by C Z Dunn
‘My lasrifle.’
Allix laughed. ‘You don’t get one. You’re staying here.’
‘I have no desire to starve to death behind these walls. I am going with you.’
The rest of the squad stopped their preparations, all attention on Allix and Marita, face-to-face in the centre of the storage room.
‘And after what we’ve been through to keep you and that thing in your belly safe, I have no desire to put you in the firing line,’ Allix said, turning away from Marita and fishing a lho-stick from Gaspar’s tunic pocket. ‘Anybody got a light?’
Before any of the Vostroyans could react, Marita snatched the lasrifle from Dmitri and raised it to her shoulder, taking aim at Allix.
‘What the hell are you doing, girl?’ Grigori yelled.
Kas reached out to knock the weapon from her hands. Marita squeezed the firing stud the instant before he made contact, the superheated energy beam missing Allix’s face by inches and hitting the smooth wall, a patch of white stonework turning black upon impact.
Everyone was silent for a moment, then, fingers shaking, Allix removed the lho-stick from between a pair of dry lips. It was lit.
‘How in the Emperor’s name did you learn to shoot like that, girl?’ Gaspar asked.
‘My father was ex-Astra Militarum. My lover was a captain in the Guard, and I grew up on a world preoccupied with preparing for war. You should be more surprised if I couldn’t shoot like that.’
‘Allix?’ Dmitri said.
Allix took a drag on the lho-stick.
‘Kas. Give her your rifle,’ Allix said, filling the cramped storeroom with sweet scented smoke. The big Vostroyan carefully put down his heavy bolter and passed Marita the lasrifle slung at his back.
‘When we talked about sacrifice, this wasn’t what I had in mind,’ Allix said.
‘I know what I’m doing,’ Marita said, defiantly.
‘For your sake, I hope you do.’ Allix dropped the lho-stick to the floor and stubbed it out underfoot. ‘Come on, we’ve got a war to win.’
The Vostroyans walked out in single file until only Marita and Dmitri were left. He stopped the Honorian girl at the threshold.
‘Either taking command of the squad has had a mellowing effect or the lieutenant must like you,’ Dmitri said.
‘What makes you think that?’
‘Because the last person to even point a lasrifle at Allix, let alone fire it, still cannot eat solids.’
The last rays of the weak winter sun faded in the Honorian sky as Balthasar and his strike team emerged from the door set into the side of the inner citadel. Serpicus led the way, his augmetic eyes giving him an advantage over his brothers’ bio-enhanced optics in the low light.
‘Contact! Contact!’ he called over the vox, opening up with his bolter as ten Dark Angels, accompanied by Diezen and the last of his skitarii, spilled out onto the street, cutting down scores of surprised orks before any of them could return fire. When their response came, Turmiel threw up a psychic shield, the deadly hail of fire melting harmlessly against the raw stuff of the warp, while those sheltered by it used the respite to scan their surroundings for any sign of the warboss.
Since they had commenced their mission, this was the fourth time the strike team had ventured out onto the streets of Honoria, moving around behind the safety of the citadel’s walls before launching rapid assaults, then retreating. Not only were they able to quickly scout sections of the city but also sow discord among the ranks of the orks, spooking and unsettling them in advance of the main assault. It had not been without cost, though: Brothers Nephiel and Delphaeron, formerly of Second and Seventh Squads respectively, both slain in the opening sorties.
The rate of ork fire slackened as their weapons began to run dry, and Turmiel dropped the shield allowing newly reloaded bolters to once again make short work of the greenskins as they covered the Dark Angels’ retreat back into the citadel. They were almost all back through when the last of the skitarii out in the open took a shot to the leg, which felled it in a shower of sparks. As it tried to get up, one of the orks leapt towards it, cleaver held aloft ready to split the man-machine in two. Its flight was arrested mid-air, Serpicus’ servo-arm grabbing it around the throat, snapping its neck and throwing it into the crowd of onrushing xenos as he picked the skitarii up and carried it to safety. The door slammed shut behind them, the muffled cries of the frustrated orks barely audible through the thick stone.
