by Nick Kyme
Reaching for his plasma pistol, he stopped short. The atmospheric readings in his battle-helm were showing a massive concentration of hydrogen; the air inside the dome was saturated with it.
To Dak’ir’s left flank, Ba’ken was levelling his heavy flamer as a massive surge of cultists spilled into the hall… ‘Wai—’
‘Cleanse and burn!’
As soon as the incendiary hit the air, the weapon exploded. Ba’ken was engulfed in white fire then smashed sideways, through the rockcrete wall and into an adjoining chamber where he lay unmoving.
‘Brother down!’ bellowed Dak’ir, Emek offering suppressing fire with his bolter as he came forward, chewing up cultists like meat sacks.
More were piling through in a steady stream, seemingly unaffected by the bolt storm. Picks and blades gave way to heavy stubbers and autocannons, and Dak’ir saw the first wave for what it was: a flesh shield.
Another Salamander came up on the sergeant’s other flank, Brother Ak’sor. He was readying his flamer when Dak’ir shouted into the comm-feed.
‘Stow all flamers and meltas… the air thick with a gaseous hydrogen amalgam. Bolters and secondary weapons only.’ The Salamanders obeyed at once.
The press of cultists came on thickly now, small-arms fire whickering from their ranks as the heavy weapons were prepared to shoot. Dak’ir severed the head from one insurgent and punched through the sternum of another.
‘Hold them,’ he snapped, withdrawing a bloody fist.
Ak’sor had pulled out a bolt pistol. Bullets pattered against his armour as he let rip, chewing up a bunch of cultists with autoguns. The dull thump-thud of the heavier cannons starting up filled the room and Ak’sor staggered as multiple rounds struck him. From somewhere in the melee, a gas-propelled grenade whined and Ak’sor disappeared behind exploding shrapnel. When the smoke had cleared, the Salamander was down.
‘Retreat to the lobby, all Salamanders,’ shouted Dak’ir, solid shot rebounding off his armour as he hacked down another cultist that came within his death arc.
The Astartes fell back as one, two battle-brothers coming forward to drag Ba’ken and Ak’sor from the battle. As Dak’ir’s squad reached the stairs and started to climb down, Sergeant Lok rushed in. Due to the presence of the explosive hydrogen gas the Incinerators were down to a single heavy bolter, strafing the doorway and ripping up cultists with a punishing salvo.
There was scant respite as the enemy pressed its advantage, wired-mouthed maniacs hurling themselves into the furious bolter fire in their droves. Brother Ionnes was chewing through the belt feed of his heavy bolter with abandon, his fellow Salamanders adding their own weapons to the barrage, but the cultists came on still. Like automatons, they refused to yield to panic, the fates of their shattered brethren failing to stall, let alone rout them.
‘They’re unbreakable!’ bellowed Lok, smashing an insurgent to pulp with his power fist, whilst firing his bolter one-handed. A chainsaw struck his outstretched arm seemingly from nowhere and he grimaced, his weapon falling from nerveless fingers. Red-eyed eviscerator priests were moving through the throng, wielding immense double-handed chainblades. Dak’ir crushed the zealot’s skull with a punch, but realised they were slowly being enveloped.
‘Back to the entrance,’ he cried, taking up Lok’s fallen bolter and spraying an arc of fire across his left flank. The ones he killed didn’t even scream. Step by agonising step, the Salamanders withdrew. There was a veritable bullet hail coming from the enemy now, whose numbers seemed limitless and came from every direction at once.
Inside the comm-feed it was chaos. Fragmented reports came in, plagued by static interference, from both Anvil and Hammer. ‘Heavy casualties… enemy armour moving in… thousands everywhere… brother down!’
‘Captain Kadai…’ Dak’ir yelled into the vox. ‘Brother-captain, this is Flame. Please respond.’
After a long minute, Kadai’s broken reply came back.
‘Kadai… here… Fall… back… regroup… Aereon Square…’
‘Captain, I have two battle-brothers badly injured and in need of medical attention.’
Another thirty seconds passed, before another stuttering response.
‘Apothecary… lost… Repeat… Fugis is gone…’
Gone. Not wounded or down, just gone. Dak’ir felt a ball of hot pain develop in his chest. Stoic resolve outweighed his anger – he gave the order for a fighting withdrawal to Aereon Square, and then raised Tsu’gan on the comm-feed.
