SERGEANT THADDEUS AND the other surviving members of Seventh Squad had fought in the dark shadows beneath the habs for so long it felt as if they'd never see the daylight again. The strategy of luring the warriors in after them and picking them off one by one appeared to be working, though it was clear that for every warrior they put down others passed by their position entirely and continued on towards the west, with the main body of the tyranid forces advancing on Zenith. Thaddeus had been planning to move back out of the habs once the last of the warriors was located and destroyed, to carry the fight deeper into the tyranid-held territory to the east, when orders from Sergeant Aramus called for a change of plans.
'Attention, squad,' Thaddeus said to the others once he'd broken vox contact with Sergeant Aramus. 'We've been ordered to pull back to Zenith.'
'A retreat?' Battle-Brother Brandt asked with evident distaste.
The Blood Ravens Chapter did not adhere as closely to the strictures of the Codex Astartes as other Chapters, but while the Blood Ravens did not refuse to retreat under any circumstances as some Codex Chapters did, still the thought of turning their backs to the enemy was anathema to most Blood Ravens.
'Not a retreat,' Thaddeus corrected, 'but a withdrawal.' He paused, and looked around at the other three Blood Ravens standing in the circle of light cast by the lamps overhead. 'Aramus has decreed that the enemy forces are now too numerous for a direct assault to have any lasting impact, and has decided instead that a defensive posture is the only solution. We are to fall back to Zenith with the others, and help defend the stronghold.'
'So it's to be a siege, then?' Brother Takayo asked.
Thaddeus nodded. 'There is no other choice.'
The others wore grim expressions, and Thaddeus knew that his own could be no less stark. They all knew only too well the chances of a siege defence lasting any appreciable amount of time against such overwhelming numbers. Though they themselves had helped thin the numbers of effective enemy combatants by taking out as many warrior-class synapse creatures as possible, they knew that a barricaded siege against a tyranid invasion was inevitably doomed to failure.
But they also knew, as Thaddeus did, that there was no other solution. The Blood Ravens themselves might survive a frontal assault against the tyranids - or some percentage of them might, at least - and could continue to carry out raiding assaults behind enemy lines almost indefinitely, but unless they stood and defended the human inhabitants of the planet, and fought to stop - or at least slow - the process of tyranoforming, there would very quickly be nothing left for them to defend but a barren world overrun by monsters. A siege defence was doomed to failure, but at least it would ensure the survival of at least a portion of the human population for longer than any other strategy. And with a considerable amount of luck, they might be able to hold out until Captain Angelos's battlegroup could arrive to reinforce them.
'Sir,' young Phaeton said in a quiet voice, as though afraid to interrupt the sergeant's thoughts, 'my brother and I are hungry.'
Sergeant Thaddeus looked from the Blood Ravens to the two youths who accompanied them. The two had borne up well under the strain of the previous days, following along with the Seventh Squad just as Thaddeus had ordered them to do, without comment or complaint. But though they were hardened by their underhive upbringings, still they were mortal, and were subject to the same failings as any other humans. When they had grown too tired to continue walking, Thaddeus and his Space Marines had carried them in turns, the Blood Ravens continuing to wield their bolt pistols in one hand with a boy thrown over their other shoulder, their chainswords sheathed at their sides. It was a testament either to the depth of the boys' fatigue or else to the conditions under which they were raised that they were able to sleep through the cacophony of bolter fire, the whirr of chainswords, and the shrieking of the dying warriors.
The boys had been awake and moving for hours now, but aside from the small amount of fresh water the squad had been able to find the night before in a cistern, the youths had had nothing to eat or drink since before the habdwellers had fled and they were separated from their mother. That they had gone this long without complaining of hunger was nothing short of remarkable.
'Just a little while longer,' Thaddeus told the boys. 'We'll be joining our friends in the capital soon, and they'll have food and drink for you there.'
Phaeton only nodded, while Phoebus remained silent and still.
'Come on, squad,' Thaddeus said, racking his bolt pistol and drawing his chainsword. 'Let's get moving.'
