by Guy Haley
Polixis knelt beside Ovido. He activated his narthecium, the advanced medicae tool that encased his left gauntlet, muttering the Litany of Recovery as he did so. A glance told him the sternal progenoid, the gene-seed buried in Ovido’s chest, had been damaged beyond recovery by the two shots that had killed him. The secondary cervical progenoid, however, was not beyond saving.
He accessed the emergency sealants around Ovido’s gorget, unclamping his helmet with a quiet prayer to the armour’s machine-spirit.
‘Blessed battleplate, yield your fallen brother to me now.’
The fallen Ultramarine’s face was revealed – wrathful in death, pale and stony-eyed, as though still damning the xenos that had shot him. Mag-locking his bolt pistol to his thigh, Polixis used two fingers to close the Ultramarine’s eyelids, before triggering his narthecium’s carbon alloy chainblade.
Combat recoveries were unpleasant at the best of times. The reverence and care that the body of any fallen member of the Chapter deserved had to be set aside in favour of measured haste. Polixis sliced the tip of the chainblade along Ovido’s throat, cutting the white flesh with a practised stroke. Blood welled bright from the small incision as he deactivated the chainblade and extended the narthecium reductor’s extractor tube and flesh hooks, sliding it into the cut and keeping the wound from sealing. The thumbnail-sized pict-caster above the tube’s tip linked with his helmet display, showing him the grey, fleshy gland he sought in Ovido’s neck. With a blink-click he triggered the extractor tube’s scissor end after it had slid over the progenoid, neatly severing the gland from the connective tissue embedding it into the larynx.
With the gene-seed disconnected, Polixis activated the reductor’s suction valve. There was a whirring noise as the gland was dragged free from Ovido’s flesh and shunted up the extractor tube into one of the sealed cryo-receptacle vials at the narthecium’s rear.
As Polixis worked, the slaughter around him continued. His transhuman senses were aware of it, capable of splitting focus between the probing of the extractor and the surrounding thump of axes and the clang of steel on ceramite. He pulled a mortis tag from his plastek medicae webbing and inserted it into Ovido’s primary breastplate port, just to the left below his fused rib-plate, providing a beacon to locate the body later now that the battle-brother’s auto-senses were offline. As Polixis stood, a spray of blood splattered his white armour, a greenskin’s severed head flying past him from the direction of Captain Demeter.
‘He is recovered,’ the Apothecary said, speaking the rite of the fallen. ‘His legacy endures.’
‘Brother Priscor?’ Demeter asked.
‘Stable.’
‘Then let us press on,’ Demeter continued, switching to address both the Primaris and the Guard over the vox. ‘The Gorgon lies just ahead, my brothers. Forward!’
KASTOR
An hour since first entering the refinery square, the Fulminata secured the eastern end of the Excelsior Arch. Kastor caught sight of the great bridge ahead, scarred by the bombing runs of Imperial Navy Marauders, craters riddling its broad expanse. Still it stood. Greenskins packed it from span to span, the mobs thrusting individuals through the holes and over the bridge’s sides in their bestial eagerness to reach the east embankment and join the battle raging through Shebat Alpha.
The final phases of the day’s objectives were at hand – they were to secure the eastern bank of the river. Demeter led the final drive to the bridge. Kastor strode to his left and Polixis to his right, their bolt pistols thundering, the Intercessors of Squad Nerva forming a wedge around them, while Ancient Skyrus’ banner fluttered at the centre of their formation. Voitekans kept their flanks clear with volleys of las-fire, the Guard maintaining their discipline in the white heat of the close-quarter combat that had been grinding on ever since the refinery square. Reinforcements pressed in from the north and the south – a squadron of Namarian Leman Russ battle tanks and two companies of Kelestan Stormers, relentlessly driving the greenskins towards the banks of the river.
That river was the Gorgon, the great, sluggish expanse of polluted water that curved through the heart of Shebat, two thousand paces from one embankment to the other. The Excelsior was the greatest of six bridges that had once spanned it, from Saint Collum’s Crossing in the north to the adamantium mag-lev line in the south. A week of Imperial bombing runs in the build up to the offensive had reduced all but one to broken stubs and rockcrete rubble heaped in the foaming sludge below. Only the Excelsior endured.