‘VULKAN’S BLOOD! I will not retreat in the face of this rabble,’ Tsu’gan snarled at Iagon. ‘Tell the Ignean, I have received no such order.’
Anvil had, under Tsu’gan’s steely leadership, broken free of the ambush without casualties, though Brother Honorious was limping badly and Sergeant Ul’shan had lost an eye when the trans-loader hit and the drums of incendiary heaped onboard had exploded. Without use of their multi-meltas, Tsu’gan had torn through the vehicle wreckage himself, scything cultists down on the other side with his combi-bolter. They were falling back to defended positions in the wider street beyond when Dak’ir’s message came through.
At some point during the fighting, Tsu’gan had damaged his battle-helm and he’d torn it off. Since then he’d been relying on Iagon for communication with the other assault groups.
‘We are Salamanders, born in fire,’ he raged zealously, ‘the anvil upon which our enemies are broken. We do not yield. Ever!’ Iagon dutifully relayed the message, indicating his sergeant’s refusal to comply.
Further up the street, something loud and heavy was rumbling towards them. It broke Tsu’gan’s stride for just a moment as a tank, festooned with armour plates and daubed with the gaping maw symbol of the Cult of Truth, came into view. Swinging around its fat metal turret, the tank’s battle cannon fired, jetting smoke and rocking the vehicle back on its tracks.
Tsu’gan had his warriors in a defensive battle line, strafing the oncoming cultist hordes with controlled bursts of bolter fire. The tank shell hit with all the force of a thunderbolt, and tore the ragged line apart.
Salamanders were tossed into the air with chunks of rockcrete chewed out of the road, and fell like debris.
‘Close ranks. Hold positions,’ Tsu’gan snarled, crouching down next to a partially destroyed barricade once occupied by Stratosan Aircorps.
Iagon shoved one of the bodies out of the way, so he could rest his bolter in a makeshift firing lip.
‘Still nothing from the captain,’ he said between bursts.
Tsu’gan’s reaction to the news was guarded, his face fixed in a perpetual scowl.
‘Ul’shan,’ he barked to the sergeant of the Devastators, ‘all fire on that tank. In the name of Vulkan, destroy it.’
Bolter fire pranged against the implacable vehicle, grinding forward as it readied for another shot with its battle cannon. In the turret, a crazed cultist took up the heavy stubber and started hosing the Salamanders with solid shot.
‘You others,’ bellowed Tsu’gan, standing up and unhitching something from his belt, ‘grenades on my lead.’ He launched a krak grenade overarm. It soared through the air at speed, impelled by Tsu’gan’s strength, and rolled into the tank’s path. Several more followed, thunking to earth like metal hail.
At the same time, Iagon’s bolter fire shredded the cultist in the stubber nest, whilst Sergeant Ul’shan’s heavy bolters hammered the tank’s front armour and tracks. An explosive round from the salvo clipped one of the krak grenades just as the armoured vehicle was driving over it. A chained detonation tore through the tank as the incendiaries exploded, ripping it wide open.
‘Glory to Prometheus!’ roared Tsu’gan, punching the air as his warriors chorused after him.
His fervour was dampened when he saw shadows moving through the smoke and falling shrapnel. Three more tanks trundled into view.
Tsu’gan shook his head in disbelief.
‘Mercy of Vulkan…’ he breathed, just as the comm-link with Captain Kadai wa
s restored. The sergeant glared at Iagon with iron-hard eyes.
‘They were falling back to Aereon Square.’
Dak’ir had been right. Tsu’gan felt his jaw tighten.
‘HOLD THE LINE!’ Kadai bellowed into the comm-feed. ‘We make our stand here.’
The Salamanders held position stoically, strung out across the chewed-up defences, controlled bursts thundering from their bolters. Behind them were the armoured transports. Storm bolters shuddered from turret mounts on the Rhinos and Fire Anvil’s twin-linked assault cannon whirred in a frenzy of heavy fire, though the Land Raider’s flamestorm side sponsons were powered down.
The Salamanders had converged quickly on Aereon Square, the fighting withdrawal of the three assault groups less cautious than their original attack.
