The blast of radiant light sheared through the alien’s head, bursting it into a spray of ichor and molten flesh. This time, the alien’s fierce vitality deserted it and crashed to the ground in a twitching heap.
‘The Emperor protects,’ Rhegeb swore as he looked from the slaughtered tyranid to the towering robot. Marhault silently agreed, though he wondered if it wasn’t the Omnissiah aspect of their God-Emperor they should be thanking.
The sounds of battle rang out from the other side of the fort. Marhault could see another of his mortar sections beset by a tyranid infiltrator. The other Kastelan was confronting the brute, immolating it with a torrent of burning promethium from the projector mounted to its back. He could see Datasmith Livia near the robot, her red robes reflecting the infernal glow of the robot’s weapon. The tech-priest aimed a bulky pistol at the alien, then sent a searing pulse of light shearing into the tyranid’s leg. Alien chitin and flesh vanished in the fury of the flashing energy, reduced to a scum of blackened ash.
The mutilated tyranid collapsed. For an instant it struggled upon the ground, trying to force its burning body towards its attackers. With a few strides, the Kastelan reached it. Standing above the crippled monster, the robot brought its immense foot stomping down. The full weight of the giant machine pressed upon the infiltrator’s head, then slammed down again to pulp the organic residue its assault had left behind. Before it could bring its foot down again, Livia was beside it, gesturing for the Kastelan to desist. She turned back towards the other robot. At her gesture, and the robot that had saved Marhault lumbered over to its custodian.
The captain had no opportunity to thank Livia for the intervention of her Kastelans. The shouts of his lieutenants barked out from the forward trenches. From his position, he could see even more clearly than the Cadians in the line. The tyranids were circling back across the savannah. They weren’t pressing their attack any further than the gun nests.
‘The filth are retreating?’ Rhegeb muttered, incredulous at the thought.
Marhault had a different idea, but it seemed just as impossible. ‘A probing attack,’ he said. ‘This was a probing attack. The xenos were just taking our measure.’
Looking through his magnoculars, Captain Marhault watched the xenos as they scurried about the plain. Only a hundred meters below the ridgeline stretched a vast swathe of savannah, a sea of tall brown grass swaying in Thain’s warm breeze. Before the tyranid invasion, this region had been used as grazing land for the grox herds that formed the basis of the planet’s industry. The facility Magos Procrustes occupied was once employed to process the reptiles’ dung as a cheap, albeit smelly, combustible to power Thain’s other industries.
The grox were gone now, of course, culled from the air by Imperial bombers to deny resources to the advancing tyranids. The tall grass had persisted however, returning with grotesque fecundity in the wake of the bombing. After only a few weeks it had spread back to engulf most of its former range. Marhault had considered burning it, but natives of Thain had warned such efforts were futile as the plants often sank ten metres beneath the soil. To get rid of it, the roots had to be destroyed.
Now the tall grass harboured something far more fearsome than any grox. Skittering around the savannah were grisly xenos creatures, lean predatory monsters encased in chitinous shells, their spindly arms tipped in long hooked claws. The mottled black and brown colouring of their shells made the aliens difficult to spot when they were still, and even when they were in motion it was hard to make out their exact outlines. They seemed roughly man-sized, which gave Marhault some comfort. If there was one thing that the Guardsmen knew about the tyranids, it was that the larger the creature the more intelligent it be. The ghastly infiltrators were proof of that.
What are they waiting for? It was a question that had been nagging at his nerves and that of every man and woman under his command. It was bad enough to be confronted by a virtually endless swarm of vicious alien predators, but to credit them with strategy? The xenos had recognized the mortars as a threat and formulated a deliberate plan to eliminate them in advance. They had initiated a probing attack and then withdrawn after testing the outer defences. Now the creatures were waiting, but waiting for what?
The angry shouts of Commissar Nazhir caused Marhault to hurriedly return the magnoculars to Sergeant Rhegeb and climb from the trench, heading up towards the grox pens and the source of the commotion.
When he arrived, the datasmith and her robots were arguing with the commissar. The Kastelans were like megaliths of metal that loomed above the stone walls. Captain Marhault stared up at the towering robots. It was impossible for Marhault not to feel a sensation of awe as he gazed at them.