‘It would appear your hunch was right, Dark Angel,’ Diezen said, setting to work on repairing the damaged skitarii’s leg.
‘You saw it?’ Balthasar replied. ‘The ork general?’
Diezen nodded, engrossed in his work. ‘Just as you suspected, he has taken up position atop the wall so that he can survey his newly conquered prize. Three point seven five two kilometres from our position, over in the next sector.’
‘Can you confirm that, Serpicus?’ Balthasar asked. Diezen made a strange mechanical noise, which the first sergeant interpreted as indignation.
‘Not with a hundred per cent confidence. I saw something in that location – a large ork, certainly – but it may have been one of the warboss’ lieutenants.’ Serpicus looked towards the ground, as if he were ashamed of what he was about to say next. ‘The arch magos’ eyes are superior to mine, though.’
Diezen emitted another sound, this one unmistakably smug.
‘Good enough for me,’ Balthasar said. ‘And the perfect place for it too.’
‘Perfect?’ Diezen scoffed, irked enough to divert his attention from the skitarii’s leg. ‘It’s one of the most easily defensible positions in the city. The ramparts prevent us from targeting it from the ground, there are hundreds of thousands of orks between us and the steps up to reach him, and that’s before you even take into account the greenskins guarding him on the walls.’
‘I am aware of that, arch magos,’ Balthasar said, setting off towards their target. ‘But it means that when I do kill it, the entire ork army will bear witness.’
At the designated time, the doors to the inner citadel were thrown open and with a column of hitherto underemployed tanks and personnel carriers at their spearhead, the combined forces of Honoria, Mordia and Vostroya took the battle back out onto the streets of Aurelianum.
The big guns of the Imperial armour obliterated all in their path, stray shells and heavy weapons fire smashing into the outer walls of the city and raining deadly debris down onto any orks unfortunate enough to be caught beneath it. Those that survived the opening barrage were crushed beneath tracks or broken open by the impact of armoured plate hitting greenskin flesh at speed. In their immediate wake came the Dark Angels, clambering atop the defensive perimeter of Imperial Guard vehicles and picking off orks one by one.
Seeing the carnage wrought below, orks on top of the outer walls rushed to join the fray and raced for the stone stairs that led to the ground. Forewarned of such a development in their mission briefing, several of the tank commanders angled their guns upwards, blasting the steps from beneath the feet of the enemy and preventing egress for further reinforcements. Small-arms fire continued to rain down from the ramparts, but engaging orks at range was nowhere near as deadly a proposition as facing them in close combat.
Tens of thousands of Guardsmen streamed into the space cleared by the vehicles, directing their fire towards the top of the wall, thinning out the covering fire until they were in range of the greenskins filing between the gaps in the Imperial armoured line. Those few that did make it through found themselves trapped in a kill-zone, the fire from their ilk above as lethal as the Guardsmen’s weapons.
With the space in front of the inner citadel doors cleared of orks as far as the outer walls, the tanks turned and began to widen the Imperial zone of control, their progress slowing due to the volume of dead orks beneath their tracks. Their plan was working but the toll was great; a
lmost as many Guardsmen’s corpses littered the plaza in front of the inner citadel as orks.
The battle for Aurelianum had been raging for almost a quarter of an hour by the time Allix, Marita and the others made it through the doors, and there was still over half of the Imperial forces yet to make it out onto the streets. Although the sun had dropped below the horizon and the night was moonless, the city was lit like daytime, the intensity of battle generating its own illumination.
‘Stay close!’ Allix called out, turning and leading the squad towards the left flank. Their briefing had been a simple one. The Mordian forces were to advance to the right, the Vostroyans to the left, while the Honorian troops were to hold the plaza. As soon as the tanks reached the boundaries of the square, they were to block all arterial roads heading towards the inner citadel while the infantry continued the battle in the narrow streets. It was a bold plan but one that, up until now, was working.
