Stormcaller

by Chris Wraight

  Her Celestians ran alongside her, sweeping their weapons two-handed as they searched for targets. Callia could hear the clatter of boots as the Guard units worked to keep pace. They would already be looking for ways to bring heavy weapons teams down to tactical points to cover the onwards advance.

  Still no return fire. The Celestians tore down the main thoroughfare, hugging the shadow of the buildings on either side, their armour dark against dark and their robes fluttering about them like death-shrouds.

  ‘Where are they?’ voxed Callia’s subordinate Djinate, advancing hard on her right flank.

  ‘Watch the habs,’ replied Callia, running, angling her helm up to the broken rooftops. ‘It’s only a matter of–’

  The first stabs of light lanced out of the dark before she’d finished speaking. Callia didn’t break stride, weaving across a patch of shattered brickwork as the barrage of small-arms fire came in. Her Sisters did the same, scattering across the open ground, using what cover the battlefield gave them and losing no momentum.

  Callia let the targeting lines on her helm intersect, pinpointing a location ten metres up in the empty heart of a multi-storey hab-tower.

  She took aim, compensating for her own movement, and loosed two shots. Then she kept running, barely hearing the crack and subsequent blast of bolt-rounds obliterating the sniper-nest. By then, other Sisters had opened up on their own targets and the air filled with the resounding roar and crack of bolter discharge.

  ‘The flanks,’ warned Callia, spotting another sniper position and dispatching it with a single bolt-round. ‘They’ll be coming around.’

  The thoroughfare they ran down was broken up with the intersecting streets of the lower city, all overshadowed by the close-packed hab-blocks. Even as Callia spoke, enemy units broke from cover some twenty metres back from her position, streaking out of the dark and engaging the Guard units following in her wake. The enemy troops were wearing gas masks, and their bulbous eyes glowed softly in the dark. Grenades started to fly, detonating with puffs of toxic smoke.

  The Guard responded, and the staccato growl of a tripod-mounted autocannon opened up from back up the street. Whisper-snaps of las-fire followed, crackling into the bands of mutants emerging from the gloom.

  Callia pressed on, confident in the main Guard contingents to hold their own. Speed was the main thing – to secure the outer gates before the enemy could muster a full defence and drag them into street-to-street combat. Locator runes cycling across her helm-lens showed the positions of the other Battle Sister units – they were closing on the lower city edge, pushing rapidly, giving the enemy no time to form up before they reached the target defence points.

  Callia swung her bolter and squeezed off another round, watching as the shell shot into the maw of a shadowed intersection to her left. She heard the wet grunt of impact, followed by the rip of explosion, and a bloated mutant staggered out in front of her, stomach spilling, gas mask ripped from its neck.

  Still running, she launched a kick at its reeling face, breaking its neck before she’d landed. More mutants emerged in its wake, some with close-combat weapons, a few with projectile cannons.

  Callia charged into them, firing from the waist with one hand, lashing out with her blade with the other. She was far too fast for them – a few seconds of fury, and they lay at her feet, coughing up blood and phlegm.

  These were the outriders. The real enemy lay beyond the outer perimeter, holed up in their vast complex of tunnels, trenches and gun-towers. She knew they would be stirring now, roused by the sudden break from the inner gates, preparing their terror weapons again and priming the launchers. If the vanguard couldn’t make their objectives before the enemy responded, this sortie would be very short-lived.

  ‘Maintain pace,’ she ordered, kicking away the last choking mutant and breaking back into a sprint.

  It was good, thought Callia, to recover land they had given up after such heavy bloodshed. Her helm-display showed each assault column driving towards their objective, supported by Guard units that made good ground and seized strategic intersections. Some of the devotional buildings around them were half intact, showing the old emblems of the Wounded Heart amid the filth and desecration. This push might be little more than temporary, but it felt like a reclamation of sorts.

