by Dan Abnett
‘My lord.’
Diaz turned. Bleumel and Thijs Reus were approaching his position on foot. He was glad of the sight of them, the two battle-brothers who had joined his ragged party at Traxis Arch during his trek to the port, and had fought at his side against the feral World Eater. He struck his siege shield gently against each of theirs in a terse greeting. Bleumel still had the raw metal gouge across the cheek and bridge of his visor, where the World Eater’s chainaxe had kissed it.
‘What do you bring me?’ Diaz asked.
‘Repellers,’ Thijs Reus replied. A platoon of Excertus heavies, Gehenned Brigade storm troopers in bulky carapace armour, were trailing him up the bridge approach. Bleumel had twenty hoplites of the Solar Auxilia. They were lined up behind the barricade, hefty and anonymous in their void armour. Big soldiers, by human standards.
‘We’ll need them,’ said Diaz. This shelling won’t sustain. The enemy wants the bridge intact.’
‘We can deny that desire quickly, lord,’ said Bleumel.
Diaz. knew what Bleumel meant. It was what he’d do.
‘Standing instruction from the zone commander,’ he replied. The Pons Solar remains intact.’
‘That’s a contingency pending relief forces,’ said Thijs Reus. ‘The situation’s changed.’
‘Agreed,’ said Diaz. ‘But the instructions have not. I’ve voxed for clarification. I have not received approval to take the bridge down.’
‘It has to be done anyway,’ said Bleumel.
‘This isn’t a strategy meeting,’ Diaz said.
Bleumel nodded curtly.
‘Prepare for ground repulse,’ said Diaz. ‘We’ll hold the brunt of it, armour in support, and hold until instructions change, or reinforcement arrives.’
They clashed shields again.
‘To your glory,’ he told them.
‘Always,’ they replied.
Thijs Reus and Bleumel moved back to instruct their heavies. The Excertus tanks were beginning to move up the bridge approach behind the barricade.
Diaz drew his longsword, and moved through the ranks of men in the trenches and bulwarks of the southside bank. Most were firing: selective shots from individual lasmen, and decent cover fire from the heavier support weapons. Diaz passed among them, making himself visible, his presence known. He knew the rallying effect the sight of Space Marines could have on rattled Army elements, especially novice Auxilia conscripts, who had already been through the flame several times.
‘You! That team! Arc your fire to the left. You four, we need faster resupply of munitions! Spread out, get into the communication trenches, and impress upon the load-captains how urgently we need the flow to be maintained! Be firm, my authority! Tell any shirkers I’ll treat them as enemy sympathisers.’
Men nodded. Men saluted. Men ran. Within four minutes of taking his place in the Bankside emplacements, Diaz could see a palpable improvement in the defensive line, the holding pattern and the fire-rate.
Not Legiones Astartes. Not Imperial Fists. But brave, mortal men, well trained, obedient, willing to listen.
And with everything to lose.
They would make a fight of this. He would make a fight of it. With luck, and will, they could hold the bridge until the backup armour came in.
No word had come from zone command. Diaz suspected that ranged vox was being jammed or scrambled. Niborran was no fool. Diaz admired him immensely. A true warrior, a great martial mind. He would have instructed on the basis of Diaz’s assessment if he had been able to.
An enemy shell struck close, annihilating one of the proud stone lions that guarded the bridge-ends. Nothing was left on the plinth when the smoke billowed away, except for the stumps of its paws.
Grit rained down on them. Diaz waited, hearing the whimpering moans of the injured. Six seconds, ten. Twenty.
The shelling had ceased. A ground assault was imminent, and there was only one way it could come.
He leapt from the emplacement onto the ramp of the bridge. Stray, loose enemy shots spat past him. He took his sword, and carved a line in the rockcrete between the lion plinths, thirty metres short of the rockcrete barricade.
‘Mark this!’ he yelled to his men. ‘This far, and no further! We stop them here!’
He was answered by a rousing cheer.
Diaz squared up, and looked along the empty length of the bridge.
The enhanced optics of his visor showed him things his human forces could not yet see. Heat tracks and motion traces in the smoke.
The enemy had appeared.