Despite having spent more than a day and a half wending their way through the catacombs that connected the habs, endless hours moving either through darkness or through twilit corridors, now that it came time to emerge once more into the sunlight it took the squad a surprisingly short amount of time to get out. Only a matter of moments, pausing at one point to rain hellfire on one of the few warriors left lurking in the shadows before them, and the Seventh blew open an access panel and emerged into daylight.
As Thaddeus had anticipated, now that the tyranid main force had continued to the west, the tyranid rearguard would be more sparsely spread, given over largely to ripper swarms who were busy consuming any organic material they could find, and the capillary towers that had just begun to climb towards the sky in the east.
The rippers were innumerable, and despite their small size the relentless eating machines were persistent, and as they became aware of the arrival of the four Space Marines and two human youths in their midst they began to teem towards them, mandibles clacking and claws out and grasping.
Thaddeus picked up Phoebus and held him in the crook of his left arm, while Brother Kell hoisted Phaeton into his arms.
'Jump packs, squad,' Thaddeus said. 'Due west, best possible speed, and the Great Devourer take the hindmost.'
The other three Blood Ravens grinned, recognizing a flash of the old joy that Thaddeus had once found in combat. They signalled their acknowledgement and took to the skies.
'Will there be monsters in the city?' Phoebus asked, looking up into Thaddeus's eye-slits.
'I imagine so,' Thaddeus answered. 'But there are heroes there, too.'
Activating his jump pack, Thaddeus leapt into the grey skies, while the rippers swarmed over the ground where he'd stood, gnashing their teeth, their ravenous hunger denied.
SERGEANT ARAMUS HELD Wisdom overhead, energy coruscating down the length of the power sword's blade, and mouthed the Blood Ravens' battle cry: 'Knowledge is power!'
Now that Sergeant Avitus and his Devastator squad had fallen back within the defensive ring, and the fires had been struck in the moat that surrounded the heart of Zenith, the Blood Ravens' full attentions could be turned to defence - in manning and maintaining the barricades, and in dealing with any enemy elements who made it past the defensive ring and into the defended area within.
The other two surviving members of Third Squad were at Aramus's side, Battle-Brothers Cirrac and Siddig firing their bolters at the hormagaunts who had made it through the flames of the defensive ring and were now ravaging the northern district of the capital. Some half-dozen of the creatures had made it through the ring of fire, and had slaughtered twice that many innocent civilians before Aramus and his squad could reach the site to put them down.
With the runes on his visor display and his handheld auspex, Aramus was able to track the movements and status of the other Blood Ravens through the city. Avitus and his Devastators had joined Sergeant Cyrus and the Scout Squad in assisting the PDF in manning the barricades, using heavy bolters, meltaguns, and plasma guns to cut down any tyranids who seemed likely to make it through the inferno of the defensive ring. Other units of the PDF patrolled the city, trying to keep order among the terrified refugees, with varying degrees of success. Chaplain Palmarius, his crozius arcanum in hand, led the fifteen aspirants in their blood-red bodygloves as they moved throughout the city, keeping watch for any stray tyranids that might have slipped through the net. And Libra
rian Niven, who had come down from the Armageddon to join in the effort, used his psyker's senses to help direct the movements of the Thunderhawk gunships who patrolled the skies, shooting down any airborne tyranids they encountered and firing strafing runs on the tyranid forces who had now spread out to surround the city entirely.
Aramus was not happy about having to adopt a siege mentality, knowing that it was doomed to failure in the long run. But the overwhelming numbers of enemy forces had left him with no choice. For every hundred of the monsters stopped by the defensive ring, though, there were always a handful who made it through; and though the clean-up squads led by Aramus and the Chaplain were successful in locating and eradicating the interlopers in time, inevitably the tyranids who made it into the city did considerable damage before they were stopped, wreaking havoc on the defences, the defenders, and the refugees alike. The death toll among the PDF was high, and the numbers of civilians lost was climbing almost as fast, and though the Blood Ravens had lost no more Space Marines since falling back to Zenith their numbers were already so badly depleted by the early actions on Meridian that they were operating at only partial strength.
