by Paul Kearney
‘I will go with you,’ he told Proxis as the Ancient lingered there.
Then he turned to Fennick and the rest of the Zalidari staff, who stood mute. ‘Full mobilisation. I want every man up on the walls. I do not think this is a diversion, but we cannot take that chance. I will monitor the command vox frequency. Inform me at once if an assault materialises anywhere else along the line.’
Fennick bowed. Before he could say anything, Calgar had swept out of the room with Proxis in his wake.
Sergeant Avila sent the blast of promethium into the face of the nearest ork, and, still depressing the trigger of his combi-bolter, he walked the white fury of the flame to left and right, engulfing those who were spreading out around it. The foremost orks burned like torches, shrieking and bellowing and clawing at their cooked flesh. He booted one aside, drops of promethium burning on his own armour, and strode on.
‘Twenty-fourth floor. One more to the gate controls. Let us hope they sealed the door. Brother Gauros, Brother Surian, you’re up. They’re massing up the corridor.’
The passageway was full of acrid smoke, and bolter rounds were zipping down it. One clanged off Avila’s shoulderplate. Another snapped back his head as it gouged a furrow in the ceramite of his helm.
‘Suppress these scum, brothers. We have stood here long enough.’
The corridor was wide enough for three Adeptus Astartes, and now two of Avila’s brethren flanked him, both bearing heavy bolters. They opened up, the massive weapons jumping in their hands, the 20mm rounds whining as they sped through their belts from the magazines on their backs. A torrent of tracer fire sped over the burning orks and the far end of the corridor erupted in shrieks and the multiple slaps of the rounds exploding in flesh.
‘Well enough,’ Avila said. ‘Forward by twos. There should be a stairwell on our right sixty yards ahead.’
More gunfire, a hellish racket. Rounds thumped into the three Ultramarines with flat smacking sounds. Shards of ceramite and plasteel sparked through the smoke. Avila saw Brother Gauros’ sigil blink amber a moment, but neither he nor brother Surian backed so much as a step. They laid down a flood of bolter fire and followed it up with gouts from the flamer, blasting almost blind into the smoke, following the bright shapes that came and went on the infrared.
‘Gauros, are you hit?’ Avila demanded.
‘Light wound,’ Gauros grunted. ‘Systems nominal. I’ve had worse in training.’
‘End those scum. We must move forward, brothers. We cannot allow the xenos access to the gate controls.’
The corridor was solid reinforced rockcrete, but the bolter fire was shredding it into powder, deepening the fog of smoke that billowed within. They stepped over ork bodies that had been chewed up by the heavy bolters, blood and dust making a red mud under their feet.
‘Here is the stairwell,’ Brother Surian said. And then, ‘Grenade!’ Without hesitation he threw himself on top of the hissing little cylinder that had tumbled down from the stairs above. It went off with a dull crump that blasted his body four feet into the air. His shoulder plate clanged off Avila’s helm. In the readout, Surian’s sigil flashed crimson.
Avila dashed into the stairwell and ran up the stone steps with every ounce of speed his body and power armour could give him. Halfway up he saw a dark shape and fired a long burst, heard a bellow of agony, and stood, the targeting cogitator in his helm lining them up – three orks with bolt pistols and chainswords. They came charging down the stairs at him and died one after the other. He set his boot on the wriggling back of the last one as it lay wounded and blew out its skull with a single point-blank round.
‘Stairwell clear. Move up. How is Brother Surian?’
Gauros’ voice came back at him. ‘Gone, sergeant.’
Avila paused a second, then said, ‘Make haste, brothers. With me – we are almost there.’
He had known Surian for twenty years. They had served together on the Fidelis for six.
‘Farewell, my brother,’ Avila murmured. Then he raised the combi-flamer he carried as more orks appeared on the stairs above him.
Calgar jumped off the roof of the Chimera that had borne him through the city and led the Ultramarines into the smoking hell that was the Vanaheim Gate. As he pelted up the stairs he engaged his storm bolters, and the chainlinked belts that fed them clicked and chimed as they swung from the dorsal ammo well. No more worrying about ammo. Not today.