* * *
‘The hell are you doing, boy?’ Piers yelled.
‘I could ask the same of you,’ replied Hari.
‘What?’
‘I said, I could ask the same of you, spreading your fables around the-‘
‘Shitsakes, boy! Get your head down!’
The grenadier pulled him into cover. They were in a trench working fifty metres behind the bridge’s barricade line. A train of Carnodon and Medusa tanks was grumbling past, belching exhaust, threading single file along the causeway towards the head of the bridge. The shelling seemed to have eased, but las-fire continued to chop and crack overhead.
‘The front line’s no place for you,’ Piers growled. He was loading grenades into Old Bess. Around them, troops from about nine different regiments, every one of them filthy, were prepping weapons.
‘It wasn’t the front line until just now,’ said Hari.
‘Shut your smart mouth,’ Piers snapped.
‘It wasn’t. I was interviewing men from the work crews up at the emplacement,’ said Hari. ‘Then this began.’
‘Well, here’s what’s going to happen,’ said Piers. He slammed home the List grenade, and turned to look at Hari. ‘You’re going to follow this trench back to the communication line, then get your arse out of here. Just run. East. Towards the Gard. Don’t stop. Don’t look back.’ He held up his right hand, and his index and middle fingers made scurrying motions like little legs.
‘Thanks, I’m fine,’ said Hari. ‘The port is a target, I’m in the port, I’m not safe anywhere.’
‘Don’t give me lip,’ said Piers. ‘We’ve got about ten minutes before this place turns to a full bucket of shit, so do as I tell you.’
‘I hear you’ve been telling stories about yourself,’ said Hari.
‘What? Oh, piss off. Soldiers talk.’
‘You can talk for a whole regiment. I’ve heard it all over the place already today. You, the mythical soldier, standing alone, but for the grace of the Emperor-‘
‘And how is that not what happened?’
Hari shrugged. ‘I… I mean, it’s… it’s a glossy version. All noble and heroic. It didn’t feel very noble when we were in it.’
‘You’re a daft little shit, Harr,’ said Piers. He spat out some dust. ‘I never said it was me. I never said, “I did this”. I said it was some guardsman called Piers. It’s called morale, you little git. It boosts the spirits. I told you all this.’
‘You told me soldiers lie.’
Piers grimaced at him. ‘That’s the truth. And I tell you what, boy, she came for me, didn’t she? She came and saved me, didn’t she?’
‘Mythrus?’
‘Yes, you little turd.’
‘I don’t know what that was. I know it wasn’t a miracle,’ said Hari.
Tell my arse that. And yours. And there were daemons too, remember? You saw them with your own damn eyes!’
‘I don’t know what they were either. Enemy bio-weapons. Certainly not proof of divine agency-‘
‘Oh, shut up!’
Olly Piers simmered for a moment, then straightened his shako, and glared at him.
‘Look around. Look at the shit around you, boy. This is what the very edge looks like. The very brink. This is what it looks like when you’re holding on so desperately there’s no skin left on your fingerbones. This is when it matters most. This i
s when it makes the difference between living and dying. You take whatever you can to blaze up your spirits. Anything. A truth, a lie, it doesn’t matter. You use whatever you can to keep you going, and you share it with whoever’s with you. Whatever you’ve got, you understand? Whatever keeps you going one more step. That’s how you live. That’s how you win. That’s how you survive, and how your friends and your comrades survive with you, so you can all tell glory tales afterwards, and make even more bullshit up to get you through shitstorms to come.’
‘Piers, that’s a really cynical way of-‘
‘Oh, piss yourself off a cliff, you precious little high-minded historian shit-streak, and take your pious little notion of what truth and history means with you! It’s your pissing history books that prove my case! The power of myths and lies and frigging stories have got us through thirty frigging thousand years of shit, so I’m gonna go out on a limb and suggest it’s a pretty effective bloody formula!
‘Besides,’ he added, slumping back against the trench wall, his voice dropping, ‘it frigging well was Mythrus. And I tell you what’s more. That file you’ve got, that Lectitio thing-‘
‘Which you’ve been telling everyone about-‘
‘Exactly. Because you should be. You should be going from squad to squad, spreading that frigging word. Sharing it. There’s not a man or a woman here who wouldn’t be a better soldier for hearing it.’