Up on the Armageddon, Lexicanium Konan continued to try to reach other Blood Ravens via astrotelepathy, but since making contact with the astropaths in Captain Angelos's battlegroup he had been unsuccessful in reaching any others elsewhere. Now their only hope of survival lay in holding the city until Angelos arrived, but the chances of them lasting so long were beginning to look bleak.
'Aramus,' came the voice of Sergeant Cyrus buzzing over the vox-comms. 'Scout Jutan reports that tyranids have broken through the ring in the north-west quadrant in numbers.'
'On it,' Aramus replied simply. 'Come on, squad,' he voxed to Cirrac and Siddig, already speeding towards the west along the inner rim of the moat. 'Be ready.'
The Third Squad reached the north-west quadrant of the city to find a hive tyrant slashing through the rubble, his retinue of guards, warriors, and lictors following close behind. The refugees who had been housed in that quadrant were fleeing, but not quickly enough that some of them had not already fallen to the claws and talons of the tyranids, their dying screams still echoing over the stale, smoky air.
Even as he opened fire with his bolter, spitting hellfire at the tyrant and slashing at one of the forerunning lictors with the power sword Wisdom, Aramus knew that the numbers of tyranids in the quadrant were too great to overcome with the forces he had at his disposal. They would be able to pick them off in time, but not before the damage that they did had been irreparable, and the losses of innocent life impossible to calculate.
There was no choice. It was time for the oxbow manoeuvre.
'The north-west quadrant is lost to the enemy,' he voxed to the others on an open channel. 'All personnel pull back. Thunderhawks, initiate oxbow manoeuvre on my mark, centred on my current position.'
When he got the flashing confirmation that all of the Blood Ravens and PDF had pulled back from the wall for dozens of metres in either direction, Aramus signalled to Cirrac and Siddig. The three Blood Ravens lobbed frag and krak grenades at the invaders, then pulled back as quickly as possible while the tyranids regrouped. 'Mark!' Aramus shouted into the vox.
In answer, two Thunderhawks streaked towards his position, one from the northwest and the other from the north-east, high-energy beams lancing down from their dorsal-mounted turbo-lasers while Whirlwind missiles launched from beneath their wings. The two Thunderhawks drew lines of fire in the ground, starting at the defensive ring and arcing inwards until they met only a few dozen metres from where Aramus stood.
Like an oxbow, a semicircular bend in a river that closes off the land within, Aramus's emergency plan called for an oxbow to be cut in the defensive ring, surrendering the land within to the enemy while cutting a new firebreak to be defended.
It was a desperate measure, of course. Use it too often, and the tyranids would succeed in pressing the defenders into an ever decreasing area, making it all the easier to ultimately overrun them entirely. But it was a preferable alternative to standing and fighting a losing battle against an overwhelming force.
The Thunderhawk pilots signalled the movement complete, and peeled away to return to their duties.
'Cyrus, Avitus,' Aramus voxed, 'I want this hole in the net closed up, as fast as possible.' In response, the Blood Ravens and PDF who had moved away from the quadrant only moments before now rushed back to man the new barricades.
Aramus glanced skyward, knowing that somewhere overhead the strike cruiser Armageddon orbited. Onboard, Lexicanium Konan would still be trying to reach anyone by astrotelepathy, for all the good it would do them. As it stood, they could not even communicate with anyone in the next system over, much less hundreds or thousands of light years away.
Not only had they been unable to contact anyone outside of the Aurelia sub-sector, but ever since the Aurelia Battlegroup had closed with the hive fleet, they'd lost astropathic contact with Admiral Forbes as well. Aramus only hoped that her forces were still in the fight, and that they might succeed in weakening the tyranid fleet, or distracting it if nothing else.
'EMPEROR'S THRONE!' SERGEANT Tarkus swore as they moved ever deeper into the body of the beast. The floor squelched beneath their feet, and the walls and ceiling pulsed, rhythmically, like a beating heart.
