Reaper autocannons roared along the line of the bulwark, the rapid firing, high-powered weapons tearing through the lines of reinforcements rushing to stem the breach in their lines. The high velocity rounds from the potent weapons tore up the defensive line and reached a battery of artillery pieces. The guns were instantly engulfed in a huge explosion as the armour piercing autocannon rounds ignited stacks of high-explosive shells. The fireball rose high in the sky, and further explosions answered it as other Anointed warriors struck further gun batteries.
‘Warmonger, lead the Host forward,’ growled Kol Badar, opening a comm-channel to the Dreadnought. ‘Come join the slaughter, my brother.’
‘Sir! we are being massacred! They won’t die! Emperor save us, they just won’t die!’
Captain Drokan of the 23rd Tanakreg PDF cursed and licked his dry lips as he ordered the comm-channel closed. What could he do? There must be a way to salvage something out of this disastrous engagement, but he was damned if he knew what it was. He turned to his adjutant, who looked absolutely terrified, his face pale and his eyes staring.
‘Val! Anything from the colonel? From any of the damn officers?’
The pale-faced adjutant shook his head, and Drokan cursed once again.
There had been no warning of the attack. The Emperor alone knew what had happened to the listening posts that skirted the system; a sudden attack like this just should not have been possible!
But it was happening, and it was all too real. And somehow Drokan had found himself the most superior ranked officer, cut off from the upper echelons. Him, Anubias Drokan! Never a dedicated student of tactics or strategy, he had risen to the rank of captain more because of his family’s status and his own skill with a sword than through any real competence. It was only the PDF, damn it! Father had wanted him to join the ranks to give him a bit of hardness about him, he had said. A few years of service; he had never expected to be on the front line of a full-scale planetary assault!
Think, man. Think! What should he do? He had four companies of the 23rd with him here (dying here, he thought), but what other regiments were close by? There was the 9th and the 11th, but his adjutant had been unable to contact them on the comms. He assumed they had already been engaged and destroyed by the enemy.
He had to get the other nearby regiments to pull away from the last line, pull back to Shinar. That’s what his superiors would do, he thought. Shinar, the palace, the governor; they were what needed protecting. Feeling slightly buoyed, Drokan turned to his adjutant once more.
‘Put out a blanket message to all Shinar PDF regiments. Tell them to pull back to the city. The 23rd will hold them here for as long as we can. We will buy them as much time as possible.’
The adjutant gaped. ‘We are to hold here? That’s suicide!’
‘Pass the damn message! Shinar is more important than the 23rd!’
With shaking hands, the adjutant began to relay the message. The captain shouted to the driver of the Chimera to head towards the battle. The man gunned the engines and the vehicle roared across the salt plains.
The men of the 23rd had never seen active service. War had never come to Tanakreg, and the only time the PDF had been required to use live ammunition had been to quell a minor insurgency within Shinar some four decades earlier. Most of the PDF soldiers had never fired on a live target.
Still, Drokan felt clear-headed suddenly. Yes, he would hold the enemy here. He pulled his laspistol from its holster. Just like his men, he had honed his skills on the target field, though he had never fired a shot in anger or defence. But I am a renowned swordsman, he told himself, patting the ornate chainsword at his hip. He had fought in countless tourneys, and had won several medals.
‘Ca… Captain Drokan?’ said his adjutant. ‘The other regiments… they are not responding. Not one of them. I… I think we may be the last regiment within a thousand kilometres of Shinar.’
The captain frowned. ‘Ah,’ he said, ‘I see.’ He felt strangely calm. ‘Well, pick up my family standard. We go to fight alongside the men.’
The adjutant gaped at the captain.
‘Come on, boy!’ urged Drokan. The younger man unclipped his safety harness and scrambled across to the other side of the command Chimera. He opened a stowage compartment, and removed a long black case. He struggled with the ornate clasps, but finally popped them open, and pulled out the captain’s family standard. It was furled tightly around a telescopic pole. With a nod, the captain leant back in his seat as his Chimera took them into the maelstrom of battle.
