Within five days, the approach trenches had covered a third of the distance between the end of the docking pier and the Gauntlet Bastions, and Honsou ordered the construction of the second parallel. A great wall of stone and iron branched out from each of the approaches, linking in the middle to provide cover from which to unleash ever more deadly and carefully aimed barrages.
Shadows flashed past Ardaric Vaanes as he dropped from his position of concealment in the recessed machicolations of the slate-coloured ore barn. His claws unsheathed from his gauntlets with a crackling snick! His jump pack flared a last minute burst of fire and he landed in the midst of the shocked soldiers with a crack of stonework.
Vaanes swept his arms out. Screams and blood followed him.
He saw panicked faces, saw their terror and shut it out as he killed.
Fifty men, two armoured fighting vehicles and a trio of supply skiffs, their most ambitious attack yet, but there were few that could match the Raven Guard for their skill in ambush killing. Rifles fired and las-bolts sparked from his blank armour as he spun and sliced his way through the soldiers. The reptilian loxatl crawled and skittered across the walls, flechette rounds slashing downwards to shred officers and sergeants trying to impose some kind of order on the slaughter.
One of the fighting vehicles exploded, its engine block a flaming ruin as a loxatl flechette bomb punched through the armoured glacis. Men on fire fell from escape hatches and Vaanes watched them burn with a hideous sense of pleasure. The smell of their seared flesh and hair, the thought of their liquefying skin as it ran from their bones like melted rubber…
His inattention almost cost him his life as a shimmering rapier slashed for his neck. Vaanes spun beneath the blade and punched out with his clawed gauntlet, spearing his attacker and spraying his helmet with blood. An officer in a blue frock coat and golden breastplate stamped with the inverted omega of his masters flopped like a landed fish on the claw, his flesh sizzling and frying with the electric heat of the weapon.
Vaanes flicked the body from his claws, angry with himself for being so easily distracted in the heat of a battle. Distractions were what got you killed. He drove all thoughts of sensation from his mind, focusing on the job at hand.
The supply skiffs were bolting, skidding around the burning wreck of the lead fighting vehicle, but a spray of loxatl darts shattered the armaglass canopy and shredded the first driver. It slammed into the side of the ore barn and rucked up on a stack of barrels and pallets.
The remaining two skiffs fought to break out of the trap, the pilots reacting with commendable speed and calm at the sudden, shocking violence around them.
Ultramarines training, thought Vaanes. Too bad mine is better.
More flechette rounds blew out the engines of the second skiff, knocking it out of the air and sending it screeching and spinning across the ground. The last skiff was brought down when a dozen loxatl leapt upon it and clawed their way inside. The grey-skinned aliens moved and fought with a series of jerky movements that appeared riotously uncoordinated and yet amazingly supple at the same time, their wiry limbs and powerful dewclaws able to tear through thin armour and flesh with a single sweep. Snapping jaws and hooked talons ripped the crew of the skiff apart in moments.
A heavy, chugging series of impacts tore up the rockcrete beside him, and Vaanes dived aside. He rolled smoothly to his feet, seeing the gunner in the hatch of the second armoured fighting vehicle slew his heavy calibre weapon around. Before the gunner could fire, a warrior in iron armour reared up behind him and tore his head off with its bare hands. Blood jetted over the vehicle, and the corpse slumped over the gun, sending a last geyser of shots into the air.
The Newborn hauled the body from the turret and dropped a pair of grenades inside before slamming the hatch shut. A tremendous detonation rocked the vehicle, and acrid smoke billowed from its vents and underside.
The sounds of fighting were suddenly silenced, and Vaanes let out a pent up breath of… what? Exhilaration? Regret? He wasn’t sure.
The Newborn dropped from the back of the destroyed vehicle and walked over to him. Fifty men were dead, two tanks destroyed and a trio of skiffs seized, but it seemed as untroubled as though it had just completed a training session.
