Anarch - Dan Abnett

by Warhammer 40K

  ‘Fire!’ Obel yelled.

  The Tanith guns began to blaze. A blizzard of las-fire ripped down the rockcrete ravine, countercut by fire from the overlooking ledges. Boaz opened up with the .20, pumping streams of rounds down the channel. The noise was painful.

  The leading Qimurah buckled and fell. Those behind leapt over the fallen, firing. Some of the creatures struck down got up and began to run again.

  ‘Feth this,’ whispered Larkin. They’d outrun his pre-set sighting point before he’d even squeezed off a shot.

  What the feth were they?

  He fired, and the long-las barked. A Qimurah toppled as his skull exploded. His forward momentum kept his corpse tumbling and cartwheeling for several metres.

  Larkin didn’t stop to enjoy his kill. He slammed in another cell and put a second hotshot into the face of another of the neon-eyed fiends. Okain had opened up too. The two snipers had dropped five of the creatures before the front of the charge had reached the rusted gates. The over-charged hotshots had true stopping power. Not even Qimurah bio-defences could block or soak up that kind of energy force.

  The .20 was also taking a toll. The streams of heavy hard rounds were shattering limbs and shearing bodies apart.

  They can’t get past this, Obel thought. Doesn’t matter what they are, doesn’t matter how fast they are, they can’t run this killbox. None of them are going to make it to us alive.

  But the bulk of the Tanith firepower wasn’t the heavy crew-served or the two long-las weapons. It was standard lasrifles. Hits from them made Qimurah stumble and falter. Some fell, others took visible damage.

  But they kept going. They soaked it up. Obel wondered how many times he’d have to hit the same target spot before he did any lethal damage.

  The Qimurah came on. Their weapons were basic, but their supple, strong bodies allowed them to fire on the move with great accuracy.

  And lasweapons were excellent tools against human flesh.

  Four Ghosts were down. Five. Six. Boaz was hit in the throat and arm, and flopped back from the .20, which chattered into silence. Ifvan leapt in to take over, but the .20 had feed-jammed when Boaz lurched away from the tripod. He fought to unblock the receiver.

  ‘Clear it! Clear it!’ Obel yelled.

  Larkin heard Okain scream out. Two more groups of the enemy were pouring up the revetments onto the ledge. They didn’t have to balance. Hooked claws on their feet and hands bit into the crumbling ’crete like pitons. Some were almost running along the wall on all fours like human spiders.

  Larkin and Okain switched aim. They no longer had time to fire at the charging tide below. They began sighting over the gate mechanisms to fend off the horrors that were racing along the walls at their level.

  Okain hit one, and the kill-shot hurled the scurrying scarecrow shape off the ledge, spinning and flailing. Larkin blew the head off the first one coming at him, then reloaded to greet the second.

  On the far side, Okain missed with his third shot. Hacklaw vaulted over the corroded gears of the gate, and decapitated Okain with a slash of his fore-claws.

  Down below, Maggs saw Okain perish.

  ‘On the walls! They’re up on the walls!’ he yelled. Several of the Ghosts at the duct mouth tried to angle up and fire at the Qimurah advancing along the edges. This further reduced the firepower concentrating on the main charge.

  Hacklaw and two others had swept past Okain’s station, sending his corpse tumbling down the revetment, and fell into the Ghosts positioned on the ledge. The Ghosts tried to fight back, shooting point-blank at the unexpected attack, or trying to fend off the Qimurah with rifle butts or blades. The Qimurah killed some outright with their meat-hook claws, or simply threw the troopers off the ledge into the channel below, a drop that either killed or crippled them as they hit the rockcrete gulley below.

  Ifvan got the .20 cleared, but the front end of the charge was already on them.

  The Qimurah had left many of their kin dead and mangled in the rockcrete channel behind them. But with undimmed fury and unfaltering speed, the remainder of the reworked warriors swept into the Ghosts’ fragile line.

  Seventeen: Flesh is Weak

  There was no quarter, no room to move, no time to think. The twilit gallery shook with gunfire, stray las-rounds spitting through the fug of accumulated smoke. The leading Qimurah hit the line, taking shots point blank, shredding and dying, and soaking up damage for the warriors behind them. The Ghosts had fixed silver, and resorted to stabbing and thrusting as the Qimurah swept into them. Most were simply bowled backwards by the superior power and force of the Archenemy creatures. Even with bayonets driven deep into blistered neon flesh, they were carried over or dragged backwards.

