Fulgrim: The Palatine Phoenix
Page 22
When the order came to return to Terra, Cassander began preparations to depart immediately, but the sudden death of his vessel’s Navigator had left them stranded until a replacement could be despatched. The following day, word of the Warmaster’s treachery and the massacre on Isstvan V reached them, throwing Cassander’s world into free-fall.
Pride in an honourable assignment was replaced by frustration and bitter disappointment that they could not fight alongside their brothers, could not call Horus to account for his perfidy and punish those who had trampled their oaths of loyalty into the dust.
But the chance to make war on the traitorous allies of Horus had come soon enough.
The Iron Warriors made planetfall in the wake of a saturation bombardment that reduced the valley and the agri-settlements filling its fertile deltas to ash. Magma bombs and mass drivers boiled away the rivers and reduced fecund earth to arid dust. The Cadmean Citadel was left untouched, and Cassander still found it difficult to believe that such a precise bombardment was possible.
He knew why, of course.
The Iron Warriors could not pass up this chance to humble the sons of Dorn, and Cassander had rallied his men with grim certitude as the bulk landers of the IV Legion descended on towering columns of firelight.
The technological cunning of the ancient fortress builders, married to the artfully wrought geography and the courage of the defenders, had kept the Iron Warriors at bay for almost three months, but now Cassander’s defiance was almost at an end. With three-quarters of his Company slain, and thousands of mortal soldiers dead, he was running out of ways to fight. The citadel had few heavy guns remaining to keep the Iron Warriors from bringing their artillery superiority to bear and overwhelming the citadel’s inbuilt defence mechanisms.
The traitors could not be denied for much longer, but every day Cassander’s warriors stayed alive kept the enemy from redeploying and bringing their strength to bear elsewhere.
A poor measure of success, but it was all Cassander had left.
He shook off such pessimism, knowing it did not become a warrior of the Imperial Fists to wallow in self pity, and moved to the edge of the northernmost bastion. Once its gleaming ramparts had been a proud example of the military engineer’s art. Now they were chewed up ruins-in-waiting. Locris and Kastor crouched behind the largest nubs of dusty stone, golden giants amid the hundreds of dusty ochre-clad local militiamen. Cassander had broken up his few remaining squads, deploying his men throughout the defence to bolster each section of wall and provide strength of heart to the thousands of soldiers who fought alongside them.
The sky strobed with concussive impacts that buckled the air with their force. High explosives on ballistic trajectories flashed and screeched as their impact violence was dissipated by the void-umbra. The shields on the southern approaches were close to failing, but thankfully the enemy wasn’t concentrating fire there.
Locris looked up as Cassander hunkered down in the lee of the rampart, and Kastor gave him a nod of acknowledgement.
‘They’re eager today,’ said Kastor, as a thunderous detonation rocked the base of the wall. Kinetic dampers in the citadel’s plunging foundations transferred the power of the blast deep into the bedrock of the mountain and the smell of metal shavings and oily secretions wafted up from the silicate scabs forming over the craters. Rock fragments rained down onto the ramparts, blanketing the long line of soldiers in yet more red dust.
‘Too eager,’ agreed Locris. ‘Something’s happening, the pace has changed.’
Like Cassander, Locris went bareheaded; the same shrapnel fragment that split his battle helm in two had given him the long scar down his cheek and taken his left eye. The scar made him roguish, the eye piratical. Both were wounds to be avenged.
The plastron, pauldrons and greaves of Kastor’s armour were scorched black where the firestorm of an incendiary projectile had peeled the paint from its plates as he shielded a group of wounded soldiers with his body.
‘What do you think, captain? The Digger?’ asked Kastor.
‘I told you, Symeon’s squad spotted the Digger in the east today,’ said Locris. ‘This feels like Scrapper’s men.’
