by David Guymer
Cicerus gave his head a bitter shake. He held up his wounded arm. The sleeve of his toga slid back over crisp white bandages, all the way to the shoulder. Ferrus snorted. He looked expectantly over his sons, and then finally to Akurduana. Slouched at his feet. Like an eel dumped from a net. As if the answer were so blindingly apparent that it was an insult to a primarch to have to voice it 'Fix it, Ultramarine.'
TWELVE
No one had wanted a war. No one had seen war, until now.
For one day Gardinaal Prime turned like meat on a spit under the guns of the Iron Hands fleet. Ship augurs saw the panic spread, ripples of red, the usual inconsistencies of biosignature reads enhanced to precision sharpness by the compound effect of volume. The astropaths felt it, and more viscerally than those on the command deck watching their screens run red. The ritually blinded psykers clawed at the padded walls of their sanctums, their mental defences overwhelmed by hellish visions. The earth split. The sky fell. Billions screamed into the night. But there would be no keeping ahead of this dawn.
The warships of the Iron Tenth did not move. There was no need. The planet obliged, presenting new targets for obliteration as quickly as they could reload and recharge.
Lance strikes demolished hab-towers and militia fortresses without distinction. Macro-ordnance pulverised districts. Cyclonic torpedoes and magma bombs laid waste to hundreds of kilometres of urban conglomeration at a time, fracturing the rockcrete-fused crust, revivifying extinct geologies for one dying surge of volcanism. Cities with hours of grace before the bombardment collapsed into the earth as it turned molten. Manufactories that the 413th Expedition had gone to such lengths to preserve slipped into rivers of lava.
Gardinaal Prime was not the first world to be scoured of a recalcitrant populace in the Emperor's name, but it was the first where this was meted out with such calculated brutality. It was punishment, scaled towards the far end of an infinite series beyond mere collective. No genocide perpetrated by the War Hounds had ever been so severe, or so total.
After one complete revolution it ceased.
What had been a pole-to-pole spread of human habitation, home to hundreds of billions, had become a steaming sphere of magmic red and twisted steel. The creaks and groans of the devastated planetary megalopolis reverberated silently through the void, relayed like the moans of the undead through the spectral augurs and geographs of the Iron Hands in orbit. Only one narrow line of latitude remained unbroken. A complex of linked fortifications, well sited in a zone of tectonic stability within the capitolis and heavily void-shielded, still stood, albeit now surrounded by a moat of lava a hundred metres wide. It could have been hit again until the ground beneath it crumbled. The planet could have been virus-bombed or had its atmosphere purged. It was what Perturabo might have done.
But what was war for if not a demonstration of strength?
Ferrus would look the Gardinaal in the eye as the life left them. He would see the moment they realised - they had always been weak.
And war was what they were getting.
The sky was the red of metal rust. Tremors running the scale from distracting to ground-shaking ran beneath the scuffed boots and dusty, dangerously overheated vehicles of the Imperial Army. The area had come through the bombardment relatively unscathed.
Its buildings were intact, the ground beneath them solid, which as blessings went was as good as they got, but it wasn't going to remain that way for long. Tull Riordan had watched the bombardment crawl from east to west, and while the soldiers under his command managed to grab sleep in shifts, he'd been wide awake to see it crawl back towards them, west to east.
And when he'd seen the fireballs falling from the sky towards their islet of baked rockcrete and groaning plasteel, he'd known the reprieve was over.
After three decades of not exactly risk-averse soldiering, he knew he'd been pushing his luck for some time now, but part of him had never really believed it would end. As if death had had its chance and passed. Most men would've taken the honourable discharge and the meagre pension that came with a bullet in the knee. There were plenty of civilian positions for military-trained medicae. Not him. He was proud of those three decades. Damn proud.
He believed in the Crusade, what it stood for. Always had. He clung to his belief as if it were the last functioning coolant unit in the galaxy.