The tortuous progress of the wall of armour and the sheer number of Imperial personnel crammed into the confines of the plaza ensured their advance was perilously slow. One advantage conferred by this was it made placing their shots an easier task; the disadvantage was that they were easy prey even for marksmen as lousy as the greenskins.
Marita’s aim was not quite as true as it had been back in the inner citadel but, considering she was not combat trained, it was impressive nonetheless. Allix had seen the girl pick off at least five orks from the wall and kill several more that had clambered on top of the tanks. Allix wondered why the Honorian had been wasted as a translator when she could have easily risen through the ranks as a sniper, then, remembering that she was the daughter of an Imperial governor, wondered no more.
Foot after hard-won foot went by, Vostroyans dropping in their droves. For one horrible moment, Allix thought that Dmitri had been shot in the head, the albino stumbling, blood soaking one side of his face, but it was the man in front of him who had been killed. Allix reached out an arm to prevent the albino from falling altogether and being trampled.
The sound of the tank guns took on a different quality, the echo and reverb suggesting they were being fired in an even more enclosed space, and Allix realised that the armour had reached the junctions of the streets and were blockading them.
Now came the really dangerous part.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Balthasar and the strike team crouched in the lee of the weapons turret, jump packs idling at their backs. His helmet destroyed in the opening battle with the orks, the first sergeant was forced to consult the tiny chron display mag-locked to his wrist as it counted down the seconds to the Astra Militarum counter-attack. With less than ten seconds to go, he signalled to the other Dark Angels to take up their ready positions.
At the precise moment the timer reached zero, the city erupted in violent noise, tank fire swiftly joined by the sound of thousands of ork guns. On top of the outer wall, greenskins rushed to reinforce the occupying force down below in response to orders snarled at them by the warboss. As Balthasar had anticipated, only a few hundred of the xenos remained to guard their general. The odds had just swung slightly towards the Dark Angels.
‘Now!’ Balthasar ordered, the roar of his own jump pack joining the chorus of battle. The strike team rose high into the air, spraying the orks on the outer wall with indiscriminate bolter fire, returned tenfold by those quickest to react. The Dark Angels adeptly manoeuvred through the air, continuing their own barrage as they avoided the orks’ fusillade. As they reached the parabola of their arc, each of them drew their melee weapons, continuing to fire as they revved up chainswords or activated power weapons. Increasing thrust, they dived headlong towards the rapidly thinning enemy ranks.
As they landed, the Dark Angels set about bifurcating any greenskin within reach, the ramparts quickly becoming a charnel house; it was the killing by rote of an enemy unable to muster any effective response. Seeing that their leader’s life was under threat, several of the orks rushing down to the plaza turned around and started back up the steps, only to find their advance halted by a tank shell ripping the steps away from beneath their feet.
A roar sounded from further along the wall, loud and vicious enough to give each of the Space Marines pause, if only for the briefest of moments. In the wake of the battle-cry came the warboss, smashing his troops out of the way with the looted power fist crudely attached to his right arm.
‘Keep the rest of them back,’ Balthasar ordered, raising his chainsword and striding to meet his foe. ‘This one’s mine.’
Ladbon had only been dead a few hours and, although this was the squad’s first taste of combat without him, Allix was starting to believe that perhaps he hadn’t been their lucky charm after all. They had all made it unscathed through the plaza where tens of thousands of their compatriots lay dead or dying, so maybe it had been one of the others all along. Kas? He never seemed to lose much in the dice and card games that went on after lights out, Mute neither. The brothers? The unluckiest thing to ever happen to them was that both of them had to enlist through their own stubbornness. Dmitri? He had never taken anything more than a flesh wound.
Allix’s opinion quickly changed when they reached the blockade.
Three Leman Russ tanks were jammed tight together at the mouth of the street, their front-facing weapons running hot thinning out the orks futilely attempting to charge their position. A Dark Angel crouched on top of the turret of one of the tanks, bolter raised to his shoulder picking off key targets among the massed greenskins. Around him, every inch of hull was covered by Vostroyans using the elevated position to lend their own fire to the cause. As they fell, other Guardsmen clambered aboard to take their place.