Vaanes took a moment to compose himself, restoring his calm after the exhilaration of the victory. The killings had inflamed the part of him that relished the defeat of his enemy, but it had been more than that. The time they had spent behind the lines of the enemy, attacking supply convoys, small unit redeployments and isolated repair crews had awakened something in him he thought long buried.
Pride.
He had always been the best at what he did, and to have his abilities compromised by these newly awakened appetites angered him greatly. He quelled the rising fury, silently mouthing the Mantra of the Hidden Hunter. His heartbeat returned to its resting state and he felt a wordless shiver of distant anger from somewhere far away.
‘Another good ambush,’ said the Newborn, removing its helmet now that the fighting was done. ‘You have great skill in anticipating where to find the most lucrative targets.’
Vaanes nodded. ‘I was trained by the best,’ he said.
‘The Raven Guard?’
‘Yes, the Raven Guard,’ said Vaanes. ‘I was a senior training instructor at the Ravenspire.’
‘What’s that?’
‘It was… is… the fortress monastery of my Chapter,’ said Vaanes. ‘A grand tower on the dark side of Deliverance. It’s a wonder, you know, the largest man-made structure on the planet. Or pretty much any planet, come to think of it. It’s an incredible place, a place where the very walls are made of history and legend.’
‘You sound like you miss it,’ said the Newborn without irony.
Vaanes started to reply, but the easy dismissal forming on his lips died as he realised the Newborn was right.
In the hold of her ship, berthed in one of the roof hangars of the basilica, Interrogator Sibiya shivered. She stood inside a large refrigerated shipping container, but she wasn’t cold, for her power armour protected her from the artificially maintained chill of the air. No matter how many times she told herself it was dormant, there was always that thrill of fear whenever she came here. Vapour gusted from wall vents like breath. Which, she supposed, it was in a way. Coiled ribs wrapped the specialised container in humming machinery and the chemical bite of coolant fluids was an acrid tang at the back of the throat.
‘Why have you brought me here?’ asked Brother Olantor, looking in puzzlement at the wealth of complex machinery built into the walls of the chamber. ‘I have a battle to fight.’
‘Surely Brother Altarion can manage without you for a little while, or don’t you trust his ability to command?’
‘That’s not the point,’ said Olantor. ‘I have a duty to stand with my men.’
‘This will only take a moment, I just wanted you to see this.’
‘See what? All I see is a freezer compartment in the hold of your starship.’
Sibiya nodded to a hooded adept in a thickly-furred robe who stood with his shaven head bowed by the only entrance, an armoured door that not even Olantor could break down. The adept ran his fingers over a gem-studded console of flashing lights and brass dials. Numerous pict screens displayed steady, pulsing lines like ponderously slow vital signs.
Sibiya’s breath misted before her and she pulled her cloak tighter about her shoulders as a blunt, oblong box slowly lowered from the ceiling. Formed from banded ribs of adamantium and steel, it resembled something used to contain hazardous bio-matter or unstable atomics.
Its surfaces were fogged with crystals of white, and long icicles dripped like glassy knife blades from its overhanging surfaces. Sibiya warily approached the container and wiped her hand across a frosted glass panel on its topside, beckoning Olantor to join her.
The Space Marine looked down through the glass and she saw his confusion.
‘What is this?’ said Brother Olantor.
‘A last resort,’ said Sibiya.
Honsou watched from the roof of his personal bunker as the bombardment of the Gauntlet Bastions continued. It was impossible to see the walls, for they were wreathed in smoke and flames. He felt the vibrations of the distant impacts through his boots and relished this chance to reduce a bastion of the Ultramarines to ruin.
This was what it was all about. He had been a shadow of his former self since he had left the Eye of Terror, so consumed by vengeance that he had forgotten what made him the man he was. He was a product of two gene fathers, yet he was wholly an Iron Warrior and the scale of industrialised warfare around him was like a vision of paradise.
The batteries of the second parallel were bludgeoning the walls before them to submission and it would not be long before they had affected a practicable breach. It had been too long since he had led warriors through a broken wall, climbed the rubble into the teeth of guns and swords with his own weapons howling their prayers to the dark gods.