  Some were crushed underfoot, others fell to raking claws or sprays of shot. Corrod was in the thick of it, tearing his way forwards. He had known since setting out that many of his kind would not return from the mission. One did not enter the heartland of the enemy and expect to survive unscathed. The holy work was all that mattered. The orders of the voice. The Qimurah could be remade. New and worthy sons could be blessed and reworked to replace the fallen. They would all share the same, eternal purpose: to prevail, even to the last of them.

  And they would prevail. They would break all opposition and bear the keys of victory to his side, and lay them at his feet. Even if they were reduced to just a handful. To just one.

  Never had so many of the Qimurah been deployed together, and never had so many perished in the same action. It was a mark of honour. A mark of trust. Their very losses, unthinkable in extent, proved the magnitude of their task. Victory, no more, no less. Ultimate victory in the Sabbat War. A few metres of filthy ground in a rockcrete channel. A few outclassed enemy soldiers in their path.

  That was all that stood in the Anarch’s way.

  A few metres. A few bags of human meat. The Qimurah could conquer that. The Imperials had fought well. Where they lacked strength, they had compensated with wit and diligence. They had executed to effect. They had shown courage and resolve, and tactical skill.

  And now they would die because their unworked bodies were too fragile to sustain the effort, their weapons too weak. At the last moment, which was always the only moment that truly mattered, their strength could not match their determination.

  He could see the looming mouth of the duct behind them.

  ‘Flamer!’ Obel yelled into the carnage. The .20 was overrun. Everything was just smoke and blood and jarring impacts and crashing bodies.

  Lubba stood his ground, and sent a lance of sucking, roaring white heat into the first of the Qimurah, searing flesh from bone. The superheated stream annihilated one entirely, scattering fused and burning fragments of bone. Another managed to stagger a few steps, skinless and ablaze, before falling.

  Criid and Obel tossed their rifles aside and pulled the adept wardens’ staves out of their shoulder packs. They stood their ground and fired.

  The air distorted as grav-pulses blasted from the ends of the staves. The next two Qimurah fell back, their skulls crushed like eggs. Criid and Obel tried to fire again, but the Mechanicus weapons took a moment to cycle.

  And there were no more moments.

  ‘Lunny!’ Criid yelled.

  ‘Charges now!’ Obel roared.

  On the ledge, Larkin heard Obel’s distant order as he scrambled back from the gate. A Qimurah bounded over it, dropping onto him. For a second, he locked eyes with the thing’s neon gaze. Then he met it with his silver.

  The Qimurah landed and impaled itself on the Tanith blade locked to the end of Larkin’s long-las.

  It writhed, pulling on the long gun, threatening to wrench it out of the old marksman’s hands or roll them both off the ledge.

  Larkin pulled the trigger. The hot shot blew the Qimurah in half and hurled the sectioned creature off his blade. Another Qimurah came over
the gate gears behind it. Larkin reached for his reload bag, but quick as he was, there wasn’t going to be enough time.

  Hands grabbed him from behind and shoved him down onto his face. Wes Maggs was kneeling on his back, hosing rapid fire at the oncoming Qimurah. Trooper Galashia was behind him, lighting it up over Maggs’ head. The combined fire swatted the Qimurah off the ledge. It plunged towards the channel below just as the Ghosts’ explosives began to go off.

  Tube charges and grenades were the only things they had left. The dwindling line of Ghosts was being crushed back into the mouth of the gallery. At Obel’s order, they had frantically hurled their tube charges and whatever grenades they were carrying.

  The staggered blasts lit up along the Ghosts’ end of the chamber, filling the artificial ravine with a sudden forest of explosions. It was a desperate choice. A final choice. Many of the Qimurah were blown apart instantly, but the blast pressure was trapped and channelled. The rockcrete ravine cupped and focused the over-shock and drove it up and out.

  The Ghosts defending the duct mouth were hurled off their feet by the hammering wave, rolling and tumbling, deaf, dazed and blind.

