‘And in ensuring the men so deployed have the nerve to stand before the storm,’ said Glassius, in characteristically portentous language. The Apothecary liked to project an air of gravitas onto the suckling neophytes he had to call brother. ‘And in increasing numbers, sir.’
DuCaine nodded in agreement. He’d become aware of the custom that had developed amongst the mortal auxilia of the 52nd Expedition, of scribing their own condolence letters prior to deployment. DuCaine heartily approved.
The clans of old Albia had observed similar traditions.
‘This phase is called Raising the Storm. It’s a template we followed on the Central Afrik, and in the Panpacific Campaigns.’
Caphen’s look, even through the frosted amethyst of his helmet lenses, was one that DuCaine had come to recognise all too well over the last century and a half. It wondered just how hard Unification could have been. How it could possibly have taken the Master of Mankind and his twenty Legions so long to achieve.
‘You heard of Rust?’
‘I think he may have,’ said Tannen.
‘It won’t work,’ Caphen repeated. ‘The Third Legion don’t fight in that way.’
‘I know the boy we’re fighting here well, and he’s not nearly as good as he thinks he is. In my experience a battle can be controlled right up to the point where it begins. After that I don’t care if you’re a technobarbarian from the Afrik, an ork, or aye, even Legiones Astartes, you do what everyone does in a battle.’
Caphen shook his head, but did not protest further.
DuCaine shrugged, turned back to the wall, slung his bolter strap over his shoulder, then set his boot against the frozen rockcrete surface as if about to pull himself up over the top.
‘We just have to sweeten the lure a little bit.’
Moses Trurakk pulled the control stick hard to the left, intending to jink but instead dragging the hyper-responsive Xiphon Interceptor into a hard break to port. He cursed in consonant-heavy Medusan as snap shots scorched his canopy and clipped the roll of his starboard wing. G-force crushed him into his flight harness as the unfamiliar machine dumped forward momentum into the turn. Pushing his engineered biology to the limits of its tolerance, he levered himself up from his harness and craned forward, catching sight of the heavily armed wedge of black as the enemy aircraft overshot.
‘Didn’t see that coming,’ he muttered sarcastically.
Conjuring mental formulaics of encouragement and common purpose, he directed them towards the Xiphon’s rebellious spirit via the interface shunt plugged into his upper spine. He dragged his augmented left hand from the dashboard to grapple the stick two-handed, the interceptor’s wing flaps juddering violently as it began to level out. A groan forced its way through his teeth. It felt like he was lifting the aircraft by hand. ‘You’re sensitive enough when you want to be.’ Just as he felt the wobble along his midline that told him he was about to pitch into another roll in the opposite direction, he pushed his hand through a hard gauntlet of gees to open up the throttle. At the same time his boot eased off the rudder pedal and the interceptor slammed him back into his harness and shot into a climb, scissoring over and under the enemy strike fighter as each sought to get in behind the other.
Unable to break the stalemate after half a dozen turns, the more powerful Primaris-Lightning broke off with a massive burn of thrust.
Moses had no option but to let it go.
The Xiphon was a ludicrously high-performance machine. It boasted phenomenal corner speeds, touch-responsiveness, and was as agile in atmosphere as it was in the void. But for all its aeronautical capabilities it hadn’t a scratch on a Primaris-Lightning for raw manoeuvring power.
He took advantage of the temporary lull to silence a string of alarms demanding his attention, and to correct a potentially serious fuel imbalance in his starboard nacelle.
The Xiphon was too complicated for its own good. It was lightweight and underpowered, and the design compromises inherent in a propulsion system that could operate in a range of atmosphere types, even one as inhospitable as Vesta’s, or in a vacuum, made her a nuisance of micromanagement in a fight.
He didn’t even like the colour.
‘You need a lighter touch on the ailerons,’ said Ortan Vertanus. Moses scanned the coppery belts of cloud that strangled his aircraft, but saw no sign of his wing-brother. ‘And not so belligerent with the stick. She wants to fly, brother. Let her.’
‘I have a solid grounding in all Imperial aeronautica.’
‘But do you love her, brother?’
‘My feelings are inconsequential. And my aircraft is agendered.’