‘These shall you hold in abhorrence, they shall be an abomination unto you: knowledge without understanding, strength without duty, accomplishment without sacrifice and intelligence without soul. For it is by these obscenities that the Children of Iron were given shape and form…’
Nazhir brandished his copy of the Imperial Creed overhead as though it were the company standard. His eyes blazed with the outrage and fury of an Ecclesiarch, glaring poison at the Kastelans and their red-robed administrator.
‘I was unaware you’d taken up recitation, commissar,’ Marhault admonished Nazhir as he marched towards the grox pens. ‘You’ve picked a rather eccentric audience to perform for.’
Nazhir swung around, turning his glower on the captain. Marhault winced when he saw the fury in his gaze. As a commissar, Nazhir wasn’t subordinate to his command and was fully empowered to summarily execute the captain should he feel Marhault had betrayed his duty to the Astra Militarum and the Imperium.
‘These things are an abomination,’ Nazhir snarled.
Marhault looked towards Datasmith Livia for support, but her composure was as cold and mechanistic as the robots themselves. Somehow that disturbed him more than Nazhir’s bombastic zealotry.
‘They’re what we need,’ Marhault told the commissar. ‘If we’re going to hold this position and perform our duty, then we need more firepower. We’re too far from the regiment’s artillery and the Navy fliers have too much on their plate already. Unless you know of a tank company that can get here in the next day or two, I think it would be prudent to thank the Emperor for these machines and question their sanctity after.’
Nazhir thumbed through his copy of the Imperial Creed, stabbing his finger triumphantly at a passage he had marked there. ‘Children of Iron! Abominations from the Age of Strife! The very existence of these… atrocities… is an affront to the Emperor! They should be…’
Something the commissar said managed to pierce the stoic detachment of the datasmith. Striding forwards, she addressed Nazhir.
‘These are revered relics of the Omnissiah, not the obscenities of the Silica Animus,’ Livia preached in a metallic monotone. ‘The robotic automata of the Legio Cybernetica represent the purity of the Omnissiah. It is blasphemous to speak of them in the same breath as the creations of technoheresy.’
‘They are without souls or the Emperor’s light,’ Nazhir retorted. ‘Their minds are shapes of metal, indecent and profane!’
Livia’s hand emerged from her robe’s sleeve. She pointed one of her metallic talons towards the bolt pistol holstered at Nazhir’s side. ‘Does your weapon have a soul, commissar? Does it reflect the Emperor’s light and serve the needs of the Imperium and mankind? It is a tool, a gift from the Omnissiah, one of the many blessings the Machine-God has bestowed upon us. So too are the Kastelans. Their machine-spirits are shaped by the wisdom entrusted to us by the Omnissiah. Your limited perceptions of flesh and faith cannot encompass the wonder of their construction. In your ignorance, you fear what is too complex for you to understand.’
Nazhir glared at the datasmith. Angrily he snapped his copy of the Imperial Creed close and shook it at her. ‘In your perversion you mistake righteous hate for fear.’
M
arhault stepped between Nazhir and Livia.
‘Enough,’ he snapped. ‘Pick a place that isn’t immediately in the path of a tyranid swarm for your philosophical arguments. There isn’t time for this bickering.’
The commissar shifted his fiery gaze to Marhault. For a moment it looked like he would continue the argument, but instead he simply turned and stalked down to the trenches. Marhault pitied the first Guardsman that Nazhir encountered.
‘That went better than I might have expected,’ he said, turning towards Livia. ‘He might have drawn his pistol.’
‘It would have been detrimental to the efficiency of this operation to indulge such excessive illogic,’ Livia stated. ‘Deprived of a commissar’s discipline…’
Marhault shook his head. ‘He could have shot you,’ he explained.
‘That was within the region of probability,’ Livia conceded. ‘Then I would have been compelled to determine that his hostility was no longer in balance with his utility. He would have needed to be eliminated.’