He slithered forward, keeping his head below the trench lip as a volley of shots went over. He grabbed Hari by the shoulder roughly, turned him around, and pointed along the trench.
‘What’s that, eh?’
Hari looked. Twenty metres away, a squad of Auxilia were manhandling a battle banner upright. The Emperor Ascendant, in a sunburst.
‘A banner,’ said Hari.
‘And look, boy, how it takes four… no, five, look… men to get it upright and displayed. That’s five soldiers who could be firing rifles at enemy targets. But the idea matters more. It rallies us. It reminds us why we’re here. It could be anything. It could be a picture of a giant rabbit. It could be a picture of my hairy frigging arse. Doesn’t matter. It reminds us, plain and simple, that there’s a point to what we’re doing, and a reason to keep doing it. Without it, we’re just a bunch of frigging idiots shitting ourselves in a ditch. Now think on that, and get your sodding arse out of here.’
He paused. Along the trench, men were shouting. Piers risked a peak over the trench top.
‘Oh balls,’ he whispered.
TWO
* * *
Eaters
Concerning the dead
Another thunder of hooves
There are World Eaters on the Pons Solar. World Eaters and witch-dogs.
I move towards the crisis as fast as I am able. I run along the barrier wall from Tower Six towards the Pons Solar stretch. I pass gun crews and infantry squads who do not notice me. They are standing at the ramparts, watching the expanding plume of smoke darkening the sky above the bridgehead a kilometre away. They shiver, despite themselves, as I pass by. They think it is from fear at the sight of approaching doom, but it is only partly that. The rest is the fleeting touch of my presence.
I transmit to Tsutomu in orskode as I run. He is in the area called Western Freight. 1 tell him to come. He does not reply. Communications are broken and intermittent. I am receiving only shreds of data, scabbed by heavy interference. Several streams, from Lord Castellan Camba Diaz and other commanders on station in the vicinity of the bridge. They are patchy and incomplete. But they tell me enough. They tell me I need to be running faster.
I focus on Lord Castellan Diaz’s signal. There is virtually no audio, and the metadata is mangled, but I get flashes of pict-feed from his visor. White, hulking shapes emerging through smoke, bearing down, galloping like wild animals across the open bridge towards me.
Towards him.
Camba Diaz is a fine warrior. One of the finest. No mere legionary is made a lord castellan. To achieve that role, a warrior must possess more than gene-bred advantage. Lord Diaz has an exceptionally sharp mind, a genius for war that echoes that of his genesire, Rogal. His role in the defensive actions of the Solar War was significant and invaluable. He has a surprising ferocity, contained in solemnity, which I find appealing.
We are lucky he is present. Blessed or lucky. 1 don’t know if there is a difference between those two things, or if they are just different words for the same effect. He can hold the line, even with the meagre and exhausted forces available to him. He can hold the line for five minutes at least.
Yet, I see what he is facing. I glimpse them via the tattered feed. I know their names. Most of them. I have made a study of the enemy. The data is available to us, for we knew them when they were friends. My cogitator processes the blurry scraps of his feed, freezing and highlighting partial captures of faces, visors, plate details, and comparing them to my combat files. Matches are framed, enhanced, and flashed onto my retina with appended identity markers.
Ekelot of the Devourers. Khadag Yde of VII Rampager. Herhak of the Caedere. Skalder. Centurion Bri Boret. Centurion Huk Manoux. Barbis Red Butcher. Menkelen Burning Gaze. Jurok of the Devourers. Uttara Khon of III Destroyers. Sahvakarus the Culler. Drukuun. Vorse. Malmanov of the Caedere. Muratus Attvus. Khat Khadda of II Triari. Resulka Red Tatter.
Khârn.
Broken images. Broken men. Most are barely recognisable. The Neverborn touch has transmuted the XII into things so wretched my heart breaks, things so terrible my blood freezes. Many of the partial captures cannot be matched with identities at all. Only snarling Sarum-pattern helms, and the intimidating curved mantles of the Caedere Remissum, identify these monsters as once-legionaries. Those, and the skeuomorphic traces of tally marks, warrior-brands, and painted tears.
