The tech-priest at the pulpit-comm smiled in satisfaction, a hundred artificial muscle-bundles articulating the near-dead flesh of his mouth into something approximating the correct facial expression.
“Target confirmed,” Magos Kappel said.
While on the surface of the snowball world everyone and everything—from caterpillar-tracked servitors, as large as a full-grown grox and twenty times as strong, to huge earthmoving machines—was pressed into service in preparing the mining facility for the siege that was to come, the Glory of Gehenna prepared to deliver a dolorous blow against the enemy and pre-empt the xenos attack on Aes Metallum Hive.
Dropping into low orbit, the Mechanicus vessel locked onto the coordinates relayed from the surface by Thunderhawk Fortis’ machine spirit, the signal boosted by Magos Winze’s Mechanicus-maintained communication arrays.
A seismic shudder passed along the length of the Glory of Gehenna as with a silent scream the vessel’s port and starboard laser batteries fired on the surface of Ixya. They hit the ground with a deviation of only point zero six degrees, due to atmospheric distortion, and pounded the excavation site and the xenos ruins with everything the servants of the Machine-God on board could coax from the ancient weapons batteries, channelling as much energy as they could from the leviathan’s ancient plasma core.
Atmospheric gases were split into their component elements as the beams of focussed retina-searing light, as hot as the heart of a sun, speared down through the cloud-festooned atmosphere of the planet, setting the sky on fire, mere nanoseconds later reaching their target on the ground.
Ice melted and water boiled as the furious heat of the Glory of Gehenna’s attack burned away the layers of frozen glacier within which the doomed explorator team had found the alien pyramid waiting for them.
Hundreds of the inhuman constructs were wiped out in the initial phase of the bombardment. The skeletal warriors were reduced to their component parts, as units of tomb spyders and swarms of scarabs, too numerous to count, were eradicated alongside them.
In only a matter of seconds half the emerging necron force had been eradicated by one decisive, pre-emptive strike.
But as the clouds of steam drifted clear of the burn site and the whirling snow returned, it soon became apparent to those monitoring the results of the orbital barrage, from both the heavens and one hundred kilometres away within the rockcrete bunkers of the Aes Metallum base, that despite wiping out a significant portion of the burgeoning necron host, the blasphemous structure on the ground—the pyramid itself—still stood. The only thing that had altered about its status was that much more of it had been uncovered by the scouring laser lances as their furious barrage cut through ice many metres deep, exposing not just the primary pyramid, but the peaks of two smaller structures that lay in its deathly shadow.
“Magos Winze,” the adept-master of the Glory of Gehenna said, speaking into the pulpit comm-link, addressing the senior adept on the surface. “I regret to report that the target still stands.”
“Understood, Magos Kappel,” a static-distorted voice replied, echoing back across the gulf of space from the planet below, echoing like the voice of some disembodied machine spirit between the ornamented metal ribs of the bridge nave. “Our initial sensor scans suggest that too.”
“We are charging batteries for a second attempt,” Magos Kappel continued, and then broke off abruptly. “Wait, auspex arrays are detecting fresh activity in the vicinity of the structures.” He stared at the data-splurge scrolling across the pulpit monitor screen. “Just a nanosecond…”
A series of live-feed data-inputs from the various servitor scanner stations ranged throughout the bridge spiked as a dramatic change in energy output was detected, centred upon the three xenos structures.
No more than four kilometres from the pyramidal hibernation sepulchres, the compacted snow covering the ice sheet fractured like the sun-baked clay bed of a receding summer watering hole. Three crescent-shaped pylon structures shuddered up out of the snow, seismic tremors rippling through the glacier, quantities of the white powder falling from them in fresh cascades as more and more of the pylons were revealed. Each supported a huge green crystal emitter, and all three were already pulsing with pent-up esoteric energies. Finally the alien devices shuddered to a halt, the last of the clinging snow dropping from them in blocks of melting slush.
