Steering away from the main group with a roll of the shoulders, the six were joined by two standard infantry squads, the twenty-six-strong group hurtling down in a V-shaped formation towards the western flank of the city’s outer wall and a clearing only recently secured by First and Second Platoons.
With the upper rim of the extinct volcano only seconds away to his right, Zachariah could see the shimmering blue void shields dancing around its massive circumference. Somewhere beneath them, penned inside the city’s impossibly cramped streets and crumbling ancient towers, were countless civilians caught up in the Rysgahan planetary defence force’s descent into madness. Facing Chaos forces smashing their way through the neighbouring Arx Gap and fearing the total destruction of their planet, a brutal rebellion had quickly swept through their ranks, ending in this stand-off within the sheer walls of Rysgah City.
The planet’s volcanic nature gave the Rysgahans almost limitless geothermal energy to power their defensive networks, and despite their best efforts to bombard the rebels into submission, the Navy had failed to break the stalemate. This waste of effort played nicely into the hands of the insurgents who saw it as a simple waiting game – once the Chaos forces arrived, they would throw in their lot with the agents of evil and embrace the darkness. Unfortunately, those Rysgahans who remained loyal to their beloved Emperor would be surplus to requirements and, as such, executed in their hundreds of thousands, military or civilian.
Well, thought Zachariah, the rebels hadn’t counted on the 158th being called in to stop them.
The massive curved walls of the volcano loomed huge in his vision, pockmarked by vast craters barely visible in the blackened crystalline rock. An earlier plan had been to use the larger holes caused by the aerial bombing as entrances to the interior of the city, but this had been discounted as too risky even for drop-troops.
Something about those holes made him feel uneasy. He motioned a warning to Adullam and Beor, who immediately mimicked the movement to the other three. They dipped and rolled away from the wall, trusting the instincts of their sergeant.
As the infantry squads continued to fall around him, Zachariah’s awareness went into full sniper mode, his gaze darting from point to point, automatically scanning and analysing any and every detail he could see. Some of those holes were very deep, and the angle of the shafts meant they didn’t come from external detonations. No, these looked like they’d been drilled from the inside–
Zachariah’s world went red, a scarlet mist coating his visor. For a split second he couldn’t quite understand what had happened, but then, as he felt the wet impact of exploded flesh hit his side, he knew he’d been caught in the total annihilation of a human body.
Wiping his visor with the back of his gloved hand, he could just make out the perpetrator of the attack through a smudge of blood. Incredibly, the Rysgahans had managed to haul a Hydra tank turret up the inside of the volcanic walls and position it as a makeshift anti-aircraft weapon in the mouth of a cave halfway up the sheer rock face. The quadruple muzzles blazed into life, tracer fire dancing in lethal lines from the exposed cave and spreading outwards in a deadly arc. By the Emperor – this hadn’t been in the briefing!
Clearly panicked by the last thing they expected and wanted to encounter, some of the less experienced Guardsmen began to bunch together in confusion, forgetting their training and forming a larger, tempting target. The three-strong rebel crew wasted no time in traversing their weapon on its improvised mount towards them, the loader working overtime to maintain the decimating hail of fire.
Projectiles passed through one trooper as if he was wet tissue, spattering tiny gobbets of flesh in all directions and turning the man into a bloody cloud. A second lived just long enough to see the bottom half of his body completely eviscerated, the shock and torrent of blood loss mercifully claiming his life before he had time to scream.
While his own squad was safely out of the way, Zachariah calculated the remainder of Fourth Platoon would pass within range of the weapon even if they’d spotted what was happening from above. Something had to be done, and now. Hitting the thrusters on his grav harness, Zachariah halted his descent with a sickening jolt, the straps cutting into his armpits. In the recesses of his mind, a chrono was running, counting down the time he had to stay in position and, based on what he’d just witnessed, how long it would take the Rysgahans to zero in on his location. He had somewhere around fifteen to twenty seconds, he concluded as more bodies erupted in scarlet plumes around him.