Kol Badar strode along the fortified line, gunning down dozens of terrified PDF troopers, their puny bodies torn apart by the force of his combi-bolter. Reaching an enclosed bunker emplacement, he ripped the sealed blast door from its hinges and stooped to enter. It housed half a dozen men and three, rapid firing heavy bolters that were pumping fire into the advancing lines of the Host.
Kol Badar gunned them all down, the walls of the emplacement splashing with their blood as he raked them with fire. Ripping another blast door from its housing, Kol Badar exited the emplacement and began killing once more.
Looking down over the plains beyond the last defensive line, he saw scores of APCs moving forwards in a desperate last-ditch attempt to hold back the Word Bearers. Salt dust kicked up behind the approaching vehicles, and lascannon fire and krak missiles streamed towards the Imperial vehicles from the heavy weapon teams that had gained the bulwark. Several of the advancing vehicles exploded spectacularly, spinning end over end as fuel lines were penetrated.
The Chimera APCs roared to a halt, and over a thousand PDF reserve troopers emerged, las-fire stabbing towards the Word Bearers. Smiling, Kol Badar strode down to meet them.
He knew that subtlety and strategy were not needed, just killing and more killing. It was what his warriors excelled at.
He strode onwards through the hail of gunfire, spraying boltrounds left and right. The salt plains were turning a deep red colour as the porous granules soaked up the gore.
‘Tanakreg 23rd!’ shouted PDF Captain Drokan. ‘Drive them back!’ The soldiers screamed as they ran, their lasguns firing and bayonets readied. The captain’s adjutant found himself shouting along with them. Hefting the captain’s unfurled banner in one hand he began firing his laspistol, even though he could not yet see the foe.
Suddenly he saw the enemy, and he wished that he had not. They were huge, making the PDF soldiers look like children.
They were all going to die, he realised.
Kol Badar raised an eyebrow within his fully enclosed helm as he saw the soldiers running towards him, an officer at their forefront brandishing a roaring chain blade. The towering warlord didn’t even bother to raise his combi-bolter, and he began stalking towards the fools running at him and his Anointed warriors. Las-rounds thudded uselessly into him as the distance closed. The officer lifted his chainsword high, his face defiant. Kol Badar almost laughed out loud.
The warlord swatted the blade away dismissively with the back of his power-talon, breaking the man’s arm in the process, and clubbed the officer down into the ground with a blow from his combi-bolter. He stamped down heavily on the mewling wretch, and the man’s skull shattered like a pulverised egg.
The Anointed cleaved into the PDF troopers, ripping limbs from sockets, tearing heads from bodies. The Coryphaus saw Bokkar drive his chainfist into the body of the diminutive PDF standard bearer, lifting him up into the air before the whirring blades cut the boy in half. The Anointed warrior turned his heavy flamer on the fallen standard, the fabric consumed instantly under the intense heat.
Las-fire sprayed across his back, and he hissed in pain and anger as one of the beams caught him in the back of his knee-joint. He turned and gunned down one of the PDF troopers before they disappeared beneath an inferno of flames, screaming horribly. Kol Badar nodded his head towards the Anointed warrior Bokkar, who acknowledged the Coryphaus with a nod of his own, before his heavy flamer roared again, engulfing anothe
r group of soldiers.
Heavy footsteps made the ground tremble, and Kol Badar turned towards the huge form of the Warmonger, the Dreadnought dwarfing even him as it walked through the carnage, potent cannons pumping fire towards enemy vehicles in the distance.
‘It is good to crush the enemy on the field of war once more, but this is no battle, Kol Badar,’ the ancient war machine boomed. There were few within the Host that would dare call the warlord by his name, but the Warmonger was amongst them. They had fought at each other’s sides for millennia. Indeed, Kol Badar had been the Warmonger’s Coryphaus when the warrior had been Dark Apostle.
‘The enemy is weak,’ agreed Kol Badar. ‘How I yearn to face a worthy foe,’ he added, turning his gaze up into the void of the heavens.
‘You think Astartes will come?’ boomed the Warmonger hungrily.
‘No, I think not,’ sighed Kol Badar. ‘As much as I wish to face them once more. The Dark Apostle has said that in none of his dream-visions did he see any Astartes come to this world to do battle with us.’