With the whining thrum of ancient machinery grinding into operation again after countless millennia of inaction, the three pylons rotated slowly, like morning flowers turning to follow the sun. As one they turned and as one their energising crystals glowed into deadly life, as an aetheric light began to trickle like a shower of pulverised emerald dust from the tips of each crescent. With a crack, like the ignition of a thousand rocket launchers, the gauss annihilators fired.
Whips of coruscating energy lashed out from the crystals, focussed by the vanes that projected from the pylons to either side of each emitter that harnessed their unimaginable power, streaming it into a lethal crackling discharge kilometres in length.
The annihilator beams merged a thousand metres up, cutting through the tortured atmosphere, their combined lethal lightning fingertips reaching into the exosphere, not stopping until they made contact with the Glory of Gehenna itself.
The annihilating beams stripped the shields from the Mechanicus vessel within seconds setting the port weapons batteries on fire and tearing through the hull plating. The carefully regulated artificial atmosphere on board the ship ignited as it bled out into the void in rippling waves of flame a hundred metres long.
As the beams continued to rip through the Mechanicus vessel, the Glory of Gehenna was clearly doomed. Listing badly to port, the ship commenced its descent, its blunt prow glowing magma-red as it plunged head-long through Ixya’s upper atmosphere.
The blazing wreckage of the Glory of Gehenna fell on Ixya like the divine wrath of the God-Emperor of Mankind Himself. It struck the ice sheet two hundred kilometres east of Aes Metallum, the shockwave of its crash-landing rippling through the crust of ice and rock, hitting Aes Metallum only a minute later, followed by a dense white cloud, a tsunami of snow that was thrown up into the freezing air as the concussive energies raced outwards from the epicentre of the crash site.
The distant crump and boom of its reactor core was also the sound that signalled the beginning of the assault on Aes Metallum.
“Brother-sergeant, they are here,” Ngaio announced from his place on the northern bulwark of the defended facility.
Before its catastrophic death, perpetrated by the gauss annihilators, the Glory of Gehenna had eradicated much of the necron force as Magos Kappel tried to destroy the pyramidal structure. But out of the thousands that had already emerged from the tomb, hundreds had still survived the orbital bombardment. And that surviving vanguard force had now reached the walls of the mining facility.
Aes Metallum already had two semi-circular rings of defences, based on the Phaeton pattern—the rear of the facility being shielded by the towering cliff face against which it had been built—but the Imperial Fists had worked hard to bolster these by barricading the gates with earthmoving vehicles. Magos Winze’s tech-priests had done what they could to hard-wire a number of the servitors available to them into the gun emplacements in redoubts and atop the bulwarks of the base. Atop the cliffs behind the refinery works and the ore-processing sheds stood yet more servitor-tasked Tarantula gun turrets, covering the reverse approach.
But the Imperial Fists had also used the mining equipment and facilities available to them to prepare a few other surprises with which to challenge the enemy’s assault.
Skimming towards them now, over the wind-whipped ice, advanced the destroyers. To the untrained eye they looked like anti-gravitic speeders, only where a land speeder needed a separate pilot, in this example of heretical xenos machinery, the vehicle and its pilot were one and the same. Rising from the prow of each of the skimmer bodies was the torso, arms and head of a humanoid automaton. T
hese mechanoids were more heavily armoured than the warriors Squad Eurus had encountered at the excavation site and were noticeably more heavily armed as well.
As Hesperus peered through a pair of magnoculars at the approaching skimmers he could see that each of the constructs had had its right arm melded into an energy cannon that pulsed with malevolent emerald energy.
“On my mark,” Hesperus announced into his helm comm, “activate forward countermeasures.”
The Imperial Fists, the serried ranks of the PDF and even the miners of Aes Metallum, who had exchanged hammer-drills for autoguns, waited. The sense of tense anticipation shared by the Space Marines, the half-human things of the Adeptus Mechanicus, and the mortal defenders of Aes Metallum, was a living breathing thing, and its breathing was shallow and its pulse panic-fast.
“Wait for it,” Hesperus muttered under his breath. “Wait for it.”
