Necropolis

by Dan Abnett

  Lord marshal? whispered his adjutant, Major Otte.

  We Croe began, his mind racing, frantic but empty. He was torn. He wanted to return to the Main Spine at once and cut to the root of this disaster, get the Shield back on. It was Sondar, he felt it in his blood. That bastard Salvador had finally gone over the edge.

  But the immediate fight was here at the hive wall, in the face of the massing foe. His men had seen his arrival and if he turned around now, just as he had arrived, it would destroy their morale.

  The silence that had followed the ghastly massed howl of the Zoicans outside, a silence that in truth could only have lasted a few seconds, was lost abruptly as the ear-splitting bombardment resumed. For leagues, the sky behind the towering shadow of the Curtain Wall that rose above him was lit yellow by the flare of colossal assault. Croe saw a section of turret to the west of the gate explode and collapse down into the Square of Marshals in a shower of sparks and rubble.

  He took the tower steps two at a time at the head of his retinue, blazing the sacred sword into life, raging out orders to both the men around him and those unseen on the wall-top via his microbead link.

  One of those orders, direct and succinct, coded in House Croe battle language, was for the ears of Izak, Croe's personal bodyguard. The big house warrior, clad in maroon body-armour, faltered at the foot of the tower steps and then turned back, curtly acknowledging his lord's command. He ran back across the square to the armoured staff-track that had brought Croe to Sondar Gate, and he steered it away at full throttle towards the Main Spine.

  Alarms and klaxons began to whoop and wail once again. In the refuges and the camps of the Commercia and the other open spaces of the hive, the multitude seethed in panic. They'd seen the Shield fail. They'd fought their way to the security of the hive and now that too was gone.

  Stampeding in places, two and a half million refugees began to surge north towards the river, the deluge of their bodies choking the streets. Their vast numbers were quickly swelled by inner hab citizens, worker families and low guilders, who had all, in a brief few seconds, seen their protection from Zoica disappear. In a matter of minutes, the hive was haemorrhaging people, rivers of panicking, screaming civilians, heading in hordes to a river they couldn't hope to cross.

  Lord Heymlik Chass looked up from his scriptorium and gazed out of the ogee window. The stylus dropped from his trembling fingers and made a blot of violet ink on the pages of his journal. He got up, his ornamental chair tumbling over onto its back, and he stumbled across to the window, pressing his hands against the lead glass.

  Oh, Salvador, he said, tears in his eyes, what have you done?

  His daughter burst into the room, still dressed in her nightgown, her terrified maids trying to wrap a velvet robe around her. Outside in the hall. House Chass lifeguards were shouting and running to and fro. Lord Chass turned and saw the look of jolted fear and bewilderment in his daughter's eyes.

  He took her in his arms.

  The alarms woke me, father. What

  Hush. You will be all right, Merity. He stroked her hair, holding her head tight to his chest.

  Handmaids?

  The women barely curtsied. They were terrified and half-dressed themselves.

  Take my daughter to Shelter aa/6. Do it now.

  The chamberlain is preparing the house shelter, lord, said Maid Wholt.

  Forget the house shelter! Escort her now to aa/6 in the sub-levels!

  A municipal bunker, lord? gasped Maid Francer.

  Are you both deaf and stupid? The sublevels! Now!

  The maids scurried around, pulling at Merity. She clung on to her father. She was crying so much she couldn't speak.

  Go, daughter of Chass. Go now. I will follow shortly. I beg you, go!

  The maids managed to drag the sobbing girl out of the chamber and away towards the Spine elevators.

  Rudrec! At Lord Chass' shout, the chief lifeguard appeared in the doorway. He was still buttoning on his ornate body-armour. His weapon was armed and unshrouded. He bowed.

  Lord Chass handed him a small, silk satchel. Go with my daughter. See she is brought safe to the municipal shelter. No other will do no other is deep enough. Take this for her: a few private family items. Make sure she gets them.

  Rudrec tucked the satchel inside the body of his flak-mail hauberk. It is my duty to escort you too, lord, l-

  You are a good man, Rudrec. You have served this house well. Serve it again by doing as I order.