‘I know that you talk to her when you’re alone in there.’
‘I assure you I do not.’
Light laughter crackled through the augmitter pad in Moses’ control board.
‘I believe it was the Shakespire that said – my brother doth protest too much. Combat is more than numbers and angles. It is a joust.’
A shudder passed through Moses’ canopy armourglass as Vertanus’ purple Xiphon roared overhead. Its wings were anhedral with a downward-cranked tip, like a Felgarrthi vulture tucking in its pinions to swoop on rotting meat. Its two stripped-down engines frothed the thick clouds with white, its pilot making expert use of Vesta’s gravity to fire the aircraft across Moses’ nose and into an overshoot.
‘Show off,’ Moses muttered.
‘Are you even trying, Iron Hand?’ voxed Paliolinus, wing commander. ‘I was told that you had more confirmed kills than any combat pilot in Clan Vurgaan.’
‘You were informed correctly,’ Moses replied tersely. The joint exercises between the III and X Legions had been Lord Manus’ proposal, to challenge ingrained approaches and provoke competitive spirit across both sides. Legion honour mattered. But clan honour mattered more, and personal honour more again.
He would rely on any man of the Iron Tenth to say the same.
‘Give me time,’ he said. And an aircraft that does not handle like a parchment aeroplane, he wished to add but did not. A gifted artificer did not impugn his implements.
‘I apologise if I sound harsh,’ said Paliolinus, sensing his defensiveness. ‘I do not know if I could perform to my fullest in your place.’
‘You have not seen my fullest. But you will. I will not fail my primarch.’
‘Well said, brother.’
A string of icons, symbols and unit-level organisational motifs flowed from the wing-commander’s flight cogitator through to the marker recognition algorithms of Moses’ ventral auspex. He scowled at the implication that he might need a reminder.
‘The immediate airspace is presently clear,’ said Paliolinus. ‘We proceed as parameterised.’
Affirmatives clicked through the squadron vox. Moses cut his thrust. Gravity would soon be enough to prevent an engine stall. He angled the flaps in his tailplane to turn his nose into the clouds. A fuel alarm pinged across his neural shunt. He tapped the brass trim of the fuel gauge, but otherwise ignored it. The Xiphon was a short-range interceptor and reduced fuel capacity kept it light. The levels remained within the III Legion’s expected parameters, despite the dogfight.
‘Six, ready,’ Moses confirmed.
‘Descent speed,’ voxed Paliolinus.
The early Catherics of DuCaine’s homeland had thought hell a frozen wasteland of eternal winter. It was only later iterations of the superstition that had filled it with flames, and it was the earlier interpretation of mankind’s primordial dread that hit DuCaine as he hauled himself onto the thick rockcrete-block wall.
The X Legion had dug in in the basin of an extinct caldera, part of a range of mountains composed of frozen ethane that circled the southern lunar pole, near to where the warriors of the Emperor’s Children were believed to have established a base of operations.
Heaving bodies of men and machines surged down the rust-coloured, semi-transparent slopes. Over a certain distance, in the dark, in the sublimation of hydrocarbon ice to phantasmal
gases, man and machine became largely indistinguishable, blobs of drab metal and void-armoured flesh, imbued by aerial flares with the colours of blood and fire. The condemned wail of the Tarantula positions was the sound to which the harrowing was played out, their screams overloading even the fine discrimination of Space Marine hearing. Denuded of that sensation, he could only feel the stride of the Legio Decimare as the Titans walked towards his lines. Like the beasts of Hellenic legend from which they drew their name, marching to war on the gods that had made them.
A steel plate covered the wound in the right side of DuCaine’s face, but with his remaining eye he took in the state of the X Legion forces.
To his right, an aegis defence line was engaged in a blistering fire duel with a bloc of Plutonic Janissars in high-spec ice-world combat gear. To the left, a column of main-line fighting vehicles, including the precursor-pattern Sicaran battle tank Beast of Manus, crumbled before the weight of enemy Leman Russ Conquerors. Immediately in front of him, across the iced-up sentry lines, a horrendously outclassed formation of the Afrik Demi-Mechanised held their lines against waves of encroachment by III Legion breacher squads.
