‘Be strong, brothers and sisters of Cadia!’ he cried. ‘Gird your hearts with faith. Armour your souls with contempt. And remember that to die in the Emperor’s name is an honour without compare!’
He clambered down from his perch and boarded his transport, Kavier and the drafted replacements for his command squad following him in.
‘Soldiers of Cadia,’ voxed Dzansk as he strapped himself into his restraints.
‘In the Emperor’s name – advance.’
‘It is all of them, lord,’ said Blorthos. ‘I can see them moving like maggots through the corpse of this city.’
Gurloch led the Witherlings down a half-flooded processional, Plague Marines and thrumming bloat-drones following in his wake. He shook his head in disgust at Blorthos’ words.
‘Such a waste,’ he said. ‘These fools had days and days of sickness and sorrow yet to offer up. Now the Ultramarines throw their allies’ lives away, and for what? A distraction.’
‘They are… ignorant creatures… lord,’ came Thrax’s voice over the vox.
‘So be it,’ sighed Gurloch heavily. ‘These Imperials have no idea how to savour their own suffering. Once again, they prove themselves ungrateful.
My patience with them has run out.’
‘The… Space Marines…’ Thrax began, but Gurloch cut him off, suddenly irked by his subordinate’s gasping voice.
‘The Space Marines will undoubtedly strike when they believe us
sufficiently engaged. Perhaps they will even bombard us from orbit again.
None of that matters. They clearly want the astropathic fortress as much as we do, so let’s give them a little false hope.’
‘Lord?’
‘Send in another wave of poxwalkers,’ said Gurloch. ‘A big one. Enough to keep the guns busy for a spell. Use them as cover and pull back to within the shadow of the fortress walls, then dig in. The Ultramarines won’t risk dropping barrage bombs and lance strikes so close to their objective, so they’ll have to dislodge you the old-fashioned way.’
‘They can… try,’ said Thrax scornfully.
‘Exactly. Hold them there for me, Thrax. I will finish the Astra Militarum and then return, and between us we will hurl back the surviving Ultramarines a second time. Such a bitter mix of disappointment and suffering will surely be enough to perfect our plague.’
‘In Mortarion’s name… it will… be done.’
‘Eighth Platoon,’ voxed Dzansk. ‘Move up through those ruins and secure firing positions. Signal when you’re in place, then cover Fifth as they attack.’
Voices came back to him over the rattle and thump of gunfire, tight acknowledgements of orders received. The Cadians had advanced to within two miles of the fortress before meeting resistance amidst a district of old, rusting chem factories. Now they were fighting to gain ground, Dzansk still pushing his soldiers forward as aggressively as he dared.
‘Captain, Third Platoon reports more Death Guard moving north of their position,’ said Kavier. ‘Heavy infantry and several tanks, Predator-class.’
‘They’ll be outflanked,’ said Gunner Astin, tightening her grip on Chonsky’s old meltagun.
‘ Gatekeeper, do you read?’ voxed Dzansk. ‘Sergeant Yuri?’
‘Affirmative, captain,’ came Yuri’s voice, lousy with static. ‘Awaiting orders.’
‘Third are about to be outflanked to the north,’ said Dzansk. ‘Intercede.
Take Kasr’s Fury with you.’
‘Understood,’ said Yuri. ‘We’ll hammer those heretics all the way back to the warp.’
‘Good man,’ said Dzansk. He knew that two Leman Russ tanks wouldn’t be
enough to overcome the enemy force that Third Platoon had reported.
Sergeant Yuri probably knew it too.
At this stage, it was something of a moot point.
‘This is Sergeant Chenska, Second Platoon,’ came a desperate voice over the vox. ‘We’re overrun. They’re pushing up through–’ The voice cut out, replaced by the scream of lasgun fire. Something exploded with a dull thump, before the voice returned. ‘Repeat, Second Platoon is overrun. Enemy infantry and Dreadnought-class walkers are pushing up through refinery one-nine.’
‘Understood, Chenska,’ said Dzansk. ‘Can you extract?’
‘Negative, command, negative,’ said Chenska as gunfire blared again.
‘They’ve pushed past us. We’re holed up in the administratum wing but we don’t have long. I’m ordering all grenades primed. We’ll bring the roof down on these heretic bastards.’