The rockcrete spire-block they held as a shelter trembled as a spread of ordnance rocketed overhead and smacked into the ground a few hundred metres away. Plumes of fire and ash rose into the hellish sky to replace the buildings they sent crashing down. Compared to what had gone before, the act of barbarism seemed almost petty. Limping through sprawled divisions of mechanised infantrymen, their visors steamed. Sweating inside death world and hazardous environment gear, Tull walked to the rockcrete barrier that encircled the roof for a better look.
Ibran Grippe held up a pair of magnoculars. He didn't say much anymore. Every earth tremor brought a nervous twitch. His pupils were pinpricks, his mouth never quite shutting properly, as if his jaw was too tense to allow it. A thin trickle of drool ran down his chin and under his collar. He was still in his dress uniform. He was sweating like a grox, but didn't seem to realise it, so thoroughly dosed on combat stimms and painkillers that Grippe probably didn't know his own name.
All for the cause, he told himself, the security and manifest destiny of mankind, but the grand words rang tinnily now.
It was easy to believe when you followed a man like Ulan Cicerus.
Tull pried the magnoculars from Ibran's white-knuckled grip and brought them to his visor. He waited while the auto-focus compensated for heat distortion to zoom into the nearest mound of rubble.
He sighed. He couldn't say anymore if it was relief or resignation. They were drop pods, cobalt blue and gold, their insignia an untarnished white. He panned the view. Dozens of tiny explosions dotted the devastation as the drop pods blew open and hundreds of Ultramarines poured into the last standing remnant of the Gardinaal capitolis. And not just Ultramarines. He saw Thousand Sons, about a dozen of them led by Amar, and even a glittering contingent of Emperor's Children at least a hundred strong.
'Where are the Iron Hands?' he mused aloud.
Everyone was here but them.
Readjusting the magnoculars, he directed their focus through the leaning structures and smoke to the furthest of the drop pods. It had been the first to fall, and had come down nearest to the Gardinaal fortress. An Ultramarine in the gilded mantle of a veteran was raising the banner of the XV Chapter. His brothers were already firing into the ruins, gunning down the slighter figures of the Gardinaal as they fled deeper into the ruins.
Another Space Marine remained by the pod beside his standard bearer. He appeared to be delivering a ferocious address to the legionaries as they charged past, his diatribe complete with violent gestures of his bionic hand towards the enemy enclave. The startling blue of his plastron had been butchered to make way for the bulky augmetic. Tull didn't recognise him. He was helmed, and to mortal men one armoured Space Marine looked much like another, but he did recognise the power sword that the warrior held aloft as he spoke.
'Bloody murder.'
He glanced at Ibran.
He lowered his magnoculars.
'Cicerus…'
The last few phrases of the Chapter Master's address forced through Tull's crackling vox link, and he winced in pain at the sudden volume. He panned the magnoculars towards the fortress. Its walls were heat hazed, its defence towers liquidly coloured and indistinct beneath the installation's voids. They shimmered under a constant rain of debris, discolouring to the occasional crump of artillery fire.
With a grunt, he tossed his officer's cane from the roof of the spire-block. He returned Ibran's magnoculars. 'Trooper Grippe.' Ibran looked up. 'Those tablets that Milein gave you, pass them over.' The old colonel obediently did as he was told. Tull unstoppered the vial, coloured tablets falling into his palm. He had no idea what half of them were. 'Thir
ty years. To end up no better than the Gardinaal.' With a slug of the brackish liquid in his canteen, he knocked the lot back.
Then he gave the order to move out.
He still believed in the Crusade. He had to.
The Iron Hands were the masters of coordinated, combined arms warfare. Only one who had never seen one of their ruthlessly orchestrated set-piece engagements at close quarters could ever dispute it. The commander of any other force would have ordered their artillery to cease bombardment the moment that ground forces came within reach of the walls. But the X Legion artillerymen knew their guns. They knew how far 'minimum safe distance' could be pushed. Earthshaker and Medusa shells hammered into the Gardinaal's wall even as the breacher and assault units of the Ultramarines XV Chapter commenced their attack.
After three hours and sixteen minutes of relentless bombardment, as the Imperial onslaught drove the numerically superior Gardinaal force from their perimeter defences, there was barely a wall left.
