Not for the first time that day, Shrike’s thoughts turned to the White Scars and their flank attack. Where were they?
A clipped report came across the command channel. It was Sergeant Indis, delivering the news that his force was down to ten per cent of its ammunition. Shrike had arrived just in time.
‘Stand by, sergeant,’ the captain said into the vox-link. ‘First wave inbound.’
Shrike had no need to pass on any order to his Assault squads for it was clear that the Space Marines holding the wall were in dire need of reinforcement. Shrike activated his jump pack and leapt high into the air. At the height of his leap, he caught a glimpse of the plain beyond the walls, at the heaving ocean of ragged cultists and militia converging on the breach. As he dived onwards, Captain Shrike glimpsed for a fraction of a second what must have been the white and red livery of the White Scars scything towards the horde’s flank. And then it was gone, and Shrike was upon the walls.
Even with his armour’s baffler activated, the cacophony of the horde was almost deafening. Wave after wave of sonorous chanting rolled and boomed across the plain, intermingled with the screams of the wounded and the insane and punctuated by gunfire and explosions. Shrike had rarely faced such bedlam, the spectacle exceeding even the barbarous mobs of the orks of Skullkrak. But this was not simply a matter of volume, for the chants were devotions to the unnameable powers, the daemon-gods of the beyond that craved to consume the soul of mankind. For a man to worship such powers was for him to surrender his soul to eternal damnation, and the utmost blasphemy in the eyes of the God-Emperor and His devoted servants such as the Space Marines.
Shrike felt sickened by the taint of the warp made manifest by devotion and death. The horde must be turned, before all was lost.
With a great roar of sacrilegious filth, another wave of traitors surged upwards through the breach, hundreds of bodies packed together as grox for the slaughter. Cultists wailed and thrashed, brandishing wicked, hooked chains, while terror-stricken militia troopers fired their autoguns wildly. Despite the stout defence Sergeant Indis had mounted, Shrike knew that the breach was lost. The tide was unstoppable.
‘Fall back by squads, pattern upsilon-twelve,’ Shrike ordered bitterly.
Though he resented the necessity of ordering such a manoeuvre, Shrike’s massively outnumbered force would be overwhelmed were it to remain at the wall. Indis and his men had fought valiantly, as hard as any of the Chapter’s venerated heroes, but they had done all they could. There was a time and a place for a glorious last stand, but this was not it. In falling back and drawing the enemy into a close-quarters battle amongst the fortifications and redoubts, the Raven Guard would have a chance of robbing it of momentum, trading time for Kor’sarro’s flank attack to take full effect.
In response to Shrike’s order, the Tactical squads at the wall began moving back, each ten-man unit dividing into two, one providing fire support for the other as it withdrew to a new position before the roles were reversed. Then the heavy weapon-armed Devastator squads began their redeployment, covered by the Tactical squads as soon as they had established a new firebase amongst the smoking remnants of an inner line of fortifications.
Shrike could not join his men yet, for the first of the traitors were dragging themselves over the corpses of their fellows.
Shrike raised his talons and arcs of blue energy surged up and down their razor-edged blades. The blood that had dried to a crust along the edge of each talon burned off in a second, leaving the lethal weapons gleaming and eager to kill yet more of the traitors.
As the wave of traitors clambered to the summit of the breach, the ragged mass resolved itself into individual enemies. The first to come before Shrike was a rabid fanatic, the man’s dirty robe that of a priest of the Imperial Creed. Bile rose in Shrike’s throat as the man hurled himself forwards, screaming filth at the top of his voice. Shrike restrained himself from charging forwards to strike the traitor down lest he be consumed by the sheer mass of the horde. With a contemptuous strike of a talon Shrike sent the traitor’s head spinning into the air, still mouthing blasphemous devotions as the body collapsed at Shrike’s feet.
Then the first rank of the horde was over the summit and crashing forth like the sea at high tide. A fusillade of bolt pistol fire rang out from the squads behind and a dozen attackers went down in a welter of blood. Shrike had no need to turn in order to know that his Assault squads were there with him.