‘Go with the Emperor’s grace, sergeant,’ said Dzansk.
‘Cadia stands! Cadia st–’
Static swallowed her voice.
Dzansk balled one fist and thumped it against the Chimera’s bulkhead, hard enough to hurt.
‘Captain,’ said Kavier, ‘Eighth report heavy drone presence on the ridge.
They’ve been driven back. Martyr’s Fist and Imperius have moved to support. Sir, Commissar Durent has taken command of Fifth Platoon –
they’re attacking despite the lack of covering fire. Taking massive casualties.’
‘Of course they are,’ said Dzansk. For a moment, he felt nothing but an incredible weight of exhaustion. Yet anger at his own weakness eclipsed it, and faith burned hot in its wake. ‘Lieutenant Cassian,’ he voxed, switching channels.
‘Captain,’ came the Ultramarine’s voice.
‘I estimate that we have minutes at best, my lord,’ said Dzansk. ‘I can’t listen to my soldiers die without me any longer. I’m joining the fight.’
‘No word yet from Squad Marcus,’ replied Cassian. ‘We are moving up on the hab-district south of the fortress now. Encountering increasing Death Guard resistance. I need you to give us as long as you possibly can, captain.’
‘With respect, my lord, I’ve been fifteen years in the Guard. I fought at Kasr Sonnen. I fought on Thracian Primaris. I fought on the Partox Fields when the Despoiler came for my world. I’ve fought on half a dozen planets since, and I have never, ever given less than my all for the Emperor. The same is
true of every single soldier I lead into battle, so you can be damn well assured that we don’t need your urging to fight this fight to our last breath.’
‘Very good, captain,’ said Cassian . ‘We are fighting too close to the fortress walls to risk deployment of orbital ordnance. Shall I re-task Shipmaster Aethor to support your efforts?’
‘Yes, my lord,’ said Dzansk. ‘Let cleansing fire rain down upon them.’
‘Go with the Emperor’s blessings, Captain Dzansk. It has been an honour.’
‘And you, Lieutenant Cassian. Make this count.’
Dzansk cut the feed, checked that his laspistol was charged and his grenade belt clipped in place, and then thumbed the tank’s internal intercom. ‘Driver, take us in. Let’s give these faithless traitors a taste of Cadian steel.’
‘Absolutely, sir,’ came the reply, and with a roar the Chimera surged forwards.
‘Get that top hatch open,’ said Dzansk. ‘Gunners, grant the Emperor’s mercy to anything that moves.’
‘Yes, sir!’ chorused Astin and Nils, releasing the locking bolts on the Chimera’s roof hatch. They heaved the doors open with a clang and hauled themselves up into firing positions. Dzansk joined them, laspistol in hand, while Kavier added his own lasgun to the arsenal. Behind them, Colour Sergeant Bastel unfurled the banner and raised it high, allowing it to stream out behind the Chimera as it sped between the crumbling ruins.
Lasfire flashed in the chem factory to Dzansk’s right, and the clouds glowed as the first orbital lance beams stabbed down into the battle. Through the driving rain, Dzansk saw bulky shapes loom at the intersection ahead. Bolt shells started to clang from the Chimera’s hull and whip past his head.
The Chimera’s turret tracked and fired, its multi-laser spitting shots into the enemy. The heavy bolter in the hull joined in, thumping shells back at the traitors.
‘Pick your t
argets,’ ordered Dzansk. ‘Fire at will!’
As the Chimera ploughed through the intersection, Plague Marines scattered before it. Dzansk fired his laspistol, shots scorching the heretics’ armour.
Gunner Astin’s meltagun gave its breathy roar, and Nils’ plasma gun joined in with a deafening scream. Their fire turned one heretic to glowing ash and took the legs off another. Lasfire from Dzansk, Kavier and Bastel blew a third Plague Marine from his feet, then their tank was across the intersection and racing away down the street.
‘Excellent marksmanship,’ said Dzansk, grinning fiercely despite himself.
‘Driver, circle through those ruins towards the Eighth. We’ll lend them our support.’