The bridge’s entrance archway lay before the Primaris. Kastor could tell that it must once have been an ornate affair, a great stone monument engraved with images showing the industriousness and toil of the city of Shebat. It had been scarred by the brutalities of war, and was now further defiled with the crude iconography of the greenskins: huge skull effigies and totemic devices had been bolted to its front and sides, and a rickety-looking ork crane had heaped wrecked battle spoil – weapons, armour, even parts of a burned-out Leman Russ – on top of it. The transformation of humanity’s great works into a bestial mockery of their former glory sent fresh fire blazing through Kastor’s veins.
‘Drive them into the Gorgon, my brothers!’ he bellowed, charging forwards into the press. Shells fell from across the river, indiscriminate detonations ripping through the embankment zone. Kastor realised he was grinning with a rictus of frenzied passion as he set about once more with Salve Imperator, the crozius crushing skulls and cracking shoulders and ribcages. Demeter joined him, both his power sword and his boltstorm gauntlet ignited, a crackling tempest of destruction. Kastor was partially aware of Polixis on the other side of the captain – the Apothecary had drawn gladius and Absolver bolt pistol, medicae tools exchanged for the implements of butchery.
A battle cannon shell pounded into the press of greenskins beneath the archway in front of them, dangerously close to the advancing Primaris. The shock wave battered the Space Marines, accompanied by a hail of shattered rockcrete and body parts. The blast cleared a space ahead, affording the Ultramarines a break in the melee. It was then that word crackled over the captain’s earpiece.
‘The Spear strikes,’ he relayed to those around him. The words had barely been uttered when the heavens parted.
A spear of light lanced down from above. Its brightness imprinted itself even on the lumen dampeners of the Ultramarines’ visors, searing a perfect circle in the ashen clouds. The light struck the ground directly across the river, the point of impact obscured by the warehouse blocks lining the opposite bank. There was a burst of brilliance, followed by a thunderclap like the closing of the Eternity Gate. The warehouses shuddered, and seconds later the shock wave hit the east side of the river, buffeting man and ork with the fury of a gale. Kastor lowered his head into the storm, stabilisers activating once again. He felt debris striking his armour, ricocheting off his legs, torso and pauldrons and making his vestments whip about him. The rockcrete underfoot shuddered, the city shaken to its very core.
The shock wave passed. The light blinked from existence, replaced now by a great pillar of black smoke that began to rise towards the torn sky. The Spear of Macragge had struck, an orbital bombardment that had obliterated the ork artillery positions firing from across the river. The shellfire ceased.
The stunned hush that followed didn’t last long. There was a cracking sound, and the ground shook once more. The crack rose to a crash, echoing back from the ruins bordering onto the river and overlaid by the howling of thousands of alien throats. Kastor realised that the Excelsior Arch, battered for days by munition payloads, was finally breaking in the aftershock of the Spear of Macragge’s strike.
He lowered Salve Imperator and watched as the great bridge began to collapse. The arch closest to the west bank gave way first, plunging hundreds of greenskins into the broken rockcrete and toxic slurry of the river below, the xenos struggling and clawing at one another as they were slowly dragge
d under. The rest of the great bridge followed arch by arch, the air filling with the sound of ruination as the city of Shebat was split in half. The destruction only ended a hundred paces from the east bank’s defiled entrance archway, the last of the bridge’s masonry crumbling away to leave behind a jagged stub of stonework, the last remnants of Excelsior’s majesty.
As the echoes of the collapse began to fade, the Imperial forces redoubled their assault. The surviving greenskins trapped on the east bank were cut down, bolt-rounds and las-bolts bursting apart their toughened hides and crude scrap armour. Kastor strode ahead of the advance, unheeding now of the orks dying around him. He entered the shadow of the archway, the stonework soaring above him, and turned back the way he had come. Before him were his battle-brothers, stained and scarred by the day’s fighting, and either side of them the stern-faced men of the Guard, bloodied but with victory gleaming in their eyes.
‘Brothers!’ the Chaplain bellowed, voice amplified to a thunderous exhortation. ‘The day is ours! In the Emperor’s name we have purged, and by His will we shall do so again! Today we have reclaimed half of this great city. Tomorrow, we retake the other half! Ave Imperator!’
The response, issued from human and transhuman throats alike, was deafening.
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First published in Great Britain in 2018.
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Cover illustration by Igor Sid.
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