  The over-pressure scorched up the revetments too. It swept Maggs off the ledge. Larkin and Galashia managed to grab him before he fell, and clung on desperately as he tried to drag himself up again, his feet swinging over the drop.

  Smoke and flames boiled down the gulley, dense and caustic. Criid tried to rise. She saw a Qimurah almost on her, and fired her stave. The gravity round hammered him back into the revetment wall and split his torso like a ripe ploin. The Qimurah had a guard-issue satchel over one shoulder. It slumped along with his corpse into the filth of the channel bed.

  Corrod saw Ulraw die.

  ‘Take it up! Take it up!’ he yelled.

  He saw Drehek stumble out of the swirling, spark-filled smoke, casting aside an Imperial he’d just gutted with his claws. Drehek saw the fallen treasure, and ran for it. He pulled it off Ulraw’s corpse and turned. A javelin of white-hot fire raked him and torched him. The Qimurah and the satchel collapsed in a consuming ball of flame.

  Corrod howled. There was no time to go back. No time to recover what was lost. He still had four of the stones.

  He threw himself on, the duct ahead.

  An Imperial blocked his path. He smashed the man aside, snapping his neck and removing half of his face.

  Zhukova, deafened by the bombs, saw the monster kill Gansky. She fired full auto, cutting Corrod off his feet with a hail of las. Corrod rose, his skin blistered and smouldering. She hit him with another burst. He fell, then came at her.

  She hit him again, and saw neon blood spurt and spatter.

  He was centimetres from her when his head wrenched sideways. The side of his skull caved in and burst.

  Corrod fell.

  Lunny Obel lowered the stave.

  ‘These fethers just don’t know when to die, do they?’ he asked.

  A hunched, stumbling figure slammed into Obel from behind and knocked him aside. Hacklaw, wounded and disfigured and perhaps the last Qimurah left alive, was still going. His claws tore the musette bag from his damogaur’s corpse.

  Clutching it to his chest, he plunged on into the duct.

  Chiria offered Kolosim the detonator casually, the way a trooper might offer a comrade a pack of lho-sticks.

  ‘You wired it,’ Ferdy Kolosim replied. ‘You do the honours.’

  Chiria shrugged. The scars on her face crinkled with a grin of relish.

  ‘Ghosts, Ghosts,’ she said into her bead. ‘Stand by for det. Brace and ease.’

  It had just begun to rain again. Fine sheets of drizzle washed across the approach to EM 14. The Ghosts huddled in the darkness, braced, and opened their mouths to prevent burst eardrums.

  Chiria flipped off the switch-guard and pressed the detonator stud.

  There was a light-flash, and then a shock that they all felt in their lungs and bones.

  Then a boom split the night in half.

  A sheet of flame ripped across the front of the Mechanicore fortress. Huge chunks of rockcrete and ouslite came tumbling out, crunching like a landslip across the apron. The blast shock flattened the security fences, tearing the chain link apart, and blew in the back of the guardhouse.

  As the concussion dropped, pebbles, grit and flecks of stone began to fall with the rain.

  ‘Get into it!’ Kolosim ordered. The chosen tactical squads hurried from cover, weapons ready. Debris was still fluttering down. Smoke blanketed the site, and numerous fires were burning. The Mechanicore’s main gate zone was a mass of broken slag and buckled rebar.

  The huge blast doors themselves were still entirely intact. They were simply lying on the ground.

  ‘Nice job,’ Kolosim commented as he clambered over the rubble on the heels of the point team. Chiria followed, lugging her short-snout rig and ammo hopper.

  ‘I knew a truck load of hi-ex would have its uses, sir,’ she replied.

  Needs must, Kolosim thought. Bray and Armin had spent almost twenty minutes trying to cut an entry in the main doors. The Cult Mechanicus built things to last, and on top of that, EM 14’s systems had suffered a catastrophic collapse, so there had been no joy trying to rewire the circuits either.

  Kolosim had been urgently considering other potential entry points when Chiria had tapped him on the shoulder and simply pointed to the bomb truck that the Sekkites had tried to drive into their lines.

  He had said, ‘Oh, what the feth. Breach it.’

