside. They found Brother Titus guarding the warehouse’s side entrance from what amounted to a platoon of skitarii. Dozens of broken bodies lay around the Dreadnought’s wide feet, denoting a failed assault by the enemy. Scores more of the Tech-Guard were sprawled on the permacrete, torn apart by the Dreadnought’s fearsome cannon. Still more were arriving from the direction of the southern gateway, however, taking up firing positions and unleashing a storm of fire against Titus’s front armour.
Nemiel brought the squad to a halt. ‘It’s only a matter of time before those Tech-Guard bring up a missile launcher or a lascannon and destroy Titus,’ he said. ‘We’re going to swing around and hit them from the rear. Askelon, can you still keep up?’
The Techmarine’s armoured shoulders were heaving after the terrible exertions of the run. His bloodied face was pale, but he looked up at Nemiel and smiled. ‘Brother-Sergeant Kohl’s been saying I need to get more exercise,’ he said breathlessly. ‘Don’t worry about me.’
‘He’s just worried about having to carry your dead weight around,’ Kohl growled. ‘Now let’s get moving.’
The squad set off to the northwest, moving past a pair of warehouse buildings before cutting south again. They listened to the sounds of battle raging off to their left, gauging their position relative to the enemy and moving five hundred metres behind them. Then they cut back east, gathering speed as they prepared to swing around and strike the enemy from behind.
They’d run for only a few hundred metres when just ahead they saw a platoon of skitarii jog into view, dragging four lascannons mounted on wheeled gun carriages. They saw the Astartes at almost the same instant; with three hundred metres between them, the enemy troops hurriedly dropped the trails on the four guns and began to frantically wheel them around to bear on the squad.
‘Charge!’ Nemiel cried, but the rest of squad hardly needed prompting. They broke into a full run, firing their bolters as they went.
Nemiel watched the mass-reactive shells strike the armoured splinter plates of the gun carriages and ricochet harmlessly away. The crews worked quickly and with remarkable precision, connecting the weapons to their power units and energising the guns in the space of seconds. If they had been preparing to fire on human troops, it might have been enough, but the Astartes reached the enemy with seconds to spare.
They leapt up and over the lascannons’ splinter shields and came down among the shocked gun crews. Nemiel shot two of them point-blank, then slew two more with his crozius. Brother-Sergeant Kohl and Brother Ephrial killed almost a dozen more before the rest of the platoon broke and fled back the way they’d come.
Nemiel paused amid the carnage, his autosenses detecting more sounds of activity to the south as still more enemy troops headed their way. He was about to order Askelon to disable the abandoned lascannons when the heavens split and trails of fire descended on the forge from on high.
These were no simple meteors, falling in thin streaks of light before vanishing into oblivion. Nemiel counted eight separate streaks of smoke and flame, plunging down in a steep arc and converging on a common point: the heart of the forge complex, some thirty kilometres away. When they struck, the entire northern horizon blazed with terrible, white light.
Nemiel had witnessed more than one orbital bombardment in his time, but those had been blazing trails of lance fire that carved across the ground like a burning blade, or salvoes of poorly-aimed macro cannon fire that saturated a target area with huge shells. He’d never been close enough to experience the fury of a barrage of bombardment cannons, and wasn’t prepared for what followed.
The eight shells struck the target area more or less simultaneously, their magma warheads detonating with the heat and force of a fusion bomb. His onboard systems registered the overpressure from the blast and had just enough time to yell, ‘Get down!’ before the blast wave hit.
He dropped to the ground and pressed his helmet to the permacrete as a roaring wall of superheated air howled over him. His temperature sensors spiked, pushing into the red zone, and the force of the wind lifted him off the ground and tossed him like a toy down the narrow lane. The thunder of the blast was something he felt through his armour, reverberating down into his bones. His autosenses overloaded and shut down at once to prevent permanent damage.
It was over in a matter of moments. One second the entire world felt as though it were coming apart at the seams, and the next, everything was almost eerily silent. Nemiel lay on his back, trying to regain his bearings. Icons blinked on his helmet display, informing him that his autosensors and vox-unit were resetting. As his vision cleared, he saw tendrils of smoke rising from his scorched armour.
Slowly and carefully, he sat upright. There was smoke everywhere, rising from warehouses that had been set aflame by the blast wave. The four abandoned lascannons were gone; he looked about and found one smashed to pieces against the side of a building, but the rest had simply disappeared.
A squeal of static in his ears made him start as his vox-bead came back online. He was about to silence it again when he heard words coalesce out of the interference.
‘Battle Force Alpha, this is Leonis!’ spoke a familiar voice, hazy and hashed out by atmospheric ionization. ‘Activate your teleport beacons and stand by!’