'Sergeant?' Space Marines were never uneasy, but there was almost a quaver of fear running beneath Battle-Brother Horatius's tone. 'Which way is it?'
They stood at a juncture between two corridors. Of course, the tubular passages with their irregular walls were more like arteries than the corridors of a engineer-designed vessel like the Armageddon, the juncture more like a chamber, with heart-like valves instead of hatches. But that was hardly surprising as the hive ship had never been designed by any engineer, but was a living creature, though impossibly large.
Before Tarkus could reply, another collection of the ''bites'' came swarming down the artery to their right, teeming over walls, ceiling, and floor. They knew of no other name for them so had called them bites since each appeared to be nothing more than an oversized biting mouth at the end of a stunted, snake-like body.
'Fire!' Tarkus said, and played hellfire over them. The heavy bolters echoed deafeningly in the narrow artery as the Blood Ravens cut them down.
The bites had first swarmed at the location where the boarding torpedo had pierced the outer skin of the hive ship, where Tarkus and the First Squad had been able to gain access to the innards of the gargantuan beast itself.
'Tane, you say those things are like our Larraman cells?' Tarkus said.
Brother Tane had advanced the theory, but it had been little more than a guess. He shrugged. 'Seems reasonable.'
As Tane had opined, like the Larraman cells which coursed to the site of any injury in a Space Marines body, converting into scar tissue and beginning the healing process, the bites might act as defensive cells, rushing to the site of intrusion and sealing the wound, perhaps by devouring any foreign bodies and converting them into ''scab''.
'Then we go that way,' Tarkus said, pointing the direction from which the bites had come. 'If the defences are keyed to keep us from that direction, it stands to reason that's where we want to go.'
Tarkus had always known that tyranid hive ships were living creatures, just like all of the warriors and weapons of the tyranid - from the tiniest microscopic spores through the weapons-symbiotes to the most massive carnifex - but until now he had not really contemplated what that suggested. But now, moving through the pulsing arteries of the hive ship, fending off its antibodies and wending their gradual way towards its heart, it finally struck Tarkus that they were not boarding a ship… they were invading a body.
The hive ship was, in a sense, the mother of a tyranid hive. Home of the norn-queen, a living bio-factory that constantly gave birth to an unending stream of warriors, weapons, and ships, the ship itself was a living creature incorporating millions of bio-engineered organ
isms, their genomes spliced and replicated to be perfectly adapted for their tasks. The hive ship followed the rest of the fleet, arriving at an invaded world only at the last stages of assimilation, and with the help of the capillary towers constructed on the surface by its offspring, it would then complete the process of planetary assimilation by consuming even the atmosphere and oceans from a world, until there was nothing left behind but a lifeless husk.
A whistling came down the artery towards them, like a strong wind blowing.
'Incoming,' Tarkus said, raising his bolter. He expected more bites, perhaps defensive organisms of a somewhat larger form.
Six monsters shambled down the artery towards them, burning spittle dripping from their gaping maws, scything blades and serrated fangs sharp as razors, each of them easily twice the size of any one of the Blood Ravens.
Tarkus had expected that the next defenders might be somewhat larger than the bites. He was learning that his expectations were, in this and in so many other aspects, woefully short of the true horror to be found in the hive ship.
'At them, Blood Ravens!' Tarkus yelled, firing his bolter as the shambling monsters raced with ungainly gaits towards them. 'Do your duty!'
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
SERGEANT THADDEUS ARCED down out of the grey skies, Phoebus in the crook of his left arm, his bolt pistol spitting hellfire in his right hand. Brothers Brandt and Takayo were already on the ground, laying about them on all sides with their chainswords, clearing a landing zone, while Brother Kell with the young Phaeton in his arms was arcing down out of the sky just above and to the left of Thaddeus. All around Brandt and Takayo lay the severed carcasses of rippers, with a couple of gaunts still striking out at them.
As Thaddeus touched down, Takayo used his chainsword to lop the forelimbs from one of the gaunts, and Brandt blew holes in the other's abdomen with his bolt pistol.
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