Overhead the sky caught fire again as a lance strike speared downwards and detonated a chem factory. The entire structure collapsed, no doubt burying Cadians and heretics alike. The Chimera slewed around a rain-slick corner, then Dzansk had to cling on tightly as the armoured transport swerved sharply, narrowly missing the burning wreck of a Leman Russ sat in the middle of the street.
Dzansk saw the words Martyr’s Fist still legible on the wreck’s bubbling paintwork.
‘Enemies ahead,’ voxed the driver. ‘Captain, get back inside! Now!’
Dzansk glimpsed a nightmarish mechanical contraption squatting amidst the ruins in front of them, Cadian corpses heaped around it. He had an impression of an armoured mass covered in spikes and guns, with armoured arachnoid limbs and a ghoulish death mask. The cannon that jutted from the monstrosity’s chest fired, and a sudden hammer blow knocked the breath from Dzansk’s lungs.
Suddenly he was tumbling through the air, rain and fire and hurtling ferrocrete all around him. Something hit his cheek, and pain exploded through his jaw. Something else detonated in a cloud of flames and whizzing metal.
Then Dzansk hit the roadway with tremendous force and blacked out.
…Gunner Astin, blood running down her cheek, a chunk of metal piercing her torso, still bracing and firing her meltagun with a scream of defiance.
Blood bursting from her as her body jerks and dances…
…boots thumping near his head, jolting him from darkness, running past him. Screams. Gunfire…
…a familiar figure crawling towards him. Something bulky on its back. Fire.
Fire dancing down its limbs, in its hair. Kavier, reaching out towards him, then slumping face first in the rain…
…darkness and grey…
…water and flame…
Dzansk groaned and rolled onto his back, then gasped in pain as the motion
caused his broken bones to grind together. He opened his eyes, vision swimming, and felt agony radiating from every part of him.
Kavier!
He looked, and saw Kavier’s burned corpse sprawled in the roadway, a dozen yards from a crater full of mangled metal that used to be a Chimera.
Dzansk groaned again, reaching a tentative hand up then snatching it away as he felt how horribly mangled his jaw was; his hand came away soaked in blood.
Running on nothing but defiance, Dzansk forced himself to his feet. His right arm hung uselessly by his side, white bone showing through a rip in the blood-drenched cloth of his sleeve. More blood ran freely from cuts and contusions all over his body, and Dzansk was glad that he couldn’t see what he looked like at that moment.
A corpse too stubborn to die, he thought, then recoiled at the mental image of the enemy’s plague mutants.
Through a haze of pain, he grasped that he was alone. Kavier, Astin and Bastel lay dead in the street. Nils was nowhere to be seen. The monstrous spider-engine was gone too, no doubt stalking away to slaughter the last of his regiment.
Captain Dzansk stood alone, mortally wounded, drenched with rain and full of sorrow and hate. He limped down the street and bent over Bastel’s mangled body. With his one good arm, he fumbled at the pole of the regimental standard. It took him three attempts, but he managed to hoist the rain-slick pole aloft. The banner still hung from it, singed and stained but in one piece.
Dzansk turned from the wreck and began to limp, one step at a time, towards the distant sound of gunfire. While there was breath in his body, he thought, he would continue to do what he could.
Heavy footsteps behind Dzansk made him turn, and he leaned on the banner pole for support. His eyes widened as he saw hulking Terminators lumbering towards him. At their head strode a horn-helmed monster with a tri-bladed axe.
The enemy’s leader, he thought feverishly. It had to be.
He cast about himself for a weapon, or for a vox headset to call down fire on his own position. Anything.
The huge Chaos lord lumbered closer, engulfing Dzansk in a sweat-thick
reek of putrefaction that made him gag, then groan at the agony that that motion caused him. Hate flared in his chest as he realised the figure was laughing.
‘By Grandfather’s cauldron!’ exclaimed the Terminator. His voice was a deep, bubbling horror, like the last death rattle of a dozen drowning men.
‘This must be the leader of this merry band of fools.’
Dzansk tried to limp backwards, still casting desperately around for a gun. If he could reach Astin’s body, then perhaps Chonsky’s meltagun could strike one more blow before the end. That spark of hope fizzled out as the hulking Terminators surrounded him, hemming him inside a ring of rusted, seeping metal and flyblown flesh. The stench was almost more than he could bear.