  Rudrec paused, his eyes meeting his lord's directly for the first and last time in his life.

  Go!

  Alone now, the hall outside thundering with footsteps and voices, Chass put on his ceremonial robes, his bicorn hat, his shot-silk gloves. He was shaking, but most of that was rage. He put his ducal seal in his coat pocket, pushed the heavy code-signet ring onto his gloved finger, and slid a compact, single-shot bolt pistol with inlaid grips into his gown's inner sleeve. A handful of shells followed it.

  Chass strode out into the corridor, stopping three of his lifeguards short. They saluted uncertainly.

  Come with me, he told them.

  Less than five minutes after the Shield vanished, the first Zoican shells began to wound the inner hive. It was as if their artillery, their Earthshakers, their siege mortars, their missile positions had all been ranged ready, waiting.

  Wave after wave of shrieking missiles screamed in over the Curtain Wall and hit the central district. Concussive ripples of explosions blew out along block after block, closing arterial routes with rubble, setting fires that blazed through dozens of high-rise habitat structures. Thousands of habbers, either sheltering in their homes or fleeing through the streets, were obliterated or left crippled and helpless.

  Siege mortar shells wailed in across Sondar Gate and punctured the stone concourse of the Square of Marshals. Flagstone sections, whizzing like blades, were flung out, decapitating or mashing wall troopers from behind. The distinguished lines of statues edging the square were toppled by the blasts or disintegrated outright.

  Mass shelling pounded the manufactories alongside Croe Gate. Swathes of machine shops and warehousing caught fire, and the flames established a firm hold, licking west into the worker habs. Similar shelling, supported by ground-to-ground rockets, began to systematically hammer the habs and manufactories behind Hass West, and the impacts of their fall crept north into the elite sector. Guild holdings and house ordinary estates were flattened and torn apart.

  The shelling and the dreadful cutting beams searing Hass East scored a hole a hundred metres wide where the Curtain Wall and the Ontabi Gate had once stood, and as the beams redirected towards the inner habs and the upper stretches of the Curtain, the Zoican armoured column and massed infantry along the Vannick Highway pressed in through the breach. The Zoican land forces made their first entry into Vervunhive proper thirteen minutes after the Shield came down, though the insurgent forces encountered by Sergeant Varl were, by then, well inside the hive.

  Long-range shells some two thousand kilos apiece, launched from railcars drawn up on hasty, makeshift trackways out in the southern grasslands whistled and whooped as they dropped on the Commercia and the mercantile suburbs. Barter-houses blew out, their rich canopies igniting in sheets of flame as hot as the heart of a star. Shockwaves crumpled others and the massive shells dug vast craters in the rockcrete footing of the hive. Hundreds of thousands of refugees were still pressing to leave the commercial spaces. Most died in the firestorms or were instantly obliterated by the shelling. Some of the craters were five hundred metres across.

  Shelling and missile attacks began to hit the vast Main Spine itself. In hundreds of places, the adamantine skin of the city-peak ruptured and holed. Fires burned unchecked through nine or more levels. House Nompherenti, on Level 68, took a direct hit from a massive incendiary rocket and the entire noble lineage was immolated. They died frenzied, tortured deaths amid the furnace of tapestries, furniture and drapes in their exalted court. Lord Nomph
erenti himself, ablaze from head to foot, ran screaming for a hundred paces and toppled from the raised balcony of his banquet hall. His burning body, streaming a trail of fire like a comet, plunged fifteen hundred metres down onto the roofs of the central district.

  General Xance, with a tattered vanguard of seven hundred NorthCol troops, was pushing through the firestorm chaos west of Croe Gate when pinpoint shells began to rip along his straggle of trucks and Chimera troop carriers. Vehicle after vehicle exploded, showering the street with metal debris, ignited ammunition and plumes of gushing fuel. NorthCol troopers fled the convoy to either side, dying in further shell-strikes everywhere they turned. Xance's truck was overturned by a shell that struck the road alongside it. Blacked out for a few seconds, the general found himself lying twisted in a mangle of ruptured wreckage and the bloody remains of his command team. There was a fine, dark drizzle in the air which he realised was a vapour of blood droplets.