Nemiel scrambled to his feet. Leonis was the primarch’s personal callsign. He looked about the smoke-stained road and saw Brother-Sergeant Kohl climbing to his feet, along with Vardus and Ephrial. ‘Where is Brother Askelon?’ he called. ‘We’ve got to get back to the warehouses immediately!’
‘Over here,’ a voice
answered weakly from down the side-lane where they’d originally come. Nemiel and Kohl rushed to the corner to see Askelon slowly pushing himself upright. His unprotected head had been badly burned by the blast, but somehow the Techmarine was still able to move.
They helped Askelon to his feet. He looked over at Kohl and tried to grin, his lips cracking. ‘Looks like you’ll have to carry me after all,’ he gasped.
Kohl grabbed the Techmarine’s arm and draped it over his shoulder, then took hold of Askelon’s waist with his left hand. ‘I could carry two of you without breaking a sweat,’ the sergeant growled. ‘You just keep an eye out for more of those damned skitarii, and let me do the rest.’
Nemiel grabbed Askelon’s other arm and together they helped the Techmarine along. He could hear signals going back and forth across the Battle Force command channel, so he knew that at least some of the Dark Angels had survived Archoi’s deadly ambush. He hoped there was an Apothecary still alive, for Askelon’s sake.
They linked up with the rest of the squad and headed back towards the barracks buildings as quickly as they could. It was only then that Nemiel fully saw the devastation that the bombardment had wrought.
An enormous column of ash and smoke rose into the sky off to the north, where the volcano and the forge’s centre used to be. The rising sun tinged the climbing column of debris in shades of blood red and fiery orange, whilst closer to the ground Nemiel could see thin veins of pulsing orange, tracks of real magma flowing like blood from the volcano’s shattered flanks. Fires blazed out of control from horizon to horizon, consuming the shattered husks of wrecked buildings in a vast swathe surrounding the epicentre of the blast. For all intents and purposes, the forge complex had been destroyed.
It took more than half an hour to cover the five hundred metres back to the warehouses. They saw the towering form of Brother Titus first. His armour had been scorched – in some places the paint had been stripped away down to the bare metal – but he seemed otherwise undamaged. The warehouses themselves were ablaze, and the road was full of Astartes. A disturbingly long line of dead battle brothers were stretched out along the roadway to their left; the bodies were being tended to by one of the ground force’s two Apothecaries, collecting the gene-seed for the future of the Legion. The second Apothecary was tending to an even larger number of wounded Dark Angels who were formed into small groups according to their parent squads on the right side of the roadway.
In the centre of the crowd stood the company commanders and senior squad leaders, gathered beneath the shadow of the great Dreadnought. In their midst stood a towering figure in gleaming armour, his head bare and his expression one of cold, righteous rage. Nemiel left Askelon in Brother-Sergeant Kohl’s care and hurried over to join the primarch.
Lion El’Jonson was receiving the reports of the company commanders when Nemiel arrived. Jonson caught the Redemptor’s eye and but said nothing until the two captains had finished tallying their dead and wounded. As near as Nemiel could determine, some thirty of the Astartes had been killed in the ambush and twice as many others seriously wounded before the last of the frenzied Praetorians had been killed. The sight of so many dead brothers filled him with grief and a cold, fathomless rage.
The primarch listened gravely to the captains’ reports and then turned to Nemiel. ‘We’ve a grim start to the day, Brother-Redemptor,’ Jonson said. ‘I hope you bring us better news.’
Without preamble, Nemiel delivered his report. He told Jonson everything they’d found during the night, from the site of Vertullus’s likely murder to the discovery of the great siege guns at the Titan foundry and Archoi’s foul treachery.
‘I surmised as much when most of our scouts were destroyed by their own brand-new torpedoes,’ Jonson said. He turned and glanced back at the towering plume of ash and smoke to the north. ‘When we traced the source of the vox jamming it made Archoi’s duplicity all too clear.’
‘The Lords of Mars will be furious at the loss of such a venerable forge,’ Nemiel said forebodingly.
Jonson turned back to the Redemptor, his green eyes blazing. ‘Such is the fate of all traitors!’ he snapped. The force of his anger was like a physical blow, as though he’d reached over and slapped Nemiel across the face. ‘So Horus and the rest of his ilk will learn in due time.’ ‘We saw the debris of a ship falling to earth,’ Nemiel ventured more carefully. ‘I take it the rebels have returned.’
The primarch drew in a deep breath and sought to master his humours. He nodded. ‘A much smaller force, this time, but sufficient to their needs,’ he said tersely. ‘Horus moved much more quickly than I expected and sent out an ad hoc force not too dissimilar from ours. We would have been hard pressed to defeat them as it was, but Archoi’s treachery proved to be our undoing. All of our destroyers were lost, along with both grand cruisers and the strike cruiser Adzikel. After bombarding the forge and eliminating the source of the jamming, I ordered the rest of the battle group to withdraw to the edges of the system and then teleported myself down to join you.’