‘They’re coming, all right.’
He lifted his cloak in one hand to display the glittering device of Clan Sorrgol for all to see, just as a barrage of sonic claps took their shot at his punished eardrums and drew his gaze upwards. An arrowhead of Xiphon Interceptors flashed across his vantage, causing his cloak to balloon up around his fist, and gunned through a loose hail of flak towards the steaming crags that encircled their position.
The Emperor’s Children were about to learn the cost of challenging the Iron Hands in battle.
The storm had been raised.
It was time to bring down the hammer.
The drop pod’s hatches blew out on impact, shattering the steeply inclined ice like docking claw and assault ramp crowbarred into one utilitarian lump of metal. Entry heat steamed off the pod’s thermal shielding, anointing the Avernii Clan veterans of the First Order within with a noxious libation of aerosolised copper and gaseous hydrocarbons.
Gabriel Santar broke through the murk, down the ramp and out onto the rapidly sublimating permafrost of Vesta.
Melt vapour enveloped him. The ground beneath his armoured boots literally boiled with the infinitesimal heat that escaped their seals. His helmet display struggled to declutter, shedding icons, redrawing the concealed topography from augur inloads. All the while, irresistible forward momentum drove him down the slope towards the sounds of combat. The primarch had seen fit to honour Order Primus with the first century of prototype Cataphractii battle suits. ‘We’re living in a golden age,’ Harik Morn had said, a wetness in his eye, as he broke open the consignment from Mars. Santar clenched one immense, crackling glove, atmosphere steaming from his grip.
It felt like he was wearing a Land Raider.
The removal and rationalisation of squad and hazard icons left two sets of runes that his authorisations could not touch. The first were the mission imperatives uploaded and installed by the primarch himself. The second was the commencement order from Lord Commander DuCaine: codephrase ‘hammer’.
Typically unimaginative.
DuCaine was the last of the Terran old guard to occupy a position of high command. From the first days, the primarch had chosen to promote from his own, but DuCaine simply refused to die. Santar thought the Lord Commander a relic better suited to a position on the Clan Council lecturing neophytes on ancient histories. DuCaine thought Santar an over-promoted pup with a voice too close to the primarch’s ear. Mutual antagonism made them both better warriors.
‘Terminators front and centre,’ he voxed. ‘Breacher units to flank. Tactical squads, at a distance, overwatching the advance. Continual auspex sweeps for enemy rearguards.’
This face of the caldera had a relatively shallow grade with an aspect that shaded it from the meagre warmth of the most proximate stars. That was enough to give it the thickest and most stable ice layer in the vicinity, and so the bulk of DuCaine’s ‘hammer’ had been deployed here. Santar’s visor display continued to update and apprise on the smaller troop and armour drops that had been deposited around the caldera basin in an encirclement position, even if he did not wish to see it. He was fiddling with the complexity of the rune display when the murmur of distant combat was broken by the crack of a solitary shot.
For the count of about three seconds, the Terminators continued to plod forwards as if nothing had happened. Then the Order auspex trooper, Joraan, marked out from his brethren by the twanging sensor pole, dropped with a helmet splattered with red. Damn. A count of about three seconds more and the Terminators were still grinding downhill. They were too bulky to stop. Damn!
Bolter-fire echoed from the ice ridge above the drop pods, and suddenly Santar’s carefully ordered rune display was awash with auspex hits.
The more mobile tactical and breacher squads turned to face the threat and were methodically picked off, all while Santar and a hundred of the X Legion’s best stomped and slipped down the slope.
‘Back,’ he bellowed, into the vox and through his voice augmitter grilles. ‘Back up to the drop pods. We’ll use their cover to make a stand.’ His armour’s mission imperatives registered non-penetrating hits to back and arm. Trembling with fury, he aimed behind him and shredded the melt fog with fire from his combi-bolter.
Defeat he could bear. Humiliation he refused to tolerate.
The ground beneath his feet hissed and bubbled, fissuring beneath his weight and spewing boiling ethane over his boots as he finally managed to arrest his forward charge.