  Another autocannon opened up from behind them, sending a heavy rain of shells rattling into the night and cracking into the buildings ahead. The Guard were getting faster at bringing them into position, securing the path back up to Ighala and clearing the long transit routes of the enemy.

  Callia’s bolter clicked empty and she slammed a new magazine in, barely pausing. The air was now falling away to perfect dark, shrouded by the ever-roiling clouds of smoke piling up from enemy positions beyond the walls. The ground became slimy with old chem-weapon discharge, glistening with ophidian dullness under the muzzle-flares of the massed bolters and lasweapons.

  They tried to make a stand up ahead of her. Callia saw them massing across the width of the street, trying to haul drum-barrelled guns onto heaps of refuse and get some kind of fire-line established.

  The Celestians needed no orders – they assaulted it in unison, laying down a curtain of bolter-fire before picking up the pace and charging head-on. The surviving enemy troops managed to get a volley of return las-fire clear, but it barely slowed them. Callia charged up the earth slope of the bulwark, drew her blade, then leapt into the mass of bodies beyond. Her sword flashed out, jamming under the neck of a grasping mutant before slicking away and cutting deep into the outstretched arm of another.

  Then her Sisters were with her, whirling, cutting, blasting, crushing. Sororitas power armour didn’t quite have the juggernaut impact of full Adeptus Astartes plate, but it was still formidable, capable of seeing off all but the most determined impacts and hugely augmenting the physical movements of its wearer. The barricade was smashed apart, its defenders crushed and bludgeoned aside and trodden into the shattered earth beyond.

  Then the outer walls loomed, battered by past bombardments but partially intact. Callia located the target tower on her forward view – a squat rockcrete structure built up against the wall itself, just over two hundred metres north of the ruined outer gates.

  ‘Objective sighted,’ she voxed, firing all the while. ‘Follow me in.’

  The Celestians streaked across the last of the open ground, trading shots with the scattered resistance holed up in the buildings around them. More heavy weapons fire broke out from behind them, testament to the growing security of the Guard positions.

  Callia reached the tower entrance on ground level – a gaping hole where doors had once stood. Bodies, fresh with hot blood, slumped over the jagged edges of metal plates. Djinate slammed against the wall on the far side of the entrance hole, priming a frag grenade and hefting it one-handed.

  Callia nodded, and Djinate hurled the grenade into the dark. A second later and the interior of the tower filled with a boom of heat, light and screaming. Callia ducked inside, her helm-lens compensating for the swirl of smoke burning across her visual field. Disorientated mutants stumbled into her path, clutching at shrapnel wounds or gasping from severed chem-tubes, and she dispatched them one by one.

  ‘Get a Guard squad at the breach,’ she voxed, racing for the spiral stairway with Djinate close behind. ‘I want this one secured first.’

  She took the stairs two at a time, racing up around a tight spiral. The enemy defenders seemed to have clustered, foolishly, at the base of the tower, and she encountered no more living until reaching the summit. Half a dozen mutants tried to rush her then, tearing across the open-roofed platform at her as she emerged.

  Callia charged straight into them, blade in hand and already spiralling. She jabbed it up, impaling a porcine maul-carrier under the chin, then pulled it round, severing the neck of a three-eyed horror with flailing jowls. The edge flashed in the night, catching
the now-vivid glow from the piled-high toxin-clouds, and the savage beauty of it made her laugh out loud.

  By the time Djinate caught up, the tower summit was heaped with bodies and Callia stood alone at the epicentre, her breathing heavy, her blade slick with diseased gore.

  ‘Objective achieved,’ observed Djinate.

  Callia strode over to the parapet facing towards the lower city. Lines of tracer-fire scythed out from the fixed gun positions, cracking against the bulwarks where enemy warbands still hunkered down. Guard units were dragging heavy weapons down the cleared thoroughfare, and a long lascannon barrel was being hauled along on the back of a half-track, ready for lifting up to the tower top where it would be mounted.

  They were moving efficiently, going fast, taking care to clear out the remaining pockets of resistance. Other towers and bulwarks along the city’s perimeter were rocked with explosions prior to being seized, cleared and occupied.