Eventually, the tank guns fell silent and the Vostroyans jumped down from the hulls, scrambling over the morass of dead orks underfoot, finally able to enter the street without fear of being shot by their own side. Hatches popped open and the Leman Russ crews joined their infantry counterparts, wrenches and hammers used as makeshift weapons by those without sidearms.
Back in the plaza, the awaiting Vostroyans who had been nothing more than stationary targets for the orks above, finally began to file forwards. The squad had become separated but Allix had eyes on all of them, Marita too. Gaspar was the first to reach the tanks. He was also the first to die.
Crouching low to make himself a small target, Gaspar was edging around the side of a dormant turret when a high-calibre round hit him clean in the midriff, throwing him backwards in a shower of blood. Fighting their way through the crowd, Allix and Grigori were by his side in seconds.
‘You’re going to be all right, brother,’ Grigori said, calmer than he had any right to be given the situation. ‘I will get you to the medicae. They’ll patch you up good as new.’
‘Too late for that,’ Gaspar rasped, his blond moustache growing redder with every word he uttered. ‘Stay safe, big brother.’ Gaspar managed to raise one last smile before he closed his eyes forever.
‘Come on,’ Allix said, grabbing Grigori under the arm. ‘Don’t let his death be in vain.’
The pair of them barged their way through the mass of Guardsmen to where Kas was helping Marita scramble over the hull of one of the Leman Russ tanks. Mute and Dmitri were already on the other side laying down covering fire for the troops advancing into the street.
‘Gaspar?’ Kas asked as he held out his massive hand to help Grigori climb up. The smaller Vostroyan said nothing, simply shook his head.
In spite of the xenos’ vastly superior numbers, the close confines of the street proved to be a great leveller, a huge number of orks armed only with clubs and blades eliminated before they could get close enough to the Guardsmen to use them, those with ranged weapons targeted by the Space Marines and Vostroyans still perched on the tanks. The price in blood was expensive but it was starting to pay off. Yard by grisly yard the forces of the Imperium began to take back the city.
&nbs
p; The first indication that the tide of battle was turning against them was when Allix’s tunic became covered in the Space Marine’s grey matter.
One moment he was directing the Astra Militarum fire, the next he was slumped over the long barrel of the tank’s gun, half his helmet and head missing. In the streets, scores of Vostroyans similarly fell to unseen assailants.
‘Up above!’ Allix yelled, pointing to the buildings flanking the streets. ‘They’re firing from the windows.’
In unison, thousands of lasrifles angled upwards, unleashing their fury, but to no effect. The orks were firing from the very highest floor of the buildings, the angle alone providing ample cover from street level fire. The Vostroyans were dying in their droves, powerless to stop the onslaught.
‘Follow me,’ Allix called, jumping down from the tank. The rest of the squad followed suit and, along with Marita, followed the lieutenant over to the side of the street, where they took shelter in a doorway.
‘Can you get them open?’ Allix asked Kas, motioning to the set of double doors behind them. A thick chain was bound around the handles, secured with a chunky combination lock.
‘Stand back,’ the big man said. The others obliged, hugging the wall for cover. Kas raised the heavy bolter and squeezed off a single round, not only destroying the lock and chain but a sizeable portion of the metal doors too.
‘Careful,’ Allix said as she waved the rest of them in. ‘They’re probably expecting us.’
Balthasar dodged the first swing of the power fist, angling his torso away from the blow. He raised his bolter, unable to miss at such close range, but before he could get the shot away, the ork’s double-headed axe came around in an uppercut motion, forcing him to lose balance to avoid it and with it the killshot.
The power fist came around again, this time batting the bolter from Balthasar’s hand and over the ramparts. The Dark Angel countered with a swipe of his chainsword, but the warboss was alert to it, the axe coming up to meet it in a shower of sparks. The two weapons locked, Space Marine and ork warboss engaged in a test of raw strength. There could only be one winner, and Balthasar knew it.