Cassander gripped the hilt of his sword and peered through a split in the rampart, where webs of connective stone tissue had failed to set, watching the uphill avalanche of burnished iron plate through a haze of dust. Smoke-wreathed artillery pits in sheltered batteries far below hurled high-velocity projectiles ahead of the climbing Iron Warriors, while mobile guns on walker platforms struggled to keep up with the assault force. This fresh attack was a salutatory reminder that Perturabo’s sons were warriors first and foremost, siege specialists second. Cassander watched their movements, fluid and aggressive, disciplined yet driven by core-deep fury.
Where had such raw hate come from?
They had taken to distinguishing between the Iron Warriors detachments by giving their commanders derogatory appellations based on their most apparent characteristics. The Digger’s men were bent-backed shovellers, methodical, precise and unstinting in their labours, the Malingerer kept his men in their dugouts as his artillery dropped tonnes of munitions on the citadel, the Voyeur liked to watch proceedings from a spike-topped blockhouse in the centre of the valley.
‘I think you’re right, Locris,’ said Cassander.
Unlike his fellow commanders, Scrapper liked to throw his men at the walls if so much as a sniff of an assault opportunity presented itself. Where other Iron Warriors displayed a measure of caution towards the citadel’s defences and an appreciation for the careful, step-by-step methodology of siege warfare, Scrapper liked to get his legionaries bloody in the swirling crucible of combat.
Cassander dropped back into cover as a whining solid slug zipped overhead.
‘Makes it easier, I suppose,’ noted Kastor. ‘His men have no fire discipline worth a damn.’
‘Maybe not, but they’re hard fighters,’ said Cassander. ‘We give them insulting names, but don’t ever underestimate them.’
‘Duly noted, captain,’ said Kastor, placing a fist in the centre of his scorched breastplate.
Locris held up a spoon-handled detonator trigger and said, ‘You want the pleasure of these ones, captain?’
Cassander risked another glance through the rampart as the citadel’s artillery pieces opened up on the advancing Iron Warriors. Those guns alone weren’t going to make much of a dent in the assault force, but any thinning of the ranks could only be a good thing.
‘You do it,’ he said. ‘You’ve more than earned it.’
Locris grinned and mashed the trigger, detonating the last of the seismic mines dug into the northern slopes at the forefront of the Iron Warriors attack. Mushrooming blasts of tectonic shockwaves ripped a three-hundred-metre section of the mountain away and sent it tumbling downhill in a storm of pulverised rock.
Cassander relished the sight of scores of split-open bodies carried downhill in the raging avalanche, and pressed the throat bead of his borrowed vox.
‘All Fists – any movement in your sectors?’
Each of his section leaders replied in the negative, lending further credence to his growing certainty that this was Scrapper’s latest attempt to break the citadel open with a surprise assault. The tempo of the unequal artillery duel picked up as the Iron Warriors drew ever closer, climbing through the deep ditch carved by the seismic mines.
‘Symeon, Esdras, Phyros,’ said Cassander into his throat mic. ‘Re-deploy your men to the northern bastion immediately.’
The enemy artillery shifted their aim as the Iron Warriors closed the last hundred metres between them and the wall. Shells screamed on direct flight paths, slamming into the wall with pounding hammerblows that shook the foundations of the mountain itself. A pressure wave of impact blew up and over the wall and the heat of incendiaries burned at the silicate scabs fighting to resist the detonati
ons.
Cassander knew this was the last chance he would have to blunt the assault force before the Iron Warriors were tearing at the defenders.
‘Wait until they reach the closest markers,’ he ordered, bellowing in a voice that could reach from one end of the Phalanx’s training halls to the other. ‘Make every shot count or it won’t be Perturabo’s whelps you need to worry about!’
Click here to buy Angel Exterminatus.
For those that gave me the opportunity to write this book, and then helped to make it better.
A Black Library Publication
First published in Great Britain in 2017.
This eBook edition published in 2017 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd,
Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.
Produced by Games Workshop in Nottingham.
Cover illustration by Mikhail Savier.