The slab floor of the square was cratered by bomb blasts and fire-blackened. Fallen pillars from adjacent buildings intruded on its perimeter. The centre of the broad plaza was dominated by a felled statue of one of Stratos’s Imperial leaders, encircled by a damaged perimeter wall. It was here that Kadai and his warriors made their stand.
The cultists came on in the face of heavy fire, swarming from every avenue, every alcove, like hell-born ants. Hundreds were slain in minutes. But despite the horrendous casualties, they were undeterred and made slow progress across the killing ground. The corpses piled up like sandbags at the edge of the square.
‘None shall pass, Fireborn!’ raged Kadai, the furious zeal of Vulkan, his progenitor, filling him with righteous purpose. Endure – it was one of the central tenets of the Promethean Cult, endure and conquer.
The bullet storms crossed each other over a shortening distance as the cultist thousands poured intense fire into the Salamanders’ defensive positions. Chunks of perimeter wall, and massive sections of the fallen statue, were chipped apart in the maelstrom. Brother Zo’tan took a round in the left pauldron, then another in the neck, grunted and fell to his knees. Dak’ir moved to cover him, armour shuddering as he let rip with a borrowed bolter. Insurgent bodies were destroyed in the furious barrage, torn apart by explosive rounds, sundered by salvos from heavy bolters, shredded by the withering hail from assault cannons whining red-hot. Still the cultists came.
Dak’ir gritted his teeth and roared.
‘No retreat!’
Slowly, inevitably, the hordes began to thin. Kadai ordered a halt to the sustained barrage. Like smoke, dispersing from a doused pyre, the insurgents were drifting away, backing off silently into the gloom until they were at last gone from sight.
The tenacity of the Salamanders had kept the foe at bay this time. Aereon Square was held.
‘Are they giving up?’ asked Dak’ir, breathing hard underneath his power armour as he tried to slow his body down from its ultra-heightened battle-state.
‘They crawl back to their nests,’ Kadai growled. His jaw clenched with impotent anger. ‘The city is theirs… for now.’ Stalking from the defence line, Kadai quickly set up sentries to watch the approaches to the square, whilst at the same time contacting Techmarine Argos to send reinforcements from Vulkan’s Wrath, and a Thunderhawk to extract the dead and wounded. The toll was much heavier than he had expected. Fourteen wounded and six dead. Most keenly felt of all, though, was the loss of Fugis.
The Salamanders were a small Chapter, their near-annihilation during one of the worst atrocities of the Heresy, when they were betrayed by their erstwhile brothers, still felt some ten thousand years later. They had been Legion then, but now they were merely some eight hundred Astartes. Induction of new recruits was slow and only compounded their low fighting strength.
Without their Apothecary and his prodigious medical skills, the most severe injuries suffered by Kadai’s Third Company would remain untended and further debilitate their combat effectiveness. Worse still, the gene-seeds of those killed in action would be unharvested, for only Fugis possessed the knowledge and ability to remove these progenoids safely. And it was through these precious organs that future Space Marines were engineered, allowing even the slain to serve their Chapter in death.
The losses suffered by Third Company then became permanent with the loss of their Apothecary, a solemn fact that put Kadai in a black mood.
‘We will re-assault the city proper as soon as we’re reinforced,’ he raged.
‘We should level the full weight of the company against them. Then these heretics will break,’ asserted Tsu’gan, clenching a fist to emphasise his vehemence.
Both he and Dak’ir accompanied Kadai as he walked from the battle line, leaving Veteran Sergeant N’keln to organise the troops. The captain unclasped his battle-helm to remove it. His white crest of hair was damp with sweat. His eyes glowed hotly, emanating anger.
‘Yes, they will learn that the Salamanders do not yield easily.’
Tsu’gan grinned ferally at that.
Dak’ir thought only of the brothers they had already lost, and the others that would fall in another hard-headed assault. The traitors were dug-in and had numbers – without flamers to flush out ambushers and other traps, breaking Cirrion would be tough.
Then something happened that forestalled the captain’s belligerent plan for vengeance. Far across Aereon Square, figures were emerging through the smoke and dust. They crept from their hiding places and shambled towards the Salamanders, shoulders slumped in despair.
Dak’ir’s eyes widened when he saw how many there were, ‘Survivors… the civilians of Cirrion.’
‘OPEN IT,’ RASPED the dragon giant. His scaled armour coursed with eldritch energy, throwing sharp flashes of light into the gloom. He and his warriors had reached a subterranean metal chamber that ended in an immense portal of heavy plasteel.
