Crusade & Other Stories - Dan Abnett Et Al.

by Warhammer 40K

  ‘Commencing final approach,’ said Polandrus. ‘Emperor guide our aim.’

  With a thought, Polandrus increased the thrust from his jump pack, accelerating into an almost suicidal dive. As he did so, lights flashed amongst the batteries below, muzzle flare sparking amongst metal gantries and illuminating the flanks of huge las silos.

  ‘They’ve spotted us,’ said Thaddean.

  ‘It won’t save them,’ said Polandrus.

  Shots whipped around him. Flak shells burst in clouds of dirty smoke, shrapnel sparking off his armour plates. Warning chimes sounded as threat recognition runes blossomed across his field of vision.

  ‘Landing zone confirmed,’ he said, jinking to evade a sawing line of flak fire. ‘Roof of generatorum seven-alpha. Light enemy presence. Deploy on my mark.’

  Polandrus and his warriors streaked downwards at punishing speed, using their sheer momentum to confound their enemy’s aim. The generatorum swelled before them, a blocky building nestled amidst the looming barrels of the las silos, its flanks thick with industrial piping and its roof a flat expanse dotted with huge cooling vents.

  Enemy warriors were visible between them, ragged human cultists who pointed and screamed as they sprayed autogun fire skywards.

  Polandrus waited until collision alarms were shrilling in his helm, then triggered his landing thrusters. Retrorockets fired with body-blow force, spinning him in the air so that his feet were pointed groundwards. His heavy jump pack howled as it arrested his descent, and he hit the generatorum roof with enough force to crack the ferrocrete, his servo-stirrups absorbing the shock that would otherwise have broken every bone in his legs.

  Polandrus swung his assault bolters up, ballistic cogitations and targeter runes dropping into place over his vision. He depressed his firing runes and sent a hail of mass-reactive bolts thumping into the cultists on the rooftop.

  The bolt shells leapt away on blazing propellant trails, and as each one punched through flak armour and flesh, the micro-cogitators built into their warheads detected sufficient surrounding mass to trigger detonation. Four luckless worshippers of Nurgle exploded in as many seconds, the diseased blessings of their god powerless to save them.

  ‘For the Emperor!’ roared Polandrus.

  His brothers slammed down beside him, their fire joining his own. A hurricane of bolt shells whipped outwards, the Inceptors’ firing solutions perfectly cogitated to prevent them from catching each other in their overlapping fields of fire.

  Cultists burst one after another, blood spraying across the rooftop, severed limbs spinning away. Skulls detonated. Bone shrapnel flew. In under twenty seconds, Polandrus and his two battle-brothers killed all thirty of the Chaos cultists occupying the rooftop. Their enemy’s ragged fire barely scratched their armour.

  ‘Squad Polandrus, drop insertion successful,’ voxed the sergeant.

  ‘Squad Thaddean, drop insertion successful,’ echoed his comrade.

  Polandrus glanced over at a shuttle pad some hundred yards to the east.

  Thaddean’s squad had landed there, and had slaughtered their enemies with little resistance.

  ‘Well done, brothers,’ voxed Lieutenant Cassian. ‘Drop craft on approach.

  Commence stage two.’

  ‘Confirmed,’ replied Polandrus.

  A spread of runic designators lit up on his auspex, each one indicating a flak battery that could pose a risk to the Ultramarines gunships even now streaking down through the cloud cover overhead.

  ‘Good hunting,’ voxed Thaddean, before he and his squad lit their jump packs and boosted away from the landing pad. Their guns roared as they sighted more enemies to slaughter.

  ‘And to you, brother,’ said Polandrus, igniting his own rockets. He leapt skywards, his brothers close behind, soaring clear of the generatorum and arcing down towards a nearby blockhouse. Polandrus had a fleeting glimpse of the ferrocrete roadway between the two buildings as he passed over it. He spotted more cultists dashing along it, yelling and pointing upwards.

  He slammed down on the blockhouse roof. Ahead of him, he saw a bulky flak-cannon emplacement, its barrels aimed at the heavens and a grey-fleshed servitor wired into its flank. With a press of his firing runes, Polandrus annihilated the servitor in a spray of bolts. His brothers added their shots to the fusillade, reducing the anti-aircraft cannon to sparking wreckage.