The hot taste of steel and burning propellant was a thick reek in the air, the smell of warfare as it was always meant to be waged. A near continuous rain of shells from the two enormous towers beyond the walls pounded the Iron Warriors’ position, but their master had taught them well and only the slaves bore the brunt of the shelling.
The main weapon systems of the star fort were next to useless in such a conflict, for its guns were designed to hurl explosive projectiles vast distances across space at attacking warships, not troops crawling across its surface like ants. The vast majority of its weapon systems simply weren’t capable of shooting at its own structure. Which wasn’t to say the defenders were powerless, for a great many soldiers manned the battlements and the guns mounted on the towers were mighty indeed.
Yes, a worthy enemy was ranged against them, but Honsou liked nothing better than a challenge that would prove his mettle to those around him.
‘Tell me,’ said Notha Etassay, reclined on a chaise longue of flayed human skin, ‘Are such battles always such tedious affairs? When do I get to bare my blade?’
Honsou sighed, his reverie of shell impacts and escalades broken by the bladedancer’s lugubrious tones. ‘Ever since we began this fight that’s all you’ve been asking. It takes time to batter down the walls of a fortress. Approaches have to be made, parallels raised and the proper time taken to break it open. It’s the perfect meeting of science and martial glory.’
‘Really? I thought it was a necessary evil,’ said Etassay. ‘A long, drawn out affair that you Iron Warriors specialise in before the real feast of death.’
Honsou felt his good mood evaporate at Etassay’s words. ‘The Iron Warriors learned their craft in the earliest days of the Great Crusade, Etassay, when their siege fleets toppled the fortresses and donjons of countless alien races and splinters of humanity who resisted the coming of the Imperium. It was a craft that saw my Legion used to exhaustion, pushing the warriors beyond the limits of endurance.’
‘I didn’t think you were alive to see such times?’ said Etassay.
‘I wasn’t,’ admitted Honsou. ‘I was elevated to the Legion in the aftermath of the war.’
‘So I heard,’ replied Etassay, glancing over at Cadaras Grendel. No doubt the mohawked warrior had delighted in telling Etassay of Honsou’s mongrel heritage.
‘I may not have faced the walls of Terra but I have stood before countless others, and they have all fallen. There is no wall that can be thrown up before me that I cannot tear down. The great Perturabo might not venture from his lair in the mountains of Medrengard, but his warriors continue the Long War in his name.’
‘If flattening castles is such a joy to the Iron Warriors, then why is he not here?’
Honsou shook his head. ‘Perturabo has a thousand lifetimes worth of hate in his heart,’ he said, remembering the deep, dark valleys of the mountains and the dread temples and forsaken towers of Perturabo’s nightmare city. Though he had not seen the fallen Primarch of the Iron Warriors, he had felt his brooding hate on the bitter winds that howled through every haunted street. ‘And such a warrior does not stir for any but the most titanic of conflicts.’
Etassay stood and swung his arms, loosening the muscles of his shoulder and performing a series of painful looking stretches. Even clad in a form-fitting bodysuit and enclosing helm of androgynous passivity, the warrior’s physique was impressive. His impatience was obvious, but Honsou wasn’t about to launch his assault on the bastions until he was ready.
‘If you’re so desperate to swing your blade, you could always join Kaarja Salombar’s corsairs or what’s left of Pashtoq Uluvent’s berserkers,’ suggested Cadaras Grendel.
‘Kind of you to offer, Grendel,’ said Etassay with an elaborate bow, ‘but I think I’d rather fight where there’s a chance I might live. The berserkers don’t care one way or the other and Salombar… well, empty heroics may be very piratical, but they aren’t very productive. Sensation can only be wrung of all its juices while one is alive to enjoy the flavour.’
‘Don’t say we didn’t offer,’ said Grendel.
Honsou was fully aware of the loss of men resulting from the impetuous Salombar’s rash charges on the walls, but the Corsair Queen cared not for the impossibility of carrying a well defended wall with only courage and foolish thoughts of glory. Pashtoq Uluvent’s berserkers, unhinged madmen who lusted only to kill, had become a liability of late, and though they too had little chance of carrying the walls, Honsou shed no tears for their losses.