‘But minions of the Corpse Emperor will come, will they not? They will come to do battle?’
‘Oh, they will come, my friend. They will be marshalling their forces even now.’
‘But not Astartes?’
‘No, not Astartes.’
‘Bah,’ snorted the Warmonger. ‘It will be just mortals then.’
‘Yes, mortals,’ said Kol Badar, still staring up into the night sky, as if he could pierce the heavens with his angry gaze. ‘One can only hope that they will come in force. At least then there may be a worthy battle.’
The Warmonger stomped off, its cannons firing once more. He saw the daemon engines clawing over the bulwark, multi-legged and spitting great gouts of flame from their maws, while others busied themselves tearing apart enemy tanks with contemptuous ease.
Kol Badar began to follow the Warmonger, to rejoin the battle once again. No, he reminded himself, this was not battle. This was a slaughter.
Varnus coughed, causing a searing, sharp pain in his side. Smoke was all around him, and bodies. No, not just bodies: body parts. He pushed himself to his feet, gasping at the pain that seemed to erupt all over his body, and his head reeled. He put a hand to his forehead and felt wet blood there, but the worst pain was in his side. It was slick with blood, and he winced as he loosened the clips holding his chest-plate in place. He hissed as he pulled out a long shard of metal that had pushed up under the body armour and into his side. He dropped the bloody shard to the floor. Still, he was alive, which was more than could be said for the others splayed out on the chamber floor.
The blast had ripped through the palace, and smoke and dust rose from piles of rubble. The walls were blackened in part, and ancient wall hangings were ablaze. Many of the bloody bodies strewn around him were also on fire, and the stink of burning flesh and fat almost made him retch. Varnus coughed painfully and he felt the floor beneath his feet shake as another blast somewhere else in the palace detonated.
The sound of shouting reached him, and he staggered towards it, away from the inferno that was blazing behind him. A trio of palace guards ran past along an adjoining corridor, and he hurried along in their wake. He felt another explosion rock the floor beneath his feet and increased his pace, wincing against the pain. He had to get out of this part of the palace.
Staggering along through the smoke that seemed to be thickening around him, he followed the direction that he thought the guards had taken. He limped through a half open door, entering a service corridor usually closed to those frequenting the palace. He passed a palace guard lying dead on the ground, a gunshot wound in the man’s head. He leant down and picked up the guard’s long-barrelled las-lock. It was heavy and unwieldy in his hands, but it was a weapon none-the-less.
Rounding a corner, Varnus saw a pair of palace guards standing over a fallen man. He wore a plain, cream coloured robe, identical to any number of anonymous bureaucrats that worked within the palace. Seeing him, the guards shouldered their weapons. Varnus held up his hands.
‘I’m an enforcer. What the hell is going on?’ Varnus managed.
‘Insurgents,’ said one of the guards. ‘Our commander has called us out onto the upper battlements. You had best come with us, enforcer.’
Varnus nodded his head and hurried along after the guards as best as he could. Through winding passages they passed, through hissing blast doors that their pass-cards gave access to. They climbed a set of steel stairs, and finally passed through a heavy door to emerge upon the high battlements of the palace bastion. The door slammed shut with grim finality behind them.
It was night. No, it was almost dawn, Varnus realised. How long had he been unconscious?
He saw masses of PDF soldiers garrisoned along the battlements and smaller groups of blue-armoured guards. They were rushing all over the bastion, the whole area seething with soldiers. Many were firing over the battlements at unseen foes on one of the multiple lower terraces of the bastion, and streaking lasgun fire answered them. Men crouched behind other sections of the battlements as rocket propelled grenades struck the walls, and they were raked by heavy gunfire. Men were shouting, and with the cacophony of gunfire and explosions, it seemed to Varnus that he had escaped the burning section of the palace only to enter a hell of a different kind.
Pain lanced through his side and Varnus grimaced, holding his hand to the bleeding wound.
‘I’m fine,’ he wheezed as he saw the guards accompanying him hesitate, caught between aiding him and joining the gun battle.
‘Go,’ he said, making the decision for them.