The Primaris-Lightnings Purple Sun jinked through the rain of heavy ordnance. The shells were too small to be picked up on auspex, the guidance systems even of the Scorpius rockets too basic to alert the aircrafts' systems to the danger. Ortan Vertanus flew by touch and instinct, every sense exhilarated by the narrowing separation between him and his mortality to the width of a single mistake. Black smoke buffeted the canopy, and he braced, ready for the intake alarms, but the Primaris-Lightning was as rugged a piece of kit as had ever been given wings and an engine, A second later the smoke cleared.
Below him, the purple of Second Company moved through the rubble behind the Ultramarines' assault. They matched their pace to the Imperial Army, The regiments' transports and heavy armour rolled alongside. Vertanus tipped his wing in salute as he flashed across Solomon Demeter's rippling standard.
'I envy them the chance to stretch their legs,' voxed Thyro. The Primaris-Lightning was a thirsty machine, but its tanks were massive. Thyro had started complaining of sores, stiff muscles and claustrophobia after about thirty minutes.
'You say that now, I imagine it looks rather less sunny down there.'
'You take what you make of it, brother.'
Ycitanus chuckled.
'Edoran Sekka, you are veering.' Paliolinus' perfect tones grizzled through the dashboard vox. 'Chapter Master Cicerus has called in an infantry battalion breaking off towards secondary positions. Sixteen degrees starboard. Close formation and fellow me.'
Confirmations clicked across the frequency.
The wing commander's strike fighter broke to starboard, followed after a brief interval by Edoran and Sekka. Vertanus glanced aside to where Thyro matched course and speed perfectly.
'Ready for a little target practice?'
'Only a little?'
Vertanus opened up the throttle. His engines roared as they flooded the machine with power, forward thrust coming up against the angle of his ailerons to push down his starboard wing and into a hard turn. He howled like a maniac as he descended, G-force widening his grin into a rictus. Nearer to the ground the smoke thinned. Rockcrete rushed towards him. Bodies in dark grey body armour scattered. Snap shots pattered his armour. By the primarch, Moses had been right. The Primaris-Lightning was a beast.
He pulled back on the centre stick, running parallel to the ground at three times the speed of sound, then opened fire. Lascannons and multilasers ripped through the mass of soldiers as they tried to flee, the survivors flattened by his sonic boom as he thundered through. He broke off, dumping speed, looping back over the soldiers he had not yet killed.
He tried not to think of the enemy as men. He reached for the flick switch to open his bomb pods. He almost hesitated.
A rain of phosphex cluster-bombed the area.
'Ortan, status,' voxed Paliolinus.
Vertanus' strike fighter wobbled as it climbed, the thermal eddies of a thousand incinerated human beings upsetting his wings. It was as if he were running over their bodies in a truck. Suddenly, all sense of pleasure departed and in its absence left him sickened.
'A perfect run, brother,' he said, pointedly refusing to look back. 'The primarch will be overjoyed.'
The Firebrands of Legio Atarus were a force of ill repute. A product of the brief conflict between the Phateon Forgeworld and Mars, the imperious war machines were intemperate, considered by the Collegia Titanica to be unlucky, and aggressively predisposed against any stratagem that did not demand wholesale devastation and a long leash. Ulan Cicerus had called on their firepower only once, a last desperate throw of the dice as the Chapter Master's first attempt at pacifying the Gardinaal had turned sour. In Ferrus Manus and Iron Lord Autek Mor they had commanders more suited to their way of war.
With a wrathful shout blaring through its war-horn, the Reaver Titan Bellum Sacrum led the snarling remnants of the demi-legio to the slaughter.
It took a phenomenal body of men to slow down the Legiones Astartes. Give the Gardinaal their due, they were capable of fielding a phenomenal body of men. Cicerus had been right. The Gardinaal war machine would have been an incalculable asset to the Great Crusade. Pity, then, that it had become Amadeus DuCaine's job to destroy it.
He roared as he laid into the Gardinaal with axe and bolter. His helm augmitters amplified the war cry to a stunning volume, but even he barely heard it.