A familiar sensation overwhelmed Zachariah, an uncanny calm that he had practised and mastered through sheer will and determination over his years of active service. Adrenaline and endorphins flooded into his body but he controlled the rush of excitement, instead using the heightened sensations to focus with supreme clarity on the target. Nothing existed other than the three rebels, their weapon and him; he was perfectly aware of the stream of deadly fire creeping closer and closer, of the carnage it would wreak if it hit him, but it simply didn’t matter.
Calculations flooded his mind – angles of potential beam deflection, the instability of his own precarious position, the distance and elevation to the gouged-out hole in the side of the volcanic wall. Heavy-gloved fingers unlatched his lasgun and, despite the extra distortion created by the blood-smeared visor, Zachariah brought the telescopic sight to his eye and regarded the furiously working trio in hazy detail, turning down the image intensifier to minimum in the gradually brightening morning light.
The deadly hail was only seconds away, tearing through the rarefied air as streaks of mortal danger. Like many of his fellow veterans, the sergeant had modified his weapon to suit his style of combat – for him, it meant removing the trigger guard completely, somewhat dangerous for a less experienced soldier but not for a man who’d been serving Elysia and the Emperor for thirty-six years.
The left thruster on his grav-chute sputtered, pitching him diagonally until it cut back in, and he had to track back to the three men; but the shot was ready.
Hold breath. Wait. Exhale. Squeeze.
The rebel he guessed to be the commander was the first to go, with a shot to the upper chest passing neatly through his grubby brown carapace armour and continuing out through the back, spattering fluid and bone into the darkness of the cave. A look of astonishment came over the soldier’s face as he looked down at the smoking hole in his chest, then to the gaping loader who crouched over the makeshift weapon clearly struggling to cope with what he was seeing.
As the commander fell to the floor like a dropped sack, the bottom of the loader’s jaw disappeared in a crimson slash. Clawing wildly at the gushing mess, he staggered to his feet in absolute panic and ran to the back of the cave, any threat he once posed now gone forever.
The third Rysgahan was made of sterner stuff, obviously a veteran of some order, and with teeth gritted he made straight for the firing controls of the Hydra. Zachariah took the opportunity to shoot him right between the eyes, just below the small peak of his close-fitting, tarnished bronze helmet, the beam cutting and cauterising his brain in an instant. Slumping sideways, he fell onto the now silenced Hydra’s feed casing. The blood running from his gaping dead mouth made the heated metal steam with every red drop.
Without hesitation, Zachariah clipped his lasgun back on to his quick-release chest harness and cut power to the thrusters, dropping immediately. Arrowing down head-first with arms flat to his sides, he increased his speed to a plummet, putting some distance between himself and the rest of Fourth Platoon above and behind. Waiting for the very last moment of safe freefall, he slammed his hand onto the grav-chute deployment rune and felt the familiar, sickening jolt of deceleration in his stomach. Looking down between his feet as a guide, he spotted the impossibly small section cordoned off for them within the black, brittle ground of the landing zone.
He hit the surface heavily, staggering forwards with the momentum but managing to
avoid the rookie indignity of crashing into one of the many temporary structures and stacks of battered rectangular drop-canisters surrounding the area. Dozens of Elysians milled around, carrying ammunition and supplies towards a large smoking hole at the base of the overwhelming volcanic wall. The noise was deafening: boots crunching on the gritty black sand, shouts and calls from hastily erected tents and shacks, volleys fired into the air from heavy guns towards the few remaining Rysgahan wall emplacements within range.
Pulling off his helmet, he could feel that the air was warming in the morning sun and despite the smell of rotten eggs caused by the engineers’ recent blasting he was glad to shed the weight of his drop-gear. The upper layers of compacted ash had at first allowed Elysian engineers to quickly make an entrance at the base of the wall, but a series of much harder rock striations had slowed them down considerably. He hoped they didn’t have to hang around for long.