They waited. The destroyers drew nearer.
And now scuttling swarms of scarabs, the trooping warriors of the necron host and other skulking or swiftly darting things appeared as the snowstorm abated at last.
Gauss weapons glowed with a foetid green light as the advancing host prepared to fire on the mining facility’s defenders.
The destroyers were in range of the defenders’ guns now and, more worryingly, the aliens’ own weapons were in range too, ready to give the defenders a taste of their lethal lightning discharges.
“Mark!” Hesperus shouted into the comm.
A split second later, the bulwarks of the base were rocked by a series of detonations that threw up great clouds of white snow and black rock that enveloped the speeding necron destroyers. As the Imperial Fists and PDF conscripts had worked to strengthen the base’s forward defences, teams of miners, under the supervision of tech-priests, had cut trenches in the ice in which they had laid the explosives they normally used as part of the mining process to open new seams of precious ore. But they had been put to a more war-like use this day.
A moment later, the destroyers emerged from the smoke and fresh-falling snow, trailing smoke, their carapaces scorched and dented. Some were listing badly. One had almost lost its cannon-arm to the charge it had passed over. Another skewed sideways, collided with one of its fellows and the two of them then ploughed into the frozen ground, triggering another detonation that had failed to fire first time round.
Broadcasting on all channels, Sergeant Hesperus cried, “For Ixya, for Aes Metallum, and for the Glory of Gehenna!” His cry was echoed by the miners and PDF troopers while their tech-priest overseers made the sign of the cog and offered up prayers of supplication to the Omnissiah for the thousand souls that had perished aboard the mighty Mechanicus vessel.
Then Hesperus spoke again, standing atop the battlements overlooking the main gate of the facility, behind which had been parked a host of heavy, earth-moving and drilling machinery to form an additional barricade behind the vulnerable entrance. Thrusting his thunder hammer into the sky, he shouted—so that all could hear—“Primarch. Progenitor, to your glory!”
“And to the glory of Him on Earth!” his brothers bellowed in response.
* * *
The necron advance hit the outer bulwark like a hammer blow. Destroyers and tomb spyders sprouting particle projectors blasted battlements, gun emplacements and defenders alike with coruscating beams of molecule-shredding energy and searing bolts of hard-white light.
A turret-mounted autocannon magazine cooked off, not thirty metres from the main gate, the gun emplacement disappearing in an expanding ball of black smoke and oily orange flame.
Men caught in the coruscating emerald beams screamed briefly and then died as layer after layer of their bodies was stripped away by the gauss guns.
Necron warriors advanced by the score, rank after rank of the relentless warriors, each locating their targets on the battlements and then picking them off with mechanical precision. Other things, only partially humanoid in form—the elongated spines of their armoured skeleton bodies tapering to lethal shocking blades—moved with bewildering speed, blinking in and out of existence, vanishing in one position only to reappear at the foot of the base’s defences. Then they would blink out of existence again and re-materialise atop the battlements, striking with whip-like arms and deadly scalpel-fingers.
More of the facility’s guardians screamed and died, in horror as much as in agony as they were cut down by a grotesque vision of their own mortality made manifest.
The ground itself appeared to be moving. And then, through the drifting smoke and whirling snow, the panicked defenders of the curtain defences saw the seething mass of scarabs closing on them, crawling over everything in sight.
With a roar of turbofans, the Thunderhawk Fortis swept low over the icy no-man’s-land before the walls of Aes Metallum, twin-linked heavy bolters raking the troops massed on the ground in front of the siege works. Where the massive-reactive shells hit, necrons were blown into their component parts, mechanoid body parts raining back down onto the sullied snow in a shower of twisted black metal and fused components.
A second later, Captain Derrin’s Valkyries screamed overhead, great blooms of orange fire blossoming in their wake and more of the undying legion fell—destroyers, spyders and warriors alike.
A dreadful scream—like the rending of reality itself—ripped the heavens asunder. Green fire blazed across the firmament and tore the snow-white skies apart as the trailing Valkyrie disintegrated in shredding flames.