Sergeant Avila’s voice came over the vox. ‘We are at the gate control room. The door is still sealed. Heavy enemy presence on this level. We will go firm here and defend the door.’
‘Acknowledged,’ Calgar said. He scrolled through the formations in his helm displays, saw that one of Avila’s squad was dead and three were nursing wounds. He had been right to come here. It was the main effort of the enemy, and its strategy was close to success.
He felt the rage rise in him. I have been complacent, he scourged himself. I underestimated the guile of the orks. Their leader is more formidable than I would have believed.
Up the stairs he went, so fast that he left Proxis and the rest of the squad behind. He passed Brother Surian’s body and ran up the last staircase with the sound of fighting raging above.
He came out on a wide landing, fifty yards to a side. It was full of dials and monitors and data screens; the control panels for the elevators and the fire control systems were here.
The space was full of orks.
Wide blast doors, as heavy and formidable as those on the entryway of a missile silo, rose to one side, and in front of them Sergeant Avila and his brethren were fighting hand to hand now. A burst of promethium blossomed out, engulfing an Ultramarine, and the battle-brother fought on while he burned. The rage rose in Calgar’s throat until he thought he would choke on it.
‘Guilliman!’ he roared, augmenting his own voice with the suit speakers. His battle cry rippled through the smoke, and as the orks turned he pointed his fists at them and opened up with the storm bolters.
He felt the savage, satisfying jump of the weapons’ recoil through his forearms, and saw the nearest orks disintegrate as the heavy rounds blasted clear through them and into the flesh of those that stood behind. Then he surged forward, lighting up the Gauntlets of Ultramar, and powered bodily into the mass of orks before him.
His fists swept out and the disruption fields that cloaked them tore the enemy apart. He shrugged off the strike of chainswords, feeling the teeth of them snag and grind into the superlative ancient armour that protected him. A chop of his right wrist beheaded one ork that was snarling almost in his face. He grasped the protruding lower jaw of another and tore it out of the creature’s skull.
As quick as the blink of an eye, he switched back to the storm bolters and slammed out a volley, the muzzles of the weapons almost touching his foes. They sizzled with burning ork meat.
He raised his power fists, strode forward, and pitched in again, his arms slamming back and forth, a blur of mayhem. A bolt pistol was fired at his helm, and for a moment the concussion of the impact blinded him, and his display fizzed and darkened.
He struck out on instinct, switched back and forth between power fists and storm bolters, blasted the enemy back, and booted out at grappling claws that sought to tear him down.
His helm display steadied, though there was a line of white broken static buzzing across it now, and the Iron Halo rune was greyed out. He felt the suit inject him with an analgesic in the side of his neck, though he did not mind the pain. He welcomed it. He welcomed the blood that painted his armour, the clots of ork flesh that festooned it and hung dripping from his fingers. Moments like this were what he was born for – to bring death to the enemies of mankind, to serve his Emperor and his Chapter, to fight for his brothers.
He clamped down on the battle rage, stepped back with another roar of storm-bolter fire. The enemy was thinned out. They were peeling
away for the broken doors at the back of the chamber. Calgar looked around. Proxis had been fighting at his side, guarding his back in the melee, and for those few minutes of slaughter he had not even been aware of the Ancient’s presence. And Sergeant Avila was moving up with his entire squad now. There were a dozen Ultramarines standing together, and the orks knew they stood no chance against such a force. They were streaming away, yowling with hate and frustration, turning to fire wild bursts as they withdrew towards the stairwells.
‘Brother Jared, Brother Antigonus, stay by gate control,’ Calgar said, breathing deep. ‘The rest, follow me. Let us cleanse this place, brothers.’
They fought upwards, level by level, room by room. Calgar fell back and let Avila’s brethren gut the place, a grenade through every doorway followed by a volley of bolter fire or a blast of the flamer. The passageways were choked with ork dead, the big xenos lying in mounds that the Ultramarines had to clamber over and pull aside in order to get through some of the narrower doorways. It was bitter, close-quarter fighting, and Proxis barely had room to swing his axe in places, but he snapped off rounds from his bolt pistol, head-shots every one.