A second later the battle was joined. Shrike’s very existence was boiled down to the controlled application of lethal force, every movement of every muscle in his body and every actuator in his power armour spelling the bloody death of a traitor. Bodies pressed in from all around, so close that he scarcely needed to raise a talon to inflict bloodshed. Shrike became a focused, diamond-hard whirlwind of death, his talons lashing out in every direction. A dozen traitors were eviscerated within seconds, great coils of viscera spilling across the ground as bodies were scythed in two. Despite the intensity of the battle, Shrike was not reduced to some mindless, blood-crazed berserker as the warriors of more savage Chapters might be. He was instead the black-armoured angel of vengeance, the deliverer of the Emperor’s justice, the shadow that brings death. Though his actions were those of a relentless killer, Shrike maintained icy control over his mind, body and soul. No drop of spilled blood touched the ground unless he willed it.
When Shrike finally judged that sufficient time had passed, and sufficient death had been unleashed, he ordered the withdrawal. ‘Disengage!’ he growled into the vox-net, and activated his jump pack.
As one, Captain Shrike and his warriors soared into the air. The horde, which had been bottled up where the Raven Guard had fought them, suddenly burst forwards, the foremost warriors stumbling and crashing to the ground. An instant later, the fallen were crushed beneath the pounding feet of those behind or incinerated by the jump packs’ backwash. A thousand maddened cultists and traitor militia spilled onto the top of the walls and spread out.
Shrike landed atop a high fortification where his Devastator squads had redeployed.
‘Hold…’ he hissed as the Space Marines raised heavy weapons.
Still more and more of the enemy clambered up the breach and hauled themselves over the precipice and onto the wall itself. Relieved of the force that had held them at bay for so long, the impossible pressure of the horde spilled outwards until the walls all around were filled with frenzied, chanting enemies.
‘Take them,’ Shrike ordered.
The Devastators opened fire at the enemy now thronging the walls for a hundred metres either side of the breach. Following millennia-old combat doctrine, they opened up at the outer edges first, walking their fire along the wall so that first those who had pressed furthest from the breach were cut down, the fire working its way along towards the centre. Within seconds, hundreds of the enemy were torn to shreds by massed heavy bolter fire, blown apart by missiles or incinerated to ashes by seething plasma. Bodies exploded, leaving behind nothing more than a bloody mess. Others were reduced to constituent atoms leaving nothing behind at all. All of this happened so quickly that none on the wall had a chance to react, the entire battlement coming to resemble the floor of a slaughterhouse.
Despite the sheer bloody murder Shrike’s force had inflicted on the enemy, to remain in position and continue to fire would merely result in the Devastators expending their precious ammunition while thousands more foes poured through the breach. It was so tempting to order a second fusillade, but Shrike resisted the urge, instead opening the vox-channel. ‘Devastators,’ he said, ‘fall back as per orders.’
Shrike remained upon the redoubt, his Command squad beside him, as the Devastators limbered their heavy weapons and pulled back. In a moment, the last of them had descended the steps at the back of the fortification and were passing along the street beyond. Shrike’s foes swarmed upwards, crushing the remains of their fellows to pulp beneath their boots. The wall had soon become so cramped that
flailing bodies were sent tumbling to the ground below, yet still the press continued unabated.
And then, Shrike saw what drove the horde onwards. From amongst the multitude strode a towering figure in blue-green power armour adorned with blasphemous sigils. The bitter hatred of ten thousand years of war welled up inside Shrike, for the figure was an Alpha Legionnaire, one of the followers of Lord Voldorius. The warrior had once been a Space Marine, but he had bargained away his soul in the service of Chaos, betraying the most sacred of oaths. Shrike longed to gun his jump pack to full power and charge headlong at this enemy, but to do so would be suicide.
With a bitter curse, Shrike turned his back on the tide bursting through the breached wall and led his warriors from the redoubt. The battle would continue in the cramped environs of the defence installation.