Pulling off his right glove, he began nursing some feeling back into his aching limbs, flexing his knuckles and running a calloused hand through his short dark hair. With fingers still numb from the cold, he felt a slick wet patch on his cheek; looking down, he found blood and matter glistening on his dirty hand. He wiped the mess away on the side of his fatigues and with a sigh cleaned off the top of his helmet so the white sergeant’s stripe running down its middle could be seen again.
‘So much for intelligence, sarge. We nearly got pasted there.’ Adullam wasn’t one for holding back his opinion, something that had got him into more than a few situations where his body hadn’t been able to uphold the promises his mouth had made. The craggy, scarred face of Zachariah’s oldest friend and comrade was still pale from the drop, but there was no time for full recovery – he and the shorter, disproportionately wider form of Beor crouched over a dozen Voss-pattern demolition charges just outside the landing zone, checking the flat, metallic discs for impact damage with a speed that would normally suggest a lack of thoroughness.
Not those two, thought Zachariah as he stood before his squad, checking the integrity of his sniper rifle by touch. When they set their minds to blowing someone or something up, they never failed.
‘You know what the Navy’s like, Adullam. Everything’s based on what they can see from their window.’ Melnis barked a laugh at his own joke, lifting the enormous bulk of his MkII plasma gun by the front-mounted bipod with one massive hand and staring straight down the barrel, its charred interior illuminated by the rising sun behind him.
‘Bloody Throne, Melnis. You nearly had our heads off there!’ Sojack snarled up at the hulking form, interrupting the fitting of a specially made extension tube onto his Voss-pattern grenade launcher. Coarto stopped too, his identical MkV unit partially assembled across his thigh.
‘Oh, I’m sorry if I interrupted your playtime, boys. I know how fond you are of those little toys.’
Sojack looked over to his best friend and they shook their heads as one, turning their attention back to improving the accuracy of their well-worn launchers. They weren’t biting – not today.
‘Now don’t be upsetting the Fourth’s finest, Melnis. Just remember how they saved your big, thick neck on Carmelia.’
Melnis snorted over at the smiling Beor, while Coarto and Sojack grinned up at him, still covered by his considerable shadow. Zachariah sighed, having heard it all before a hundred times, but it comforted him to see everyone in good spirits before a battle.
He noticed that Sojack and Coarto had re-inked the tattoos on the backs of their shaven heads. Each had the opposing half of the 158th’s aquila symbol, a stylised, swooping Imperial eagle with the skull of an ork in one talon and an eyepatch-wearing human head in the other. Their party trick was to put their heads together as a prelude for instigating brief, brutal and, to them, hugely enjoyable fist-fights with anyone they could find stupid enough to argue with or insult them.
‘I’d like to invite them on a drop one day, sarge. See how they like the nasty surprises we always seem to get.’
Beor was on his feet now, packing half a dozen of the heavy explosive devices into a rucksack by their stubby handles, breathing heavily as he did so. Built like an Elysian valley ox, his head and neck were virtually the same thickness, leading to the less than flattering nickname ‘Bulldozer Beor’ among his close friends. Despite his outward appearance of being unfit, they all knew this to be a dangerous assumption to make; his girth only added to his destructive potential.
There was no answer from Zachariah, whose attention was drawn to a sudden increase in activity at the mouth of the nearby drill-hole as several Elysian engineers ran from the man-made cavern. Seconds later, the ground shook and a huge, stinking black cloud billowed out of the entrance, bringing an uneasy silence to the encampment which a moment later broke with a roar as Third Platoon began pouring into the hole. Within seconds, the unmistakable sound of close-quarter combat echoed into the foetid air.
‘We’ve breached the inner wall of Rysgah City, men. You know your orders: for the 158th and for the Emperor!’ Fourth Platoon’s captain took the lead within seconds of landing, his veteran personal guard shedding their harnesses and readying weapons as they cut a path through the milling soldiers. Zachariah and his squad fell in behind the surviving Guardsmen who had made it through the Hydra assault, assigned as their support for this mission. Zachariah replaced his helmet and buckled up, and before putting on his glove took a swig of water in an attempt to wash away the stench of the planet. It didn’t work.