The ork assault troops had nowhere to run to, so at the last they stood and fought and died where they stood, or else they charged the Adeptus Astartes warriors in a savage attempt to bring their superior strength to bear.
When they closed with Avila’s brethren, Calgar and Proxis stepped up and broke them apart, hacking them down. They waded through blood and flame and thickets of autogun fire that careered in mad screeches off the walls and tumbled with clangs and sparks off the armour of the Ultramarines.
Two more of Avila’s squad went down, struck by lucky shots that came out of the smoke and chaos, but both were alive, and now, coming up behind the Ultramarines, Lieutenant Janus and his men worked to pull the injured battle-brethren clear of the fighting. It took four or five of them straining and grunting to drag each huge warrior out of the melee, while the rest of the squad fought on without pause, grouped around Calgar and Proxis.
Up again, more stairways, more grenades raining down on them, to be kicked out of the way or thrown back into the faces of the orks before they went off. Finally, Calgar noted a change in the air. The smoke was being sucked out by wind from the outside. They were on the topmost level of the Vanaheim, and the orks were pulling back onto the roof itself, a two-acre expanse that was lashed by warm rain and pitted by the fighting of the initial assault.
They were under the sky at last, and the fight opened out here, the heavy bolters brought up again to hose down the scattered ranks of the enemy. Avila’s squad ducked into shell craters that had been blasted into the thick rockcrete roof, or settled into empty weapons emplacements, dozens of dead Zalidari militia lying scattered around them. From here they picked off any ork that raised its head, methodically working their way across the roof.
Beyond the Vanaheim, the night sky was lit up with explosions and tracer. Calgar ran over to the battlements and saw, three hundred feet below, the great mass of orks that had gathered at the foot of the barbican, like seaweed washed up there by the waves of a sea.
He thumped his fizzing helm and blinked on the Basilisk sigil. ‘Beta Primaris, we have target in the open, massed formation at the south wall. Defensive fire on location grid alpha one, fire for range. Fire now.’
‘Acknowledged.’ The Basilisk battery had been waiting.
‘All reserve tubes, same grid. Fire now.’
He waited, as the fight went on around him. Looking up at the rain-dark night he thought he saw a faint brightness on the horizon – it would be dawn soon.
Proxis cut in half an ork that tried to charge him, and held up his axe as the ork blood sizzled on the power field that enclosed the blade.
Calgar barely registered the deed. He was looking out from the walls, south across the beetling plain where the enemy massed in untold thousands. The big formations were many miles away, hardly to be made out even with the enhanced optics of his armour and bionic eye. But here – right here – they were packed tight in anticipation of the Vanaheim Gate opening. They would pay for that presumption.
He could see the ork host beginning to break away from the walls. They had failed – by a narrow margin, but they had failed, and knew what must be coming. Now they were retreating to their camps.
But they had left it too late.
He heard the earthshaker shells in the air, a roar like passing freight haulers. They impacted six hundred yards south of the Vanaheim Gate, throwing up huge fountains of earth, and the shockwave staggered the air and sent the rain flying sideways.
‘Beta Primaris, all tubes, on target. Fire for effect.’
All over the southern districts of the city, the mortar teams of the militia were dropping bombs down their tubes. He could see the spark of them rise up into the air, dozens of the squat bombs propelled skywards, a sight beautiful to behold. And above them, the high parabolic arc of more earthshakers inbound.
The ork warbands below were trying to scatter, but the torrent of mortars found them while they were still packed too tight to miss. The plain south of the Vanaheim erupted in a forest of explosions, and down came the earthshakers to break it up in cataclysmic fountains of mud. Calgar glimpsed dozens of ork bodies tossed skywards before the flash of the explosions greened out the infra of his optics.
‘On target, repeat, on target. Fire schedule Primaris and Secundus.’