Men screamed, weapons roared, armour whirred and clanged and fizzled sparks, power fields spasmed. Flash grenades popped like strings of firecrackers. Bellum Sacrum sounded her war-horn, a long sonorous blast that brought a severely compromised gun tower crashing down in a cascade of rubble and sharply muted screams. Aircraft nipped through the grey plume. A Fire Raptor, silver edge-trims flickering with the ferocity of the firelight below, swooped in, strafing the packed ranks of light infantry with twin streams of shot. Dozens fell in a single pass. DuCaine scarcely noticed.
He shouldered in, crushed men against other men, crushed bones to jelly underfoot, resorting to physically dragging a soldier from the packed melee to make space for him to push into.
The Gardinaal's visor was cracked and flecked with spittle. His expression was a mask of abhorrence twisted by a cocktail of conditioning and drugs. He beat wildly at DuCaine's armour with bayonet and toe caps, screaming defiance even as DuCaine hurled him aside.
Across the slender bulge of the Imperial assault the story was the same.
DuCaine's second wave had bunched in with the vanguard warriors of the III, XIII and XV Legions, compressed onto a narrower and narrower front by the great swell of bodies in clacking grey plate. Sheer volume held the might of the Legions at bay and was even beginning to drive the Imperial's flank into a pinch point where the last of the Army's reserves held the breach in the outer wall. Crab-like superheavy walkers bristling with Titan-busting firepower duelled with the Legio Atarus. Tank traps, ditches and rough barricades forced the Legion's tanks into the role of spectators. The ground behind the Ultramarines' advance was littered with the bent remains of Sentinel scout walkers that had attempted to keep pace with the legionaries only to fall to the withering enfilade from the gun towers of the inner wards. Only a handful of Dreadnoughts had made it to the front, towering bulwarks of plasteel and ceramite from which men and bits of men, torn apart, bullet-riddled and aflame, would periodically be thrown into the air.
Between sprays of blood and the progressive splintering of his face shield, he marked unit types and formations he had not seen so far.
Brutish cybernetica, their dull red armour inscribed with proto-Gothic runic script. Trike vehicles mounting devastating anti-armour weapons. Soldiers with hieroglyphic electoos on their bald heads surrounded by muttering dwarf familiars and hypnotic auras.
He turned his head towards a barely audible crack, just in time to be caught by the blood spraying from Rab Tannen's faceplate.
He roared, smearing the blood from his lenses with the scrap of banner he had wound about his forearm. DuCaine's armour was scarred, pitted, scratched, degraded by relentless p
unishment to the point that even a stray baton round to the head would be potentially deadly. Hardly the way he would want to be found. Turning his grief into a howl of fury, he grabbed a Gardinaal soldier by the face, crushed his skull with the barest application of force and drove his twitching corpse like a riot shield into the press.
'Live forever in glory! For the primarch!' His warriors rallied to him, answering his call with cries of their own. 'I'd say the storm is damn well raised, lad.' DuCaine turned to Caphen, but Caphen wasn't there. He was back with Second Company, a casualty of Ferrus' decree that Legion boundaries be restored prior to the final assault. DuCaine missed him.
Now that he was gone.
With the last stalwarts of the Gardinaal fully engaged by the might of four Legions and the god-machines of the Legio Atarus, Ferrus Manus delivered one final demonstration of contempt. It was overkill of the highest order, but the compliance of Gardinaal Prime had ceased to be a military operation and had become an object political lesson. Not for the Gardinaal, of course. Their last chance to draw anything from their first reunion with the Imperium of Man had expired with the arrival of Ferrus Manus.
It was for everyone else.
At his voxed command one bright speck in the firmament of Gardinaal swelled, bleaching the sky of its neighbours with the light of a supernova. It was Fist of Iron, shining over Gardinaal Prime like a newly kindled sun in the split second before the sky above the fortress exploded into the indigos and violets of void shield discharge and aggressively blue-shafted lance beams. The voids held firm, as Ferrus had known they would, but the air within their bubble yielded. With an apocalyptic crack of thunder, a blast of overpressure turned rockcrete to explosive blooms of powder and flattened anything lighter than a power-armoured Space Marine.