Fulgrim: The Palatine Phoenix ® Copyright Games Workshop Limited 20I7. Fulgrim: The Palatine Phoenix, The Horus Heresy Primarchs, GW, Games Workshop, Black Library, The Horus Heresy, The Horus Heresy Eye logo, Space Marine, 40K, Warhammer, Warhammer 40,000, the ‘Aquila’ Double-headed Eagle logo, and all associated logos, illustrations, images, names, creatures, races, vehicles, locations, weapons, characters, and the distinctive likenesses thereof, are either ® or TM, and/or ® Games Workshop Limited, variably registered around the world.
All Rights Reserved.
A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN I3: 978 I 78496 597 6
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.
This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.
See Black Library on the internet at
blacklibrary.com
Find out more about Games Workshop’s world of Warhammer and the Warhammer 40,000 universe at
games-workshop.com
eBook license
This license is made between:
Games Workshop Limited t/a Black Library, Willow Road, Lenton, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, United Kingdom (“Black Library”); and
(2) the purchaser of an e-book product from Black Library website (“You/you/Your/your”)
(jointly, “the parties”)
These are the terms and conditions that apply when you purchase an e-book (“e-book”) from Black Library. The parties agree that in consideration of the fee paid by you, Black Library grants you a license to use the e-book on the following terms:
* 1. Black Library grants to you a personal, non-exclusive, non-transferable, royalty-free license to use the e-book in the following ways:
o 1.1 to store the e-book on any number of electronic devices and/or storage media (including, by way of example only, personal computers, e-book readers, mobile phones, portable hard drives, USB flash drives, CDs or DVDs) which are personally owned by you;
o 1.2 to access the e-book using an appropriate electronic device and/or through any appropriate storage media; and
* 2. For the avoidance of doubt, you are ONLY licensed to use the e-book as described in paragraph 1 above. You may NOT use or store the e-book in any other way. If you do, Black Library shall be entitled to terminate this license.
* 3. Further to the general restriction at paragraph 2, Black Library shall be entitled to terminate this license in the event that you use or store the e-book (or any part of it) in any way not expressly licensed. This includes (but is by no means limited to) the following circumstances:
o 3.1 you provide the e-book to any company, individual or other legal person who does not possess a license to use or store it;
o 3.2 you make the e-book available on bit-torrent sites, or are otherwise complicit in ‘seeding’ or sharing the e-book with any company, individual or other legal person who does not possess a license to use or store it;
o 3.3 you print and distribute hard copies of the e-book to any company, individual or other legal person who does not possess a license to use or store it;
o 3.4 you attempt to reverse engineer, bypass, alter, amend, remove or otherwise make any change to any copy protection technology which may be applied to the e-book.
* 4. By purchasing an e-book, you agree for the purposes of the Consumer Protection (Distance Selling) Regulations 2000 that Black Library may commence the service (of provision of the e-book to you) prior to your ordinary cancellation period coming to an end, and that by purchasing an e-book, your cancellation rights shall end immediately upon receipt of the e-book.
* 5. You acknowledge that all copyright, trademark and other intellectual property rights in the e-book are, shall remain, the sole property of Black Library.
* 6. On termination of this license, howsoever effected, you shall immediately and permanently delete all copies of the e-book from your computers and storage media, and shall destroy all hard copies of the e-book which you have derived from the e-book.
* 7. Black Library shall be entitled to amend these terms and conditions from time to time by written notice to you.
* 8. These terms and conditions shall be governed by English law, and shall be subject only to the jurisdiction of the Courts in England and Wales.
* 9. If any part of this license is illegal, or becomes illegal as a result of any change in the law, then that part shall be deleted, and replaced with wording that is as close to the original meaning as possible without being illegal.
* 10. Any failure by Black Library to exercise its rights under this license for whatever reason shall not be in any way deemed to be a waiver of its rights, and in particular, Black Library reserves the right at all times to terminate this license in the event that you breach clause 2 or clause 3.