  The point teams slithered and climbed in over the rubble, moving through the heavy haze of smoke and dust with weapons up and sweeping. Primary lights and environment were down, but self-powered auxiliary lumen banks had come on, illuminating the interior hall with a soft, blue glow.

  Bray had tac lead. He threw hand signs, fanning his entry team wide. They left the edge of the rubble and the blast area, and crossed a marble floor covered with in-blown grit and lumps of rockcrete. The Ghosts moved from pillar to pillar, bounding cover. Vadim’s squad moved in at their heels, then Kolosim with the heavier weapons. Kolosim signalled his own squad wide, then moved up to join Bray and Caober.

  The hall ahead was large and silent, a long chamber like the nave of a temple. Back-washed smoke from the entry blast was collecting in the high ceiling space. Kolosim looked around.

  A fight had torn through here in the last hour or so. The walls and floor were scarred with bullet and las strikes. He saw several Mechanicus weapons servitors, dead and blown out, plus the bodies of half a dozen Tanith troopers.

  It must have been hell, trapped in here when the machines turned.

  Caober pointed. Several of the automata had been shot out and wrecked, but several others seemed intact. They had just shut down and died. Kolosim edged close to one and inspected it. Black goo, like treacle, was seeping out of its casing. It had burned out from within, its cogitator and biomech processors dissolving into mush.

  ‘Like the thing outside,’ Bray remarked.

  ‘Same here, sir,’ called Vadim. He was examining systems built into a wall – a data duct and a row of monitor screens. Tarry black slime oozed from all of them.

  ‘Kolosim to Arcuda,’ Kolosim said into his bead. ‘Entry achieved.’

  ‘Copy,’ Arcuda’s voice replied. ‘I thought I heard you knock.’

  Arcuda had taken charge of the companies inside the Mechanicore. Pasha and Elam had already descended into the ducts and, like Obel and Criid’s hunter squads, they were out of comm range. Word was, Theiss was dead, and he’d died in the first few minutes. Kolosim had warned Arcuda once it had become clear he was only going to force entry by unsubtle means. Arcuda had pulled all Ghost forces clear of the entry hall.

  ‘Moving in by squad,’ Kolosim said. ‘You still got actives?’

  ‘It’s quietened down a lot,’
said Arcuda. ‘A few bursts, so watch yourself. But the frenzy is done. I think they’re all dead, or dying.’

  ‘It true about Theiss?’

  ‘Yeah. We’ve taken a beating. Big purse.’

  Kolosim winced. Big purse. The euphemism stung. The Militarum had bastardised it from Munitorum jargon, an assessment term used in action reports and logistical summaries. Big purse was actually ‘big perc’, the cover-sheet abbreviation for ‘big percentage casualty rate’, indicating forty-five per cent losses or higher. To Kolosim it always sounded like some thieving bastard had got away after a brutal mugging.

  ‘We’re going to need medicae and med-vac soon as,’ Arcuda reported.

  ‘Working on that,’ Kolosim replied. ‘Links to high command and Eltath Operations are still down.’

  ‘Another big hit?’ Arcuda asked.

  ‘Can’t say. Hoping it’s just technical feth. But shit’s kicking off all over town.’

  ‘No way the palace has been hit,’ said Arcuda.

  ‘You’d think,’ Kolosim agreed.

  The teams moved forwards again. Kolosim stuck tight with Vadim and Caober.

  ‘What’s the plan,’ Kolosim asked into his bead. ‘Do we start extraction?’

  ‘Cas-vac yes, soon as you can,’ Arcuda replied. ‘But otherwise we secure the feth out of this place. The operation’s still live down in the ducts. No signal yet, but we need to be ready to support. Or block anything that tries to come out.’

  ‘Copy that. Key me in.’

  ‘We’ve covered all the possible duct exits,’ replied Arcuda, ‘but we haven’t reached Turbine Hall One yet. That’s where Criid and Lunny went in. That’s closer to you.’

  ‘On it,’ said Kolosim. ‘We’ll lock that up.’

  He followed the advance in. More automata wrecks. Dead tech-priests and adepts, some of whom had been shot apart or torn limb-from-limb. The Mechanicus had turned on itself as well as its guests. Black slime spattered the floor and was sprayed up some walls. Most of it leaked from the machine dead, but some of it was oozing and dripping from the building itself.