Besides, the constant assaults on the walls was keeping the defenders’ guns occupied, allowing the covered ways and approaches to creep ever closer to the wall. When a third parallel was established, Honsou would be in a position to mount his direct firing guns to blast the footings of the walls to dust.
And looking at the drifting banks of smoke that perpetually wreathed the walls, Honsou didn’t think it would take much longer.
Brother-Sergeant Olantor fired the last of his shells at the fleeing warriors and slumped against the blasted stump of this section of wall. His breath came in short, sharp hikes, the result of numerous breaches in his armour. Though vacuum sealant had prevented a catastrophic decompression, it had left his air supply dangerously thin.
Decimus knelt beside him and passed him a fresh magazine.
‘You always did have lousy fire discipline,’ said his fellow sergeant.
‘Thank you,’ replied Olantor, switching magazines with automatic precision. He glanced over the walls, seeing a cratered wasteland of rubble and bodies. The expanse of the star fort’s southern quarter resembled the very worst warzone imaginable, like a devastated city that had changed hands a dozen times or more.
The battered survivors of this latest attack gathered behind hastily thrown up walls and sheltered redoubts that had been built at their back as the assault came in. It astounded Olantor how quickly the Iron Warriors could build such things, and no sooner had one attack been beaten back than the next was coming in.
He looked along the length of the shattered wall, its once proud ramparts little more than ragged outcroppings of stone and jutting rebars. It was little enough to shelter from enemy fire, but it was all they had. Olantor could see seven Ultramarines, and around a thousand Defence Auxilia troops. Chaplain Sabatina held his crozius high, reciting the litanies of hate for traitors over the Auxilia vox-net.
The mortal soldiers were fighting with great courage and honour on a battlefield where even minor damage to an environment suit could see a man dead in moments. Each was trained to quickly seal a tear, but much of the firepower coming at them caused such horrendous damage that repairs were impossible.
Even Interrogator Sibiya had surprised him, fighting on the front lines with her Datian Saurians at her side. The Saurians were swarthy-skinned men with long-barrelled melta guns and heavy armour of umber scale. A twitching preacher in ill-fitting haz-mat armour never left Sibiya’s side, chanting words from a heavy book carried on the back of a t
hickly-muscled, vat-grown bearer. The man seemed oblivious to the fact that only he could hear his own words.
Olantor felt the crash of iron footfalls behind him, recognising the heavy tread of Brother Altarion. For all that he had entertained doubts as to the Old One’s ability to command the star fort, he had no doubts as to his ability as a warrior. Since the first attack, Altarion had stood alongside the defenders of the Gauntlet Bastions, and the Dreadnought’s presence had done more to raise morale than any number of inspiring speeches from Chaplain Sabatina.
Those few attackers who had somehow reached the ramparts on automated grapnels, had been met by the crackling hammer or roaring cannon of Brother Altarion. None who reached the top of the wall survived.
‘So soon?’ sighed Olantor.
‘Looks like,’ said Decimus, glancing over the wall.
FOUR
Honsou got his breach seventeen hours later. As the corsairs and berserkers scrambled up the pitted and easily-climbed walls of the Gauntlet Bastions, the Iron Warriors built and fortified their final batteries. Their works were too close to the walls for the defending gunners in the mighty towers of the basilica to target without fear of hitting their own men, and thus the work was undertaken with only minimal disruption.
The huge, elevated platforms were raised with sheet steel and hard packed slabs of rockcrete salvaged from the ruins. Within two hours of their completion, six enormous guns rolled along the covered ways from the Iron Warriors’ bridgehead. They had belonged to Lord Toramino and Lord Berossus, warsmiths who had laid siege to Honsou’s fortress on Medrengard, but in the aftermath of their defeat, Honsou took the weapons for his own.
Toramino once claimed his guns had fired on the walls of Terra, and while that was a boast made by many a warsmith, Toramino’s likely had merit.
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