  ‘Life signs approaching,’ said Brother Donadus. ‘One floor down.’

  ‘Dispersal pattern,’ ordered Polandrus. His battle-brothers redeployed in jet-

  assisted leaps, forming a semicircle around the exit hatch atop the roof.

  The hatch swung open with a clang, and the first cultists spilled upwards.

  Polandrus had a fleeting impression of rag-wrapped features, yellowed eyes and disease-bloated flesh before the Inceptors blew them apart.

  More of the enemy spilled onto the rooftop, only to be blinded by the spraying viscera of their comrades. Bolt shells drilled into their bodies and exploded, slaughtering them wholesale.

  ‘Press the attack,’ ordered Polandrus, and he and his warriors closed up, hosing fire down the stairway below the hatch. Cultists screamed in terror.

  Most of them died in droves, packed in and unable to escape, before the last of them turned and fled, chased by roaring bolt shells.

  ‘Enough,’ said Polandrus. ‘Relocate.’

  His squad leapt again, dropping from the rooftop of the blockhouse into the square below. Another flak emplacement stood here, surrounded by buildings and flanked by statues of Imperial saints now furred with mould. Polandrus’

  warriors blitzed the cannon with fire.

  ‘Gunships inbound,’ voxed Thaddean. Polandrus looked skywards and saw Ultramarines craft sweeping down through the clouds like vengeful angels.

  ‘Three more emplacements to eliminate,’ he said. ‘Resistance negligible.’

  ‘Moving on,’ said Thaddean.

  At that moment, the distinctive roar of bolters echoed across the square. The shells struck Brother Ulandro, tearing open his chest-plate in a gory spray.

  ‘Death Guard!’ roared Brother Donadus, raising his assault bolters and letting fly even as Ulandro’s body crashed to the ground.

  The Plague Marines strode into the square, bolters up and firing. They were abhorrent, their dirty-green power armour thick with rust and seeping sweat.

  Gurgling tubes punctured their forms, and plague flies swirled around them.

  ‘Unclean filth!’ shouted Sergeant Polandrus, leaping aside on a jet of flame as he opened fire. His shots hammered the nearest Plague Marine, staggering the monstrous warrior and cratering his power armour. Yet the heretic didn’t fall, instead giving a gurgling laugh and returning fire.

  Bolt shells chased Polandrus through the air, several rounds ricocheting from his armour with punishing force. He landed and leapt again, still firing.

  More shots struck the trudging Plague Marine, punching through his cracked armour plates and detonating within him. Filthy gore splattered the square as the Death Guard warrior’s torso was blown apart.

  Still he kept firing.

  ‘Guilliman’s oath!’ cursed Polandrus. ‘These heretics are nigh

  invulnerable.’

  ‘Enough bolt shells will kill anything, sergeant,’ said Donadus fiercely as his stream of shots took off one of the Plague Marines’ heads. The heretic’s body staggered several more paces, bolter still firing wildly, before toppling onto its side.

  ‘True words, brother,’ said Polandrus, unleashing another salvo and snarling in satisfaction as his target finally collapsed, dead.

  The last two Plague Marines kept advancing and firing, but they were outmatched. Weathering their fire, the two surviving Inceptors poured shots into the traitors until they were nothing but twitching corpses.

  ‘Heretic filth,’ spat Brother Donadus, voice thick with disgust. ‘Ulandro was thrice the warrior any of these unworthy things were.’

  ‘Focus, brother,�
�� said Polandrus. ‘We will mourn Ulandro later. For now, we have a beachhead to secure.’

  Rune-marking the position of Ulandro’s fallen body for the Chapter’s Apothecaries, Polandrus selected his next target and engaged his jump pack.

  Meanwhile, the Ultramarines drop-ships swept in to land, shrugging off the last desultory streams of flak fire as they delivered infantry, battle tanks and Dreadnoughts into the fight. The beachhead was as good as secured, and soon the Ultramarines would take the fight to the Death Guard.

  In the meantime, Polandrus would avenge his fallen brother in heretic blood.

  Far across the city, strange figures stirred within the banquet chamber of a ruined manse. Lithe forms moved through beams of weak daylight, treading with a fluid grace that was entirely alien. The thick dust barely stirred at their passing.