The Elysians bunched up as they reached the mouth of the entrance in a swarm of dark-green camouflaged bodies, and Adullam looked back to Zachariah with a frown, more cracks than ever thrown into stark relief on his beaten face from the sunrise creeping steadily into the sky behind them. The heat was already stifling inside the poorly lit tunnel; the engineers had done a spectacular job in a short period of time, but it was too narrow and too low for troops to mount a full-on assault. This kind of bottleneck could only mean huge casualties on entering the killzone; which in itself was bad enough, but stepping over the bodies of fellow drop-troops could be too much for rookies and even for veterans never got any easier to face.
‘Weapons ready, squad. This is going to be unpleasant.’
Armed and armoured bodies pressed against each other, all eager to get to the fight. A soft glow of light could be seen in the distance, hazy shadows dancing and crossing in a blur of activity across its radius. Three loud explosions shook the tunnel and it was all Zachariah could do to keep his footing on the smooth, wet rock. Small-arms fire increased significantly after the final boom; screaming and shouting echoed from the walls, but something else could be heard too, a ghostly, amplified voice that drifted in and out of audibility.
‘I am the voice of Rysgah, I am the mouth of Chaos. Do not fight us. Join us. Together we can embrace the darkness…’
The voice rasped on Zachariah’s nerves and he shook his head to clear it, his mouth twisting. Join them? Had the hundreds of thousands of Rysgahan civilians had any real option in the face of their military’s treachery? The rebels had already left entire cities full of bodies in their retreat to the sanctuary of Rysgah City. Zachariah had seen many disturbing things in briefings before, but the sight of innocents not even accorded the decency of a burial or pyre but left to rot in the stinking, corrosive air of this vile planet filled him with a deep but, for him at least, still controllable fury.
‘How do you want to play it, sarge?’ Melnis had taken the lead but was barely able to bring his weapon to bear, such was the crush from the rest of Fourth Platoon before him. His voice had an edge of frustration, something Zachariah knew Melnis continually struggled with. Given the option, he would hop into the largest, most destructive vehicle available and shoot, ram and generally smash his way into and through a combat zone, but in such a confined space, Melnis felt claustrophobic and vulnerable. The best way to deal with him was to be straight and simple.
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nbsp; ‘Two threes. Sojack, Coarto, fill your tubes and flank Melnis. Watch your feet on exit as there’ll be bodies all over the place. Fire at anything that moves. Adullam and Beor are with me. Wait for the ranks in front to get clear then move out.’ Turning to the support squad behind him, he told them to await further instruction following their exit. No point in pushing them out first to get uselessly killed, as they’d certainly need as many men as possible when they reached their objective.
Zachariah could hear all five of his men shuffling into position. They were ready.
A deafening volley of fire from the mouth of the tunnel created a gap for Zachariah’s squad to occupy, and they got their first real look at the interior of Rysgah City, much of it in deep morning shadow from the high rim of the extinct volcano’s walls. The geographical conditions had dictated where the tunnel could be dug in such a short time and it was hardly the most advantageous tactical position, opening out onto a line of crumbling black and grey stone buildings thirty metres across from the outer circumference wall.
Several heavy weapons nests were located on the buildings’ parapets and roofs, but many of them were little more than smouldering ruins, having attracted the fire of Third Platoon which currently busied itself with the hastily formed barricades to the left and right of their position. Fire still came from positions built into the towering, striated volcanic interior walls above and behind them, but the continual curve of the crater around the outside of the city and its buildings offered some protection for the moment. As soon as a few upper storeys disappeared, though, they would be entirely exposed from just about every angle.
Honour Imperialis - Braden Campbell & Aaron Dembski-Bowden & Chris Dows & Steve Lyons & Rob Sanders Page 97