Floodlights lit up the battlements as if it were daylight, and Varnus, leaning heavily on his salvaged las-lock, staggered across the open area to take cover below the thick crenellations. He risked a quick glance down towards the sprawling, ugly city.
There was a series of lower terraces below the battlements upon which he stood, but beyond them he could see dozens of fires burning all across Shinar, and he could hear a steady thump of explosions coming from all over the city. From over the horizon, he thought he could see dim flashes.
‘Emperor preserve us,’ said Varnus quietly as he crouched back down behind the crenellations.
He started as one of the enormous air defence turrets along the battlements suddenly came to life, hydraulic servos whirring as the massive cannons rotated, the barrels angled high. What next? thought Varnus, as more of the turrets rotated their giant cannons heavenward.
The floodlights that lit the whole area flickered suddenly, then died. The lights of the entire palace turned off as the potent plasma reactors beneath it went dead. A fifty-block radius around the palace went black instantly, swiftly followed by the rest of the city. Las-fire and tracer rounds flashed through the darkness.
The air defence turrets went off-line.
Without the glare of the lights, crouching, as he was in pitch darkness, Varnus could see what the turrets had been turning towards before they had died.
They looked like stars at first, but they burnt bright orange, and they were getting larger. What the hell were they? Meteors?
Whatever they were, they were approaching the palace with sickening speed. Varnus could almost feel the heat of the objects as they plummeted from the heavens.
Death rained down upon Shinar.
CHAPTER FIVE
Marduk smiled, exposing his sharp teeth as the Deathclaw drop-pod hurtled down through the atmosphere of Tanakreg. The First Acolyte felt savage joy as the g-forces pulled at him. Burias grinned back at him like some feral beast from across the other side of the plummeting attack transport. Marduk pulled on his helmet, hearing the hiss as it slid solidly into place around his gorget, and breathed in the recycled air of his power armour deeply.
He savoured these moments, the thrill just before battle commenced. He knew that Borhg’ash, the daemon bound within the archaic chainsword at his side, felt his anticipation for the bloodshed that was soon to erupt for the
weapon was vibrating slightly. It too hungered for battle.
Warning lights flashed, and Marduk felt the powerful retro-thrusters scream as they kicked in. He howled, the vox amplifiers fitted to his ornate helmet further enhancing the potency of the daemonic sound. The other Word Bearers joined in with howls of their own as their systems were filled with a sudden rush of adrenaline administered by their power armoured suits. Marduk relished the sensation of the combat drugs flooding his system.
‘Into the fray once more, my brothers!’ bellowed Marduk. The other nine warriors strapped into the Deathclaw roared their approval. ‘We are the true bearers of the righteous fury of the gods!’ Another roar. ‘And in their name, we kill! Kill! And kill again!’
With that the Deathclaw struck, smashing into the ground with bone jarring force, stabiliser claws embedding deeply. Infernal mechanics grinded as the drop-pod was lifted up on its four claws, and the bladed arcs of the circular floor slid back with a hiss.
Marduk was first out of the Deathclaw, his heavy boots slamming hard onto the cracked plascrete, the booming of his vox amplifiers sounding out over the barking of his bolt pistol.
‘Hate the infidels!’ he roared, his pistol kicking in his hands as he fired. ‘Hate them as you kill them! Hate them with your bolter and hate them with your fist!’
The towering hulk of the Deathclaw had slammed into a crenellated, terraced balcony on the upper face of the palace. Other drop-pods screamed down from above, their hulls glowing with the heat of the rapid descent. Seeing the enemy around him and feeling the fear emanating from them, Marduk licked his lips.
He thumbed the activation rune blister on his chainsword and it screamed into life. He could feel it trembling in his hand with barely suppressed hunger, and he gritted his sharpened teeth as he felt the weapon bond with his flesh, tiny barbs piercing his armoured palm.
There were uniformed soldiers all around them, scattered across the cobbled open area atop the crenellated defensive structure. Not that it was any defence against enemies that landed in their midst, thought Marduk as he fired his bolt pistol into the soldiers. They were falling away in terror from the Deathclaws that were landing with titanic force all around them.
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