A chill swept down Marhault’s back as he heard the datasmith declare in cold, passionless terms her readiness to kill Nazhir. She spoke of disposing of an officer from the Commissariat as indifferently as someone might mention throwing out an old boot. Even generals of the Imperial Guard didn’t contemplate such a thing.
Quickly, Marhault turned away, gesturing to the fortifications that stretched down the slope. ‘The perimeter around Second Platoon is where the line is at its weakest,’ he said. ‘If you would direct the firepower of your maniple there…’
‘Such a determination would be inefficient until the disposition of the xenos has been ascertained,’ Livia responded. ‘It would increase the probability of operational success to monitor the situation and then respond with appropriate measures.’ She raised her head, gazing up into Thain’s sky. ‘Magos Procrustes has theorized that the principle xenos assault will begin when the solar cycle enters its transitional phase.’
Marhault smiled despite the horror of the situation and the horde of ravenous aliens just beyond the perimeter.
‘Twilight,’ he told Livia. ‘You tech-priests are so focused on your theories and calculations that you can’t feel the things you study.’
‘You speak of imaginative impression, primitive emotion,’ Livia retorted. ‘To divest such corruption from the intellect is the first blessing of the Omnissiah. Emotion pollutes logic, it encourages distraction and provokes heresy.’ She looked down the slope at Nazhir’s black-uniformed figure. ‘If the Commissariat truly appreciated the meaning behind the words they recite, they would embrace the Machine-God as the shield of the Imperium. Only stalwart constructs such as the Kastelans can be fully depended upon to guard mankind. Organics reject such a conclusion because to acknowledge the perfection of the machine is to recognize the weakness of flesh. It is one of the paradoxes of existence that a biological brain can conceive and construct mechanisms superior to itself, yet that same fleshy organ refuses to accept the meaning of what it has built.’
Marhault shook his head. He was even less inclined to debate with the datasmith than he had with Nazhir.
‘Magos Procrustes has made an error,’ he told Livia, changing the subject. ‘Thain orbits two suns. The planet has neither twilight or dawn.’
There was a sudden eruption of gunfire from the trenches below, and Marhault heard the shouts of officers and sergeants directing their soldiers, and the violent whine of First Platoon’s lascannon as it sent searing lances of laser energy into the enemy. Above the din came the maddened shrieks of tyranids.
‘The primary sun recedes as the secondary sun rises,’ Livia stated. ‘That transition may not feel like twilight, but it is sufficient for the purposes of the xenos.’
Marhault rushed towards the trenches. Livia’s steely rejoinder dented his pride even as the roars of the tyranids turned his blood cold.
How do we begin to stop them? Marhault thought to himself as he looked out at the savannah. Whenever the wind rippled through the grass it exposed a skittering tide of aliens crawling across the plain. The shadows lengthened as the erratic orbit of Thain’s secondary sun drew closer to the western horizon, making it increasingly difficult to pick out the creatures. There wasn’t a true night on Thain, only quasi-twilight as the secondary sun slithered along the horizon. The creatures couldn’t be waiting for darkness. It had to be something else.
‘Blood of the primarchs,’ Marhault swore.
‘They’re coming!’ a voice shouted from the trench. A second later the pseudo-night erupted in a renewed cadence of lasguns, heavy bolters, missiles and grenades. From the grox pens behind him, the Kastelan armed with the weapon pods sent blasts of disintegrating energy into the oncoming horde, while its companion stood idle until the xenos came within range of its promethium-thrower.
The low walls of the pens afforded the robots some slight protection against the tyranids – at least at this stage of the assault. Marhault had seen his comms trooper dropped by one of the hideous bio-weapons the xenos carried, the soldier’s chest had been torn to shreds by something that was more carnivorous beetle than it was bullet. In the wake of the leaping creatures that swarmed towards the trenches were squat aliens carrying bony rifles. Their sporadic fire wasn’t precise, but when their grisly bio-organic projectiles struck, the destruction they inflicted was horrific.
Marhault saw the savannah vanish beneath the surging rush of the aliens. The tyranids weren’t hiding in the grass now; they were charging towards the ridge in skittering leaps, a rolling surge of wicked talons and snapping jaws.