Dzansk leaned on the banner pole and hauled himself upright, staring defiantly as the horn-helmed lord loomed over him.
‘You stand in the presence of Lord Gurloch,’ snarled one of the Terminators, a disgusting vision with a single bulbous eye where his head should be. ‘You should be on your knees, worm.’
‘No, Blorthos,’ said Gurloch. ‘No, this one has earned the right to stand.’ He looked down upon Dzansk, whose hate-filled stare didn’t waver. ‘Look at you. Jaw hanging by sinews. Arm broken. Organs ruptured, bones cracked, flesh veritably seething with disease. And still you refuse to fall. In another life, my father might have welcomed you with open arms.’
Dzansk tried to speak, but managed nothing more than a slurry of bloodied grunts. Lord Gurloch laughed again, his mirth as genuine as it was horrifying.
‘I shall assume that whatever you were attempting to say, it was somewhat less complimentary,’ he said, eliciting cruel chuckles from his warriors. Off in the distance, something exploded as lance fire stabbed down from the sky.
‘You have proven yourself a stubborn and tenacious foe,’ said Gurloch, his tone growing serious, ‘and for that I salute you. But your mind is closed, your eyes shut to the glory of Chaos, and you have cost me time and warriors.’
He reached out and grasped the banner pole, plucking it from Dzansk’s hands as easily as taking a toy from a child. Gurloch cast the banner into the mud, then wrapped his fingers around Dzansk’s neck and hoisted him easily off the ground.
The captain gurgled in agony as broken bones crunched together in his jaw, Gurloch’s rust-metal fingers tightening on his windpipe and vertebrae. His good arm twitched and spasmed as he felt rot spreading through his flesh
from the heretic’s touch.
‘I am done with your little soldiers,’ said Gurloch. ‘I have wrung the last droplets of misery and pain from your husks. Now you will die, then the Ultramarines will die, and then – at last – I will be free to spread the blessings of Nurgle across the stars.’
Dzansk was dying, his tormentor’s words echoing to him down a long, dark tunnel. His fingers twitched with the last flickers of his life. He felt them touch something.
Cold metal.
Pin.
In his pain and bewilderment, he had forgotten. But now he remembered, and he wordlessly thanked the Emperor for this final gift.
With his last breath, Captain Dzansk summoned the strength to pluck out the pin and let it tumble slowly away. He went with it, drifting into darkness like an autumn leaf on the Partox fields of home.
He was already dead when the krak grenades on his belt exploded.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Cassian charged up a heap of rain-slick rubble, shrugging bolt-rounds from his shoulder guard. He swept Duty in a killing arc, lopping off the end of the Plague Marine’s gun along with the fleshy tentacle that held it.
His enemy bellowed in anger and tried to smash his mailed fist into Cassian’s faceplate. The lieutenant wove aside and slashed his sword through his enemy’s legs, causing the heretic to fall to his knees. Cassian pressed his bolt rifle one-handed against his enemy’s helm and blew off his head.
‘They’re retreating to the next line,’ voxed Dematris. ‘Heavy covering fire coming down from the right. Brother-lieutenant, they’re digging in again.’
A spray of diseased filth rained down from above, and Cassian threw himself out of its path. He cursed as droplets spattered his armour, causing ceramite to hiss and bubble. The remaining two battle-brothers of Intercessor squad Telor were less fortunate: they staggered in pain as their armoured forms were eaten away by virulent bacteria.
‘Brothers, find cover and suppress the enemy,’ ordered Cassian. ‘Inceptors, encircle their position to the right and open the way for Aggressor squad Doras to turn their flank.’
The Ultramarines were less than half a mile from the front gate of the astropathic fortress, but Cassian felt his frustration growing with every second. The enemy had dug in with veteran skill. Every time the Ultramarines overran one Death Guard position, they found themselves enfiladed from two more. They were pressing forwards through the rubble heaps and ruins of the hab-district, but not quickly enough. Close by, Cassian could hear the endless groans of plague mutants and the chatter of the fortress’ wall guns.
Crusade & Other Stories - Dan Abnett Et Al. Page 8