Another giant wearing the red-scaled plate came forward. Tendrils of smoke emanated from the grille in his horned helmet. The silence of the outer vault was broken by the hissing, crackling intake of breath before the horned one unleashed a furious plume of flame. It surged hungrily through the grille-plate in a roar, smashing against the vault door and devouring it.
Reinforced plasteel bars blackened and corroded in seconds, layers of ablative ceramite melted away, before the adamantium plate of the door itself glowed white-hot and sloughed into molten slag.
The warriors had travelled swiftly through the mag-tram tunnel, forging deep into the lesser known corridors of Cirrion. None had seen them approach. Their leader had made certain that the earlier massacre left no witnesses. After almost an hour, they had reached their destination. Here, in the catacombs of the city, the hydrogen gas clouds could not penetrate. They were far from the fighting; the battles going on in the distant districts of Cirrion were dull and faraway through many layers of rockcrete and metal. ‘Is it here?’ asked a third warrior as the ragged portal into the vault cooled, his voice like crackling magma. Inside were hundreds of tiny strongboxes, held here for the aristocracy of Stratos so they could secure that which they held most precious. No one could have known of the artefact that dwelled innocuously in one of those boxes. Even upon seeing it, few would have realised its significance, the terrible destructive forces it could unleash.
‘Oh yes…’ replied the eldritch warrior, closing crimson-lidded eyes as he drew of his power. ‘It is exactly where he said it would be.’
DESPERATE AND DISHEVELLED, the Stratosan masses tramped into Aereon Square.
Most wore little more than rags, the scraps of whatever clothed them when the cultists had taken over the city. Some clutched the tattered remnants of scorched belongings, the last vestiges of whatever life they once had in Cirrion now little more than ashen remains. Many had strips of dirty cloth or ragged scarves tied around their noses and mouths to keep out the worst of the suffocating hydrogen gas. A few wore battered respirators, and shared them with others; small groups taking turns with the rebreather cups. The hydrogen had no such ill-effects on the Salamanders, their Astartes multi-lung and oolitic kidney acting in concert to portion off and siphon out any toxins, thus enabling them
to breathe normally.
‘An entire city paralysed by terror…’ said Ba’ken as another piece of shrapnel was removed from his face.
The burly Salamander was sat up against the perimeter wall, and being tended to by Brother Emek who had some rudimentary knowledge of field surgery. Ba’ken’s battle-helm had all but shattered in the explosion that destroyed his beloved heavy flamer and, after being propelled through the wall, fragments of it were still embedded in his flesh.
‘This is but the first of them, brother,’ replied Dak’ir, regarding the weary passage of the survivors with pity as they passed the Salamander sentries.
Aereon Square was slowly filling. Dak’ir followed the trail of pitiful wretches being led away in huddled throngs by Stratosan Aircorps to the Cirrion gate. From there he knew an armoured battalion idled, ready to escort the survivors across the sky-bridge and into the relative safety of Nimbaros. Almost a hundred had already been moved and more still were massing in the square as the Aircorps struggled to cope with them all.
‘Why show themselves now?’ asked Ba’ken, with a nod to Emek who took his leave having finally excised all the jutting shrapnel. The wounds were already healing; the Larraman cells in Ba’ken’s Astartes blood accelerating clotting and scarring, the ossmodula implanted in his brain encouraging rapid bone growth and regeneration.
Dak’ir shrugged. ‘The enemy’s withdrawal to consolidate whatever ground they hold, together with our arrival must have galvanised them, I suppose. Made them reach out for salvation.’
‘It is a grim sight.’
‘Yes…’ Dak’ir agreed, suddenly lost in thought. The war on Stratos had suddenly adopted a different face entirely now: not one bound by wire or infected by taint, but one that pleaded for deliverance, that had given all there was to give, a face that was ordinary and innocent, and afraid. As he watched the human detritus tramp by, the sergeant took in the rest of the encampment. The perimeter wall formed a kind of demarcation line, dividing the territory of the Salamanders and that held by the Cult of Truth. Kadai was adamant they would hold onto it. A pair of Thunderfire cannons patrolled the area on grinding tracks, servos whirring as their Techmarines cycled the cannons through various firing routines.