The noise of the mortars provided some small measure of relief to the hard-pressed Guardsmen holding the line. Each concentration exploded in a shower of chitinous limbs and burning grass. Marhault had the mortar squads stagger their salvoes in a checkerboard pattern, raking the savannah across a hundred metre front. One burst would be twenty metres forward of the line, the next would be only ten metres, and so on. Anything to make it hard for the aliens to predict where the next salvo would fall. After the incident with the infiltrators, Marhault wasn’t going to underestimate the cunning of their enemy.
The foremost of the aliens struck the minefield laid in front of Outpost Nymue’s perimeter. Fragments of chitin and fibrous meat pelted down into the trench as creatures were ripped to bloody tatters by the buried explosives. In their frantic determination to hold the xenos at bay, the soldiers paid scant attention to the gory debris.
Balduin’s platoon was doing its utmost to send a continuous barrage into the charging creatures. Marhault could see the lieutenant signalling his soldiers with hand gestures, directing their fire to different points along the line. Further along the perimeter, Lieutenants Peredur and Drystan were doing their best to get their platoons to match the fury of Balduin’s position. Above it all there came the blasts of energy from Livia’s robot, immolating clutches of xenos brutes with each barrage, leaving the residue twitching in the scorched earth until fresh waves of invaders ground them beneath hoof and claw.
Mines, mortars, Kastelans and guns continued to batter the tyranids, but still the beasts came. The approach to the ridge was carpeted in xenos fragments and twitching carcasses, yet their charge lost none of its impetus. The attack seemed mindless, devoid of the unsettling sense of strategy that had guided the monstrous infiltrators. Then Marhault noticed something curious. He saw a clutch of the spindly, claw-armed aliens reach the base of the ridge. Through his magnoculars he could distinctly see them hesitate for a moment. Instead of trying to climb the ridge and force their way through the saw-wire in front of the trench, the creatures turned. They scurried back into the minefield, deliberately picking a different path from the one that had seen them through to the ridge. One after another, the aliens were destroyed by mines they had missed in their initial charge.
‘By the saints, what are they doing?’ Rhegeb wondered. ‘Even an ork isn’t s
tupid enough to dance through a minefield twice.’
Marhault glanced at the stocky sergeant, catching his unease. ‘They’re clearing the minefield. The little ones are making things safe so bigger ones can pay us a visit.’ He handed his magnoculars to Rhegeb. ‘Five hundred metres out, stomping along behind another mixed swarm of shooters and stabbers.’
He had spotted them only a moment before, lumbering out from the gloom of Thain’s quasi-twilight: three trios of massive tyranid creatures, each as tall as the ghastly infiltrators had been. There was no deceptive chameleon quality about these, however. They were hideous: terrifyingly solid, immense brutes with fanged faces and spiked heads. Four arms erupted from their armoured bodies, each clawed hand wrapped about the haft of some weird bio-organic weapon. Some bore what looked like colossal swords, while others carried cannons made of bone, or polypus sacks of quivering flesh. One of the brutes wielded a long segmented whip, the bladed tip coiled around its forearm.
‘Not so sure a lasgun will keep those bugs from taking the trench once they get up here,’ Rhegeb snarled. ‘Maybe they’d be obliging enough to eat a grenade if we ask them nicely.’
‘The mortars might be enough,’ Marhault said. ‘If we could catch them in a good concentration…’
The captain shifted his attention back to the Third Platoon’s perimeter. It was here that the xenos assault was making the most headway. The mines had been cleared and the rest of the brown-shelled alien vanguard was now scurrying up the ridge. Marhault was horrified to see the broad leaps the beasts were capable of. A single spring could have got them clear over the saw-wire, but the monsters dropped right into the wire instead and drove their bodies into the circular blades fastened along the obstacle. The saws whirred into action the instant pressure was put on them, tearing into the xenos bodies. Metal teeth that had been engineered to saw through more fleshy foes had a much tougher time ripping away at the shells of the tyranids. After a few hundred rotations, the span of only a few seconds, the saws faltered and sputtered, their mechanisms fouled by the fibrous tissues and splintered chitin of their victims.
The Omnissiah's Chosen - Peter Fehervari Page 12