  Callia turned around and walked over to the parapet’s outward-facing edge. The tower she’d taken ran up the inside curve of the outer wall, cresting the upper edge by a few metres and affording a clear view of the plains outside.

  Just a few dozen metres out, and the madness began. Hordes of glow-eyed mutants were advancing out of the night, roused by the clamour of combat from within the city. The front ranks looked as ramshackle as those the Sisters had already swept away, but behind them came more organised units – plate-armoured and carrying more lethal weaponry. The throttled growl of vehicle engines keying up rumbled across the plain, out of sight behind the shifting curtains of smog but not far away.

  Callia leaned against the parapet edge. More Sisters emerged from the stairwell and took up position on either side of her.

  The enemy encampment was vast. It was like a miniature city in itself – a huge, rambling collection of trenches, infantry detachments, tank squadrons and luminous, belching chemical works. Toxin-clouds blossomed above it all, blotting out the stars in swirling columns of virulence.

  It was like kicking an ant’s nest. Now the enemy was stirring, sending out its gathered strength. The defenders of Hjec Aleja had provoked it, forcing the assault early in order to buy the Wolves some breathing room, but set against the advance of such a huge, brooding mass of slaved warriors, the gamble now felt perilously fine.

  ‘So, we’ve done our part,’ Callia breathed, leaning against a rockcrete battlement and angling her bolter. ‘Now, Sons of Fenris, do yours.’

  Chapter Three

  He no longer remembered his name.

  For a while, after the sickness had first come, he’d remembered it. After that, when he’d torn his uniform to get at the sores and his skin had started to pucker, he’d still remembered it. During the long nights in Hjec Morva when everything seemed to be dissolving into a long, sweaty frenzy of contagion he’d repeated it to himself, over and over, together with his rank and his regiment, as if by mouthing the syllables he could stave off the horror that was already combining and multiplying within his body.

  Now, much later, he remembered doing that, but he no longer remembered why. His name was long gone, as was his old military grade, as was caring about either.

  He pushed at the pustules clustering across the back of his neck and smiled as they burst. Milky fluid leaked down his chest and gave off an interesting smell – like fungus, or rotten boot leather.

  Orders came to him in different ways now. Sometimes the Masters sought him out in person, lumbering through the trenches in their gloriously distended battleplate, speaking to him in a language he knew wasn’t Gothic but that somehow made sense. Other times his duties would just become clear to him, formulating in his mind as if crystallised from a dream.

  This was one of those times. He pulled himself out of what had been a shallow, dream-filled sleep and hoisted his autogun into position. His uniform – what remained of it – was crusted with dusty mud from the trench floor. His weapon-casing was already beginning to rust. Once, that would have appalled him. Now he just didn’t care and nor did it seem to have any effect on the operation of the gun.

  He adjusted his helm, biting down against the rebreather that pressed against the inside of his mouth, then climbed up, grabbing hold of the wooden ladder that ran up the inside wall of the trench and out to the world of fire beyond.

  Others came with him – his men, the ones who had followed him into damnation right from the start. Just like him, their movements were heavy, their reactions dulled by the mucus that seeped from their ears and nostrils. Some carried autoguns like him, others had resorted to meat-hooks and rusty spikes laced with the special nerve-toxins the Masters gave them.

  In his more lucid moments, he wondered why the Plaguefather had afflicted them in so many different ways. He wondered why, if the gods of decay desired his service, they hadn’t made him faster, more deadly, more skilful. To lace his body with such gurgling rottenness seemed like a strange choice. But then the Father’s ways were hardly likely to be transparent to him. All things considered, it wasn’t worth worrying about overmuch.