  He tried to move, but pain gutted him. A transverse-gear rod had disembowelled him. He was half-buried in splintered body parts.

  He moved aside a fragment of leg that lay across his chest, coughing blood. Then a limbless torso that still had the NorthCol insignia on its braids. Then a severed arm.

  He gazed at it. It was his own.

  Shells dropped all around, lighting the space with flashes so bright they burned out his optic nerves. They made no sound, not to him anyway. His eardrums had been punctured by the initial shell strike. Blind and deaf, he could only sense the carnage around by the quaking of the ground and the Shockwaves that buffeted at him.

  Xance was almost the last of his seven hundred-strong unit to die. He had bled to death, howling in rage, before yet another shell vaporised him.

  In House Command, Vice Marshal Anko had fallen silent, his voice robbed to hoarse whispers by the screaming orders he had been issuing. He slumped across the great chart table as the command staff hurried around, stunned and helpless.

  The chart table made no sense any more. Runes and sigils flicked on and off, unable to keep up with the progress of the assault, wavering as contradictory data pummelled back and forth through the straining codifiers. After a while, it repeated nothing but default setting repeats of house crests.

  Anko got up and backed away from the disingenuous table and its silence. He smoothed the front of his white dress uniform, adjusted the waist buckle under the girth of his belly and pulled out his autopistol.

  He shot the table eight times for disobedience, then changed clips and shot two of the aides who ran screaming from him. He tried to yell, but his voice was nothing but a feeble rasp.

  He ran to the ironwork rail and began to fire indiscriminately down into the lower deck, killing or wounding five more tactical officers and exploding a cogitator unit. VPHC Officer Langana and two servitors tried to wrestle him to the ground. Anko shot Langana through the left eye and emptied the rest of his third clip into the mouth of one of the servitors, blowing the upper part of its head away.

  Anko threw off the other servitor and got to his feet. He turned to face the great observation window, fumbling for another clip as the staff fled in panic all around.

  He saw the missile plainly, ft seemed to him he could even see the checkerboard markings around its nose-cone, though he knew that was impossible, given the speed at which it must have been travelling.

  Even the fluting of the exhaust ducts, the rivets in the seams.

  The missile entered House Command through the great window, slamming a blizzard of lead-glass inwards with its supersonic bow-wave before striking the rear wall and detonating.

  The storm of glass shards stripped Vice Marshal Anko's considerable flesh from his bones a millisecond before the blast destroyed House Command.

  A brace of Earthshaker shells struck the great Basilica of the Ecclesiarchy east of the Commercia.

  The two-thousand-year-old edifice which had stood firm through the Settlement Wars, the Colonial Uprising, the Piidestro/Gavunda power struggle and countless bouts of civil unrest and rioting shattered like glass. The roof was thrown outwards by the multiple blasts and millions of slate tiles showered the area for kilometres around, whizzing down like blades.

  Stone walls, two metres thick, were levelled in the deluge of fire, flying buttresses sundering and bursting apart. Precious relics almost as old as the Imperium itself were consumed along with the priesthood. The streets outside were awash with rivers of molten lead from the roof and the windows. Many devotees of the Imperial cult, citizens and clerical brethren alike, who had survived the initial impact hurled themselves into the building's pyre, their faith utterly destroyed.

  At Croe Gate, General Nash tried to reform his beleaguered units and direct them north to the Ontabi breach, even though fierce Zoican attacks battered the gate position.

  House Command was offline and there was no coordination of repulse. Nash reckoned correctly he had 1,500 Roane Deepers and 3,500 Vervun Primary troops. He had been waiting for support from the NorthCol and Xance, but he had a sick feeling it wasn't coming. The hammering of the shells was overwhelming.

  Nash had been in the infantry since he joined the Guard and he had seen the very worst dog-soldier work it had to offer. In those first few hours of the Great Assault, his command and leadership was unrivalled in Vervunhive. He set a condensing resistance around Croe Gate that shut the invaders out, and he countermarched two thirds of his forces north to Ontabi and the main breach, which was nothing short of overrun.