‘Once there was darkness and ignorance, and man, who was scattered to the stars, fell far from grace. Upon the winds of Chogoris came the Kagayaga, the Whisper in the Darkness. The Great Jaghatai Khan, Primarch of the White Scars, honoured be his name, united the tribes of Chogoris and dispelled the Kagayaga. But in truth, such things can never be slain. They merely flee for a time and lurk in the shadows of men’s hearts. They await the moment of returning, when they will take their bitter vengeance upon the world…’
– Hidden Chronicles of the Chogoran Epics
Chapter 10
‘Filthy as Thou Art’
Moonfang sang with the power crackling the length of its razor-sharp, monomolecular edge as Kor’sarro drove the blade into the guts of yet another of the berserker cultists. The traitor vomited a torrent of blood into the Space Marine’s face and, for an instant, Kor’sarro could barely see.
Twisting the blade free of the slain cultist’s body, Kor’sarro gunned the engine of his mount and turned the bike around. Coming to a halt, he wiped his eyes clear of the dripping viscera and looked about. The White Scars had cut a deep, ragged wound into the side of the traitorous horde, slaying scores in the moments after their wild charge had struck home. Now the horde was pressing back in as if to fill the vacuum the attack had created. It was imperative that the counterattack should not become bogged down or lose its momentum. The charge must continue, or the Raven Guard would be lost and the whole battle rendered a tragic waste of effort and life.
‘Onwards!’ Kor’sarro bellowed, his voice hoarse with the joy of righteous battle. At his cry, three dozen White Scars bikers converged on his position. Not a single power lance was dry of the blood of the foe, though many of the bearers had their own wounds too.
His command retinue at his side and the banner of the Third Company waving proudly in the wind, Kor’sarro sped forwards. The horde rushed in to the gap the White Scars had created and in a moment Kor’sarro was leading the charge of the entire company. As he rode he brought Moonfang down in lethal arcs, beheading or gutting traitors with every swing. Soon blood stained the dark ground and severed limbs were scattered all about. Numberless multitudes were pressing in all around and it seemed to Kor’sarro that some cultists deliberately threw themselves beneath the wheels of his mount in order to slow him while others allowed their bodies to be ground to paste beneath the treads of the Rhinos and Predators simply to clog their running gear. What madness had descended upon the servants of the Ruinous Powers was unknown, and unknowable to Kor’sarro.
There was no order to the horde, no command structure and no tactical logic to its actions. It ebbed and flowed, the only stable point the gargantuan super-heavy tank grinding through its midst. The cultists simply threw themselves forwards, chains and blades whirring.
So disordered were these fanatics that they inflicted more carnage amongst their own than they did amongst the Space Marines, but not once did they appear to be slowed, whoever it was that struck them down. Kor’sarro pressed on, forging against the relentless tide of the enemy. His arm rose and fell what felt like a thousand times, each blow from Moonfang striking down an enemy in a spray of blood. Rusted chains were thrown about him, flails struck his arms, bare fists pummelled uselessly at his power armour. One cultist even tried to unsaddle the Master of the Hunt, a tactic the steppes nomads of Chogoris were taught to counter from the first moment they took a war-mount. Kor’sarro bared his teeth and ripped the man’s neck wide open, casting the corpse to the blood-soaked ground as he ploughed onwards.
Kor’sarro no longer faced the frenzied cultists, but enemies wearing the grey uniform of the planetary militia. Though better armed and equipped than the fanatics who had sold their souls to Chaos, the militia troopers were clearly not motivated by the same mindless zeal. The troopers fought with the desperation of those who knew they were being herded towards their own deaths. The Master of the Hunt showed these foes no more mercy than he had the cultists. If there was one thing a man should strive for, it was to choose the manner of his own death for himself, and never to allow another to do so for him. These fools had learned that lesson too late, and would now pay their price.
The militia troopers broke before the irresistible charge of the White Scars, surging to either side. For a moment Kor’sarro dared hope that the response might be more than a localised effect and that the entire horde might be routed. But the hope proved short-lived, for a new foe was revealed where the militia troopers had scattered.