  Sat in their midst, their leader raised her head and closed her eyes, reaching out with senses beyond those of the mortal flesh. She breathed deeply, and nodded to herself.

  ‘They have come,’ she said, her voice musical and lilting.

  She rose from her cross-legged pose, the runes on her armour glowing softly and her long cloak flowing around her like water.

  ‘It is time.’

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Lieutenant Cassian moved along a roadway between crumbling ruins, bolt rifle sweeping for targets. His strike force was spread through the streets to either side.

  Intercessors and Hellblasters jogged from one firing position to the next, stopping to cover their battle-brothers. Aggressors stomped through rubble and ruin, ready to bring point-blank annihilation to anyone that stood in their way. Polandrus’ and Thaddean’s Inceptors had the flanks, while on high the Reivers of Squad Marcus could be glimpsed as they used grapnel guns to swing from one vantage point to the next, keeping watch for threats.

  The strike force’s infantry was supported by a pair of Redemptor Dreadnoughts, Brother Indomator and Brother Marius, who strode along in their midst. Fifteen-feet-tall bipedal war engines, each Dreadnought was built around an armoured sarcophagus containing the still-living remains of a mortally wounded battle-brother who piloted his walking tomb as though it were his own body.

  Cassian’s force was completed by a trio of Repulsor battle tanks, which he had placed at the forefront, an armoured spearhead to drive their attack home.

  The Repulsors were slab-sided war machines bristling with heavy firepower, hovering several feet off the ground on thrumming grav-fields that would crush and pummel anything they passed over, be it rubble, wreckage or enemies.

  ‘Chaplain Dematris?’ voxed Cassian.

  ‘No resistance yet,’ replied Dematris from his position one street over. ‘The enemy clearly lack fortitude, or else they would come and oppose us.’

  ‘If there is one thing the Death Guard do not lack, it is fortitude,’ said

  Keritraeus from his position elsewhere on the line. ‘We are making good progress, but we should remain cautious.’

  ‘The foe should not be underestimated,’ agreed Cassian. ‘But we captured our beachhead with virtually no casualties, and we still have the element of surprise. With luck, we will reach our objective before they can rally more than token forces against us.’

  ‘We also have the Primarch’s Sword ,’ added Dematris. ‘Shipmaster Aethor has enough weapons systems working to provide a substantial planetary bombardment should it be required.’

  ‘The tainted atmospherics render auspex scans unreliable,’ said Keritraeus.

  ‘We do not know for sure where our enemies are. We have only ghost returns.’

  ‘What do you counsel?’ asked Cassian.

  ‘We slow our advance. We use the Reivers to scout the path ahead. If we cannot rely on the senses of our machine-spirits, then we must instead rely upon our own.’

  ‘An excess of caution,’ said Dematris. ‘Surprise is an advantage that lasts only so long. Everything we know of the Death Guard suggests that they are predominately an infantry force, exceptionally resilient and deadly in close-range firefights, but ponderous. If we give them time to respond, the situation will deteriorate rapidly.’

  ‘Lieutenant, I cannot agree,’ said Keritraeus. ‘The enemy has been here for weeks. With the auspex so unreliable, we have no way of knowing where their forces might be massed. And they are still Space Marines, let us not forget. I believe it would be a grave error to rush blindly in on the assumption that they did not have contingencies in place for just such an attack.’

  ‘Brothers, I hear you both,’ said Cassian, ‘but I must err on the side of decisive action, for every moment spent away from the primarch’s side is a moment we are failing in our duty. However, I agree that we must determine our foe’s true location and strength. That is why we require more eyes on the ground. Eyes that I intend to secure now.’

  So saying, he cut the link to his brothers and began to cycle methodically through Imperial command channels, sending out a rune-coded interrogation to each one.

  Cassian led his Intercessors across a rubble-strewn intersection, stepping around collected pools of oily filth. It had begun to rain, a light, greasy

  drizzle whose touch Cassian did not trust – wary of heretical contaminants, he had ordered his brothers to keep their helms on. He ducked through a blackened archway and picked his way through the bombed-out ruin of a hab-block. Heaps of remains lay rotting here, the sad remnants of Dustrious’

  inhabitants now little more than fly-picked bones.