  He reached the lip of the trench wall and heaved himself over the top, and the full vista of war stretched out and away, glimpsed through bleary gas mask-lenses. The whole camp was moving. The charred desert ahead of him, thrown into perpetual twilight by the churning smog, crawled with a steadily growing carpet of advancing men. It was a strangely awesome sight – like the planet itself stirring to excise the last remnant of those who opposed the Father. He dimly felt his small role in that, and a swell of something like satisfaction grew in his rheumy chest.

  Far away, he saw the outer walls of the city. He saw bright flashes of weaponry igniting along the parapets, tiny and blurred in the distance. He saw the army of the Masters marching to respond. He saw thousands of warriors, all like him, picking themselves up, dragging themselves out of the earth, falling into loose assault formations. He saw the big tanks grind into motion, gouging up desiccated earth under their tracks. He saw artillery pieces crank into firing angles, and gun-crews working to deliver the payloads of chem-bombs and incendiary canisters.

  Then he was marching himself, shambling like the others over the broken, dusty ground. His men fell in around him, dozens of them, faces hidden behind their black rebreathers. They did not follow the infantry heading for the city. They had their own duty, up on the earthworks guarding the Masters and their glorious Machines. They would not be hurled up against the inferno of the wall assault. They would stay amid the gun-towers and trenches, forming the final line of defence that would keep the Machines guarded.

  They were needed, those Machines. They had been hauled across the pitiless sands by a hundred thousand blessed drone-slaves, their barrels anointed with pungent oils, their innards infected with the most virulent scrapcodes, their mechanisms augmented with the living sinews of sacrificial thralls, their kill-range extended through the occult rites of the Masters’ red-robed, half-metal servants.

  As he marched, dragging his newly bulging body up the incline towards the earthworks’ summit, he envisioned the blessed slaughter to come. The barrels would be winched onto scaffolds and the breeches would be filled with flesh-burners and stone-breakers. Then, finally, when the blood of the sacrificed boiled on the iron shells and the hooded ones had doused the fire-pits with fresh spoors, the thunder would begin.

  He reached his designated place in the defence lines, high on the earthworks, facing south, away from the desperate battles already breaking out across the city walls. The attention of the entire host was turned to the east, towards the fragile battlements, the slender lines of defence that dared to oppose the inevitable.

  He reached his assigned trench and dropped down beyond the leading parapet, landing on the firing step and turning to take up his fire position. All along the defensive bulwark his fellow warriors did the same, dropping heavily into the protective earth-bank and slotting autoguns and lasguns into targ
eting grooves.

  He looked out into the night, and wondered why he’d been stationed so far back from where the fighting would come. Defensive duties were surely no longer required.

  The first clue came with a low growl, running along the earth like a tremor. He stiffened, looking back and forth, seeing nothing.

  He pondered voxing a warning, but couldn’t quite remember how to use the comm-bead. His mind was sluggish, as if in a fever.

  Another growl, closer this time, emerging from the smog-filled night – everywhere, nowhere.

  From further down the trench, he saw las-beams flicker out soundlessly, followed by the clatter of projectile fire. He heard short, strangled cries, like animals having their necks wrenched.

  He stood back from his fire-point. To the north was the inner defence cordon guarding the blessed machines. The earthwork ran around it, manned by hundreds of gunners, each protected by hard-packed walls and backed up by gun-towers every hundred metres.

  As he peered into the gloom, some vestige of fear stirred in his sluggish soul. Marker lights were going out along the length of the trench, one by one. He saw a gun-tower open fire just a hundred metres away, spraying a curtain of explosive shells into the dark, before a dull explosion took that out, too.

  He couldn’t see what was doing it. He couldn’t see where the noises were coming from.

  More growls, closer now, snickering in the air, punctuated by savage-sounding cracks and crackles. The remaining hairs on his neck stood up stiffly, as if an old race-memory lurked at the base of his brain-stem, not quite driven into abeyance by the plague.

  He stood down from the firing step and advanced slowly along the trench floor. Others came with him, sharing his caution. For a moment longer, he saw nothing solid – just toxic dust swirls spilling into the trench shaft, spiralling away in the night, lit red from chem-fires.