A hundred metres in front of Kor’sarro stood a group of hulking creatures the like of which he had rarely seen. They were mutants, probably kin to the thing he had fought atop the tower on distant Cernis IV. Kor’sarro’s savage heart filled with anger at the thought of such blasphemy against the pure form granted to man by the God-Emperor. There were a dozen of them, each as much as three metres tall, though they were stooped over so far their drooling faces appeared to be set into their chests. They wore no more than ragged hoods and stained loincloths, and their leathery skin looked as tough as carapace armour. Worst of all, the mutants were armed, but instead of hands, they sported power shears crudely grafted to their wrists. Feed cables snaked up their arms to generators stitched into the raw flesh of their backs. The claws were clearly large and powerful enough to cut even a Space Marine in two.
The leading White Scars bike squads formed themselves into an attack pattern unchanged through tens of thousands of years of use by the steppes nomads of Chogoris and by subsequent generations of Space Marines recruited from their tribes. The bikers spread out into a wide front, each warrior lowering his power lance and selecting his target. The White Scars let up a savage roar, invoking the spirit of their people and their warlike traditions, steeling their hearts for the moment when the charge would hit home and blood would be spilled.
As if issuing a response to the White Scars’ war cry, the mutants leaned forwards as one and opened their mouths wide. The resulting roar was not that of any creature that had the right to walk beneath the light of any star in the Emperor’s domains. Scores of nearby militia troopers fell to the ground as if propelled by a blast wave, hands clamped over ears to keep the hellish cry at bay even as they bled explosively from every orifice. As the roar continued the very air between the mutants and the charging White Scars became distorted and was shot by flecks of vile spittle. The sound struck the White Scars as if they had collided with a physical barrier. Warning runes flashed across Kor’sarro’s control panel, and looking left and right he saw that the armour of several of his warriors was cracked and smoking in places.
‘The primarch watches!’ Kor’sarro bellowed, putting all of his strength into the effort to pierce the unnatural roar of the mutants. Though he could barely hear his own voice, his brothers heard and repeated the war cry, setting their lances for the final metres of the charge.
As he bore down on the line of mutants Kor’sarro selected his target. The mutant in front of him must surely have been the leader, for it was even larger than its fellows and its eyes were possessed of something approaching intelligence. Its muscles rippled across its body, visibly tensing as it braced itself to receive the charge. The mutant
planted its feet wide, set its shoulders and lowered its vile head, its beady eyes staring out from beneath its ragged hood and meeting those of Kor’sarro.
In the last second of the charge Kor’sarro selected the point on the mutant’s body he would attack, and Kor’sarro raised Moonfang high in preparation for a savage downward sweep that would cut his opponent in two.
And then, the charge struck thunderously home. Kor’sarro had no time to note the success or failure of those on either side, for in that moment his entire world was contained in the edge of his sword. Moonfang swept downwards, cutting the very air with the energies that surged along its monomolecular edge. The mutant was struck just above its left elbow, severing the arm and the deadly power shears grafted to it. The blade continued on its path, gauging a thin, yet deep line across his opponent’s chest.
Only when Moonfang contacted the right side power shears was it checked. With a terrific burst of speed that belied its bulk, the mutant twisted. Before the Master of the Hunt could react, it grabbed the ancient relic weapon between the long blades of its remaining power shears. At that moment, the beast twisted its weapon and Kor’sarro was faced with the instantaneous choice of relinquishing his beloved power sword or of being pulled forwards and off-balance, perhaps even being dragged from his bike by the mutant’s sheer brute force.
All of this had occurred in the blink of an eye and Kor’sarro’s mind was made up just as quickly. As the mutant twisted its right arm backwards and up, Kor’sarro let go of his grip on Moonfang’s hilt. He saw instantly that the mutant had expected him to cling on to his treasured weapon. As his opponent staggered backwards, Kor’sarro used his now free hand to draw his bolt pistol.
Space Marine Battles - the Novels Volume 1 Page 20