  Nash's Roane Deepers, never the most celebrated regiment of the Imperial Guard, proved their worth that night at the eastern extremities of Vervunhive's Curtain Wall. They met the Zoican infantry pouring into the hive with determined marksmanship and hand-to-hand brutality.

  The Deepers, despite their reputation for laziness and an easygoing attitude, stopped the inrush at Ontabi dead for two and a half hours. A thousand Roane supported by and inspiring the Vervun Primary residue took down almost 4,500 Zoican troops and nearly a hundred armour elements.

  Nash died in a work-hab ruin just before dawn, shot nineteen times as the Zoicans finally broke his last-ditch defence and swarmed into the hive. Falling back, the Roane and Vervun Primary survivors continued to defend, street by street, block by block, as the Zoican force rolled in on them.

  At Sondar Gate, Zoican stormtroops raised ladders and siege towers to overrun the wall. Marshal Croe had lost count of the ochre-armoured soldiers he had slain by the time a massive death machine shaped much like a vast praying mantis thundered forward out of the night and hooked its huge arms around the towers of the Sondar Gate, ripping them apart. The great mantis-limbs locked and bridging plates extended between them, forming a huge ramp that allowed the Zoican troops to finally overrun the battlements.

  Croe fell as the vast limbs destroyed the entire frontage of the gate battlement.

  He was still alive in the rubble outside the collapsed gateway when advancing Zoican troops passed in, bayoneting any living bodies they kicked.

  Marshal Croe died broken, covered in dust and unrecognisable with a Zoican bayonet through his heart.

  FOURTEEN

  THE IMPERIAL WAY OF DEATH

  True to the Throne and hard to kill!

  The battle-pledge of the Volpone Bluebloods

  Enough! Gaunt snarled. The gunfire which had been shaking the martial court died away fitfully. The air reeked of laser discharge, cartridge powder and blood. VPHC corpses littered the floor and the shattered wooden seating ranks. One or two Bluebloods lay amongst them.

  The half-dozen or so surviving VPHC officers, some wounded, had been forced into a corner, and Gilbear and his men, high on adrenaline, were about to execute them.

  Hold fire! Gaunt snapped, moving in front of Gilbear, who glowered with anger-bright eyes and refused to put up his smoking hellgun. Hold fire, I said! We came down to break up an illegal tribunal. Let's not make another wrong by taking the law into our own hands!

  You can dispense it! You're
a commissar! Gilbear growled and his men agreed loudly.

  When there's time not here. You men, find shackles. Cuff these bastards and lock them in the cells.

  Do as he says, Gilbear, Sturm said, approaching and holstering his pistol. The Blueblood troopers began to herd the prisoners roughly out of the room.

  Gaunt looked around the chamber. Pater sat against the far wall, with Bwelt fanning his pallid face with a scribe-slate. Daur was releasing the Narmenian defendants.

  The room was a ruin. Sturm's elite troops had slaughtered more than two thirds of the VPHCers present in a brutal action that had lasted two minutes and had cost them three Bluebloods. Tarrian was dead, his rib-cage blasted open like a burned-out ship's hull.

  Gaunt crossed to Kowle. The commissar was sat on one of the lower seating tiers, head bowed, clutching a hell-burn across his right bicep.

  It's the end for you, Kowle. You knew damn well what an abuse of the law this was. I'll personally oversee the avulsion of your career. A public disgrace for the People's Hero.

  Kowle slowly looked up into Gaunt's dark eyes. He said nothing, as there was nothing left to say.

  Gaunt turned away from the disturbing beige eyes. He remembered Bal-haut in the early weeks of that campaign. Serving as part of Slaydo's command cadre, he had first encountered Kowle and his wretchedly vicious ways. Gaunt had thought he embodied the very worst aspects of the Commissariat. After one particularly unnecessary punishment detail, when Kowle had had a man flogged to death for wearing the wrong cap-badge, Gaunt had used his influence with the warmaster to have Kowle transferred to duties on the south-west continent, away from the main front. That had been the start of Kowle's career decline, Gaunt realised now, a decline that had led him to the Vervunhive posting. Gaunt couldn't let it go. He turned back.