The red harvest had begun.
Sergeant Hesperus batted aside another darting robotic wraith-form, the crackling head of his thunder hammer pulverising its living metal cranium. The thing slid back down the second curtain wall, throwing up a stream of sparks behind it as it scraped against the adamantium-reinforced bulwarks.
The defenders of Aes Metallum had had to abandon the outer defensive ring after a concerted pounding attack by a trio of heavy destroyers had breached the main gate. But losses had been heavy on both sides. As the Imperial Fists performed a rearguard action, the surviving PDF troopers and others involved in the defence of the facility retreated behind the second curtain wall and the refinery barns and processing manufactorums beyond. Battle-Brother Verwhere triggered another trap, igniting the promethium store that had been positioned between the two gates with a well-placed shot from his plasma pistol.
Flames rose twenty metres into the freezing air, licking at the mechanoid forms pouring through the breach in the base’s defences, but doing little in the way of any real harm.
A coruscating cord of dread lightning tore across the sundered ice-field, shredding the tyres from a massive spoil plough and sending the machine sliding sideways.
The particle whip reached out again, sending half a dozen of the curtain wall’s defenders to their deaths.
Sergeant Hesperus’ gaze immediately went to the source of this devastating attack.
Standing serenely at the centre of the necron strike force, clad in crumbling vestments, was a thing apart from the others of its kind now marching into the compromised mining facility. Its body was the colour of antique silver inlaid with hieroglyphs of gold, its skull tarnished with the fractal patterns of the patina of epochs past. It scanned the progress of the battle raging all around it with tactical interest as it directed its forces into the fray.
It was the calm at the centre of the storm, the eye of the hurricane, and in its hands it clasped its staff of power. With a silent gesture it guided its warriors forwards, towards the breach, glittering arcs of energy crackling between its skeletal digits, its entire being suffused with ancient power.
This was the focus of the necron force’s esoteric energies. For this was their lord. As their mechanoid master passed by, those among their number that had already fallen to the Imperials rose to fight again, living metal re-knitting itself, repairing damaged limbs and forging their armoured shells anew.
“Brothers,” Hesperus spoke into the comm, directing his own troops into the fray, �
��we have our target. The xenos lord cannot be allowed to stand any longer. It is a blasphemy in the sight of the Emperor. In the name of Dorn, ignite jump packs.”
To which the battle-brothers of Squad Eurus replied in unison, “And Him on Earth!”
Hesperus’ body smashed through the ranks of the milling necrons, sending a number of the xenos flying as his armour-hard body collided with them. His hurtling flight was brought to a sudden stop by the dozer blade of a heavy earth-mover. The bodywork of the huge digger buckled at the impact and Hesperus dropped to the ground, momentarily stunned by the blast from the necron’s arcane weapon.
Recovering quickly, he got to his feet again, grey tendrils of smoke rising from the scorched ceramite plates of his power armour. If it hadn’t been for the now dented storm shield that he still held fast in his left hand, he would have been lucky to survive the staff of light’s unkind ministrations at all.
Raising his thunder hammer above his head once more, he began to pound towards the silver and gold ancient a second time, hammer held high, an unintelligible bellow of battle-rage on his lips. The pace of his pounding footfalls began to pick up as he covered the expanse of ice before his target.
As he ran, servos in his armoured greaves squealing, the necron prepared itself for another onslaught from the Imperial Fists. With his eyes locked on the necron lord, Hesperus could still see the broken and mangled metal carcasses of fallen xenos warriors knit themselves back together—as if he was watching a pict-feed of the destruction of the alien host running backwards—the undying automatons rising from the sullied snow to fight again at their master’s side.
Hesperus readied himself both physically and mentally for the necron’s retaliatory attack that was sure to come, but kept running.
Hearing the hot roar of a jump pack above him, he looked up and saw Battle-Brother Maestus, shorn of one arm already, descend upon the necron from the sky like the wrath of Dorn himself.
Victories of the Space Marines Page 21