He saw the hellish light of the barrage reflected in the black lenses of Proxis’ helm, fountains of fire rising in the night. His auto-senses dulled the noise of it to protect his hearing.
‘All call signs, walk your fire south on axis alpha two. Enemy in the open. I want promethium shells mixed in.’
Confirmation came back in a score of flickers in his vox display. The fizzing damage of his helm was irritating him, so he took it off, and breathed the unalloyed reek of Zalidar’s air, thick with smoke and slaughter. He felt the rain on his face, refreshing despite the warmth of it.
Proxis unhelmed also. Behind them, Avila had brought his squad forward and they were manning such heavy weapons as had survived on the summit of the Vanaheim. Janus’ troopers fanned out behind them, a hundred militiamen, most of whom had never seen an ork up close until tonight.
The sky was growing bright, and in it lights could be seen coming up from the south.
‘Flight of enemy fighter-bombers inbound,’ Calgar said automatically. ‘All anti-aircraft batteries, engage at will.’
The Hydras on the defence towers roared out along half the perimeter, and the growing dawn light in the sky was striped with an intense cloud of tracer, bright skeins of it in a concentration so thick that it illuminated the underside of the rainclouds above.
The incoming aircraft ran into a wall of fire, but kept coming. Four were shot down before the walls were reached, their broken flaming carcasses spiralling down into the hordes of orks still fleeing from the artillery barrage below. Two more were shot down over the city and came down in districts close to the Alphon Spire, exploding in bright globes of fire.
That was not the end of it; a series of secondary detonations went off, larger than the initial impact. A whole block of habs and warehouses was destroyed in a rippling flash that lit up the district and thundered out across the city in pulsing shockwaves.
The last fighter-bomber was crippled, but its pilot managed to guide it on a suicide course until it smashed into the side of the spire itself. Calgar watched the Alphon Spire burn, its head lost in cloud, lights all over its massive slopes, and the bright boil of the crash flickering in its flank.
He turned to regard the swathe of ruin below the spire, the explosions still cooking off, and frowned.
After that, no more attacks were launched. It was full daylight by that time, and it was possible to see the dismal spectacle that surrounded them.
Out on t
he shot-torn muck of the plain, the carcasses of thousands of orks lay, most steaming in bloody ragged fragments. A whole army had been destroyed there. The ork dead created a mire of blood-filled craters and mounded meat.
But the city had suffered too. The top half of the Vanaheim Gate was largely gutted. It was a monolithic blackened hulk that towered over the walls, smoke still streaming from its gun-ports, the roof of it a reeking wasteland of the dead and dying, wrecked armaments, broken emplacements and the low-hanging fog of cordite.
And at the base of the Alphon Spire and the districts around it, the fires still burned. Hundreds of tiny figures were fighting the flames. Others were demolishing whole streets of habs with heavy vehicles and explosives, so that the fires might not spread. The steady crump of these concussions boomed out in dull succession, like a minute-gun at a funeral.
Calgar felt suddenly weary. Not in body – in the secret place within his mind where the faultline lay. But he fought it, battled against it with anger and prayer. He breathed deep.
‘Well, Proxis, I suppose we must start clearing up this mess.’
Fourteen
‘The enemy is more enterprising than I gave him credit for,’ Calgar said harshly. ‘That error is mine alone. I had no idea he could muster so many assault troops for an aerial attack.’
‘Well, he doesn’t have them any more,’ Proxis said with relish.
‘The attack was seen off with massive ork casualties – that is the main thing. I congratulate you on your victory, my lord,’ Admiral Glenck said.
They were all gathered in the map room of the palace, all the high command. Calgar glanced impatiently at the fleet officer, but did not comment.
The Lord of Macragge had taken off his armour and was clad now in a simple hooded blue robe without sign or sigil. It had been run up hastily for him by seamstresses in the lower city. His armour was undergoing repair. Brother Orhan was working on it, aided by the best artificers in Zalathras. The ancient power armour had taken a beating during the battle that even its superlative construction could not shrug off, and the dorsal magazines were being reloaded with bolter rounds fashioned here in the city’s manufactoria.