For some, not even that.
This is the measure of our foe. To take a Legion already infamous for its berserk terror and its fury, and make those qualities deeper. Beyond inhuman. Beyond savage. Beyond the pale of any martial culture.
There are steps at Tower Nine. I take them four at a time. I am outside, in the light. I pass field gun batteries where sweating men are working to re-train their guns. I pass a picket of troops who do not notice me. I run.
I draw my sword.
* * *
The plasma fire of Thijs Reus’ hoplites did not seem to stop the charge. The range was short, the line of fire clear and the rate sustained. The Solar Auxilia were void veterans, equipped to fight m any environment, famed for their stubborn endurance. Their man-portable plasma guns and volkite rifles had been engineered lor boarding actions, designed to cut a kill-path into warships. Each beam lanced out with a shriek, lurid pink and as bright as neon. The air was already wretched with the choking stink of superheated plasma and leaking coolant.
But the charge did not falter. Across the top of his raised shield, Diaz watched in resignation. The combined firepower around him – heavy plasma weapons, volkite guns, the rotary cannons of the Gehenned, the Space Marines’ bolters – should have torn a regiment to shreds.
The charge did not falter.
The World Eaters were crossing the bridge en masse. They appeared through the backwashed smoke howling, augmented voices braying like wild cattle. Wild cattle in a slaughterhouse, Diaz thought, stampeding to die. There was the most exquisite streak of pain at the heart of every war cry, like a vein of pure agony running through the booming rage.
They were massive. They seemed, even to Diaz, bigger than legionaries. Like the feral traitor he and his brothers had killed in that water-choked thoroughfare, they were bounding and galloping, some propelling themselves on all fours like great apes. They were lumbering ogres in size and movement, but their speed was shocking. The wave of white armour spewed across the bridge like a horizontal avalanche.
Some still wore the high hom-crests and roaring Sarum-visors that distinguished the XII, but many had passed through the recognisable forms of legionar
ies, and had become hulking, hunchbacked monsters, bareheaded and insane. Eyes and brows had receded, jaws had extended and swelled, mouths had become the screaming maws of saltwater reptiles; of cave bears; of giant, carnivorous ocean fish. Blood ran from stretched lips. Foam and spittle flew from hook-teeth and exposed gums. Beaded strands of hair and cranial cables whipped and shivered behind their heads in writhing manes. They brandished chainblades, executioners’ axes, spiked mauls, maces, falx, cleavers.
Among them came other horrors. Baying Neverborn spawn that ran like hyenas, or tottered like biped goats and rams. Loping hybrids of man and aether. Scurrying vermin that dripped blood, and oozed warp light. Flocks of winged things followed the mass, flapping overhead or swooping across the gully beside the bridge. Some were half-feathered, half-flayed, the size of vultures, cawing like crows. Others were small, fluttering in clouds, with frayed moth wings or iridescent pinions that beat rapidly, and buzzed.
The hoplites kept firing. The Gehenned kept firing. Diaz kept firing. Bright pink beams seared into the onrushing mass. Rotary blasts mowed into armour and flesh. Bolter shells detonated. World Eaters burst, burned through and fell, crushed beneath the following tide. Goat-kin were torched. Swooping, bat-winged monstrosities caught fire and plunged into the gully like meteors.
But for everything that fell, split or seared or ignited or hollowed out by loyalist gunfire, there were more behind, trampling the dead underfoot, filling gaps, bearing on, heedless. Diaz saw a World Eater lose an arm, sliced clean off by a plasma beam. The arm tumbled away like debris. The World Eater kept coming, oblivious. A volkite shot tore away one horn and half the face of another. It did not stop.
The charge did not falter. The charge would not falter.
The berserk mass engulfed the defensive line at the head of the bridge.
The vast spans of the Pons Solar shuddered. In the final few seconds, Diaz clamped his emptied bolter to his thigh plate, and wrenched his longsword out of the ground where he had staked it. He screamed the war cry of his Legion, but it was drowned out by the howling and the mass collision.