  As Cassian emerged into daylight again, he saw the astropathic fortress standing proud on a hilltop in the middle distance. According to his helm’s auto-senses, the structure now lay just a few miles ahead. At the Space Marines’ swift pace, they would reach it in less than twenty minutes. If the enemy had not made themselves known by then, he would use the fortress as his base of operations and begin hunting the heretics while he waited for the Indomitus Crusade fleet’s response to his astropathic message.

  Cassian’s vox crackled. A coded response came back to him, indicating a secure channel.

  ‘This is Lieutenant Cassian Talasadian of the Ultramarines Fourth Company,’ said Cassian. ‘Identify yourself in the Emperor’s name.’

  ‘My lord, it is good to hear your voice,’ came the reply. ‘This is Captain Dzansk, Cadian Forty-Fourth Heavy Infantry.’

  Cassian heard exhaustion in the man’s voice, along with an unhealthy hoarseness, but also steel.

  Cadian, he thought. They were the most renowned of all the Astra Militarum’s countless regiments, and arguably the finest.

  ‘Captain Dzansk, well met,’ said Cassian. ‘Appraise me of your

  disposition.’

  ‘I am the surviving ranking officer in the Dustrious warzone,’ said Dzansk .

  ‘From an initial regimental strength of five thousand men and two hundred armoured vehicles, I currently command eight hundred and twenty-two able-bodied men and women of Cadia, along with seventeen Leman Russ battle tanks and twenty-one Chimeras. We are operating out of the Temple District, where we have fortified several structures. Ammunition is low, and rations and medicae supplies virtually nil. Sickness is rife and morale has been steadily deteriorating. Though if I may say so, my lord, your arrival will do much to bring heart to my soldiers.’

  ‘How long have you been in the field?’ asked Cassian. ‘And what can you

  tell me about the enemy here? Strengths, dispositions, capabilities?’

  ‘They attacked twenty-one days ago, ’ said Dzansk. ‘Bombarded the city

  from orbit with viral contaminants and conventional ordnance. We lost over half the regiment during that first attack. I and a few other officers managed to get our troops to the shelters, but the rest… After that, the Death Guard landed a force of – I would estimate – two to three hundred Heretic Astartes supported by war machines and heavy mobile artillery. General Yorin attempted a counter-attack in force, but the contagions the enemy had dropped made the battlefield hazardous. Worse, many
citizens and soldiers who fell to their plagues rose up again as revenants and overran our lines.’

  Cassian frowned, disturbed by the estimated enemy numbers. There were more heretics here than orbital scans suggested.

  ‘The counter-offensive failed utterly, my lord,’ continued Dzansk. ‘It cost us at least another thousand able bodies, along with Yorin and his entire upper command staff. My men and I have been holding out ever since, attempting to harass the enemy wherever possible, and launching measured attacks to break their besiegement of the astropathic fortress. Thus far we have met with only defeat. I believe we have endured this long only because the enemy do not fight as a sane man would, instead seeking to draw out our misery for as long as they can.’

  ‘You have done what you could, and the Emperor will look kindly upon you for it,’ said Cassian. ‘Now, however, He has a different duty for you, captain.’

  ‘Of course, my lord. What are your orders?’

  ‘My brothers and I are pushing towards the astropathic fortress. We must secure it in order to despatch a message to the Indomitus Crusade. We must rejoin our comrades and free the stars from the rule of Chaos.’

  ‘A crusade?’ asked Dzansk, excitement in his voice. ‘My lord, we had no idea. We thought, perhaps…’

  ‘That it was the end?’ said Cassian. ‘No, captain, this is just the beginning of the heretics’ final defeat. But in order to play our part in that battle, we must return to our comrades. Aid us in that fight, and the Emperor will smile upon you. Guilliman needs all the warriors he can get.’

  ‘Guilliman?’ asked Dzansk, his Cadian discipline slipping for a moment.

  ‘My lord?’

  ‘Our father has returned to us,’ said Cassian. ‘There is much to tell, captain, but it can wait. For now, I need you to mobilise your forces and support our advance.’

  ‘At once, my lord. Send me your coordinates, and I will mobilise the regiment.’

  Cassian tapped the runes on his vambrace, each one flashing briefly and fading again as he despatched the data to the auspex-inload channel Dzansk provided. There was a pause, then Dzansk spoke again, his voice urgent.