The news of the battle group’s defeat sent a stir through the stoic Astartes. Nemiel gripped his crozius and straightened, remembering his duties to the Legion. ‘While we live, we fight, my lord,’ he said, his voice defiant. ‘Though the storm rages and the foe gathers about us, we are unmoved. Let them come: we are the warriors of the First Legion, and we have never known defeat!’
Shouts of agreement rose from the assembled Dark Angels. Jonson smiled. ‘Well said, Brother-Redemptor,’ he replied. ‘You are right. We’ve suffered some terrible blows, but the battle isn’t over yet.’
‘What would you have of us, my lord?’ Nemiel asked.
Jonson cast his eyes to the north, towards the distant bulk of the assembly building. ‘We fall back to the foundry,’ he said. ‘So long as we possess Horus’s siege guns, the rebels won’t risk an orbital bombardment.’ When he turned back to the Astartes, his face was grim.
‘Once we’re in position, we need to fortify the sector as best we can, and prepare for the fight of our lives. Unless I’m very much mistaken, the Sons of Horus will be here soon.’
EIGHTEEN
A THORN IN THE MIND
Caliban
In the 200th year of the Emperor’s Great Crusade
THE TIMBRE OF the shuttle’s thrusters deepened as they made a near-ballistic descent towards Aldurukh, swelling from an angry whine to a thunderous roar as they plummeted from the stratosphere into the denser air at sea level. The shuttle’s airframe trembled as the pilot pushed the craft to its limits; Zahariel had told him to fly to the fortress as though his life depended on it, and he was taking the Astartes at his word. The Librarian felt the shuddering of the craft in his bones and had to raise his powerful voice to be heard over the noise. ‘General Morten, this is a direct order,’ he yelled into his vox-bead. ‘Unseal the hab levels at the Northwilds arcology and redistribute the populace through the upper levels.’
The Terran general’s reply was faint and washed with static, but there was no mistaking the exasperation in his voice. ‘Sir, I believe I explained this before. The security situation—’
‘I’m well aware of the security situation,’ Zahariel snapped. He glanced across the passenger compartment at Master Remiel and Sar Daviel, who were both pretending not to listen to the tense exchange. ‘The cordon is only making things worse. You’ve got to get those people out of there before you have a catastrophe on your hands.’
‘But sir, the logistics of relocating five million people—’
‘Will require a great deal of effort and coordination on our part,’ Zahariel cut in. ‘So I expect you and your staff to give the matter your complete and immediate attention. Make it happen, general. I don’t care what it takes.’ Zahariel broke the connection without giving Morten a chance to reply. He wasn’t interested in arguing the matter, and he had no intention of explaining his reasons over vox.
Daviel turned away from the viewport at his left and stared questionin
gly at Zahariel. ‘Do you think he’ll do it?’ the maimed knight asked. The Librarian sighed. ‘Not all Terrans are corrupt devils, Sar Daviel. Morten is a good soldier. He’ll follow orders.’
Daviel’s scarred face twisted into a scowl, but he offered no reply. Zahariel studied the scarred knight for a moment. ‘How long have you known?’ he asked.
Sar Daviel narrowed his one good eye. ‘Known what?’
‘About Caliban. About the taint.’
Daviel’s fierce expression grew haunted. ‘Ah. That.’ He rubbed his chin with one scarred hand. ‘A long time. Too long perhaps.’ The knight shook his head. ‘At first, I thought I must be going mad. After all, you’d seen the same things I had, and never seemed to think anything of it.’
Zahariel straightened in his chair. ‘What things?’ he asked, feeling the skin prickle on the back of his neck. ‘What are you talking about?’ Daviel frowned in consternation. ‘Why, the library, of course.’ He replied. ‘At the fortress of the Knights of Lupus. Surely you remember.’ His one eye grew unfocused, as though he were recalling the details of a nightmare. ‘All those books. Those terrible, terrible books…’ The Librarian felt his skin grow cold. ‘How could you have seen the library, Daviel?’ he asked him. ‘I saw you wounded in the castle courtyard.’
Daviel’s gaze fell. ‘So I was,’ he said quietly. ‘I was raving with fever for days afterward. The chirurgeons feared to move me in the state I was in, so I and a few other wounded men were left behind when the army returned to Aldurukh.’
The old knight fell silent for a moment as the memories welled up inside him. He stared at his hands, curled like claws in his lap. ‘Later, when we could get up and hobble about for a few hours at a time, they tried to find jobs for us to do, to keep our spirits up. So they put some of us to work in that library, crating everything up to be carried back home.’
Daviel sighed. ‘They rotated us in shifts, so we were only up there a few hours at a time, and we had strict orders not to open any of the books.’ He smiled ruefully. ‘The chirurgeons said they didn’t want us to exert our minds unduly in our weakened state.’