The high-powered whine of at least twenty cold-stressed suspensor/repulsor drives drew Santar’s ire before he could give it a target of his own choosing. A squadron of jetbikes pierced the ice haze like throwing knives. Their purple cowlings were decorated with chipped ice and stylised equidae, the brilliant palatine aquila on their front fairings proudly displayed in gold. Two Cataphractii were gunned down in the process of turning towards the initial ambush, the jetbikes naught but the rumour of engine noise, before Santar and the remainder of his warriors could bring their heavier guns to bear.
‘I thought that you were the heroes in this conflict, brother!’ Santar spat after them. He scanned the melt vapours with his full suite of instruments, but could still detect nothing but ghosts and static echoes. He cursed the loss of his auspex trooper. ‘What manner of hero fights with such cowardice?’
‘The one that wins, captain.’ The disembodied reply came from the mist. ‘The one that always wins.’
Another blizzard of gunfire dropped a handful of his Terminators, but for the most part the new-pattern armour held up to the punishment, the warriors adopting a defensive ring with red paint splattered all over their ebon war-plate.
As the echoes of the volley faded, the III Legion crystallised from the mist to take its place.
Their war-plate was highly elaborate, gilded with ebru and hagiography, their softseals cloaked with fine silks that rippled under the gentlest motion. They wore long red cloaks buckled with elaborate clasps, and came armed with a variety of melee weapons, many with one in each hand. To Santar’s chagrin he saw that there were Iron Hands amongst their number. He saw Veneratii Urien, built like a bull grox, an enormous power-axe in each chain-wrapped fist. And there, Harik Morn, charging at his former brethren with a chainsword held in a two-handed butcher’s grip. Santar emptied a full magazine into Morn’s plastron as the mingled-blade brotherhood of the III Legion slammed into a wall of iron plate.
Or rather, it didn’t. It hit the wall the way a fog would. Swordsmen ducked under blows, around guards, slipped through gaps to assail their larger and more ponderous adversaries from all sides. Urien and Morn were the best warriors in the clan, and Santar had little doubt that the bladesmen attacking him now were drawn from the finest of the III Legion’s Second Company.
There was some satisfaction at the fact that they had come for him rather t
han for DuCaine.
‘You are dead, captain.’
Santar turned his head towards the voice, the awesome bulk of his armour following a second after.
Captain Akurduana’s armour was more gold than purple, the fine etching of his signature tughra flowing around the left side of the chest plastron and down his arm. The palatine aquila spread across the width of his chest-plate looked bright enough to take wing. A horsehair plume trailed from his helmet, red cloak fluttering as the bolters on the crags took shots at anything that came within six metres of their captain. Except for Santar. Akurduana clearly wanted him for himself. The captain bore two long swords, but had only seen fit to draw one. The other remained as pure statement, unrequired, sheathed in yellow silk at his hip. Rumour had it he was good, best in the Legion.
Santar wasn’t in his Legion.
‘Not yet, I’m not.’
‘You’re splitting hairs.’ Akurduana shrugged and leapt into the attack.
Santar took a step back, but his armour was too cumbersome, too slow, and he instead let it take the blade across the chest plating before lashing out with his lightning claw. With a weapon like that he only needed to hit his enemy once. The air burned as the energised gauntlet passed through it, but Akurduana evaded as though Santar’s intent had been inscribed on the face of his helmet. A dragged sidestep, a pivot, and then a strike so glancing it was almost casual, and Santar’s gauntlet smashed into the permafrost.
A geyser of fast-thawed ethane magma smote his faceplate, bent his neck hard back against his gorget bundles, and punched him onto his back.
He gave an impotent howl as the sublimation of the ground from under him stymied his attempt to rise. With what sounded like a sigh, Akurduana brought his blade to Santar’s throat seals.
Up close Santar could appreciate the craftsmanship. One warrior to another. As fine as anything made by the hands of Ferrus Manus.
He had a moment to think of something biting to utter in defeat before the primarch’s mission imperatives blinked in his display, expanding to flush his visor with red light and his non-critical armour systems with disabling code. He saw Harik Morn stagger towards him, cradling a section of plastron that had been pummelled so hard with noospherically active red pigment that the plate had actually been breached.
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