by Nick Kyme
'I see…' he began, but stopped himself to truly open his eyes. 'I see Nocturne.'
Pyriel nodded. It was a small movement, near undetectable, but expressed his satisfaction elegantly.
'That is what I see also. Beneath the layers of ash there is rock. The volcanoes have been venting for so long and so continuously that the grey flakes have made this place a grey world, with darkling skies, bereft of life. The oceans, for I believe the deep basins in the ash deserts were once large water masses, dried up long ago. Underground tributaries might still exist, but I doubt they're enough to support significant life. Scoria, I suspect, was once much like Nocturne, only more advanced in its geological cycle.' Pyriel stooped and placed a hand against the ground. He beckoned Dak'ir to do the same.
'You feel that?' the Librarian asked, closing his eyes, shutting out smell and sound, focusing purely on touch.
Dak'ir nodded, though he had no way of knowing if the Librarian had seen or realised his affirmation. There was a tremor running through the earth, faint but insistent like a pulsing vein.
'Those are the last heartbeats of a dying world, brother.'
Dak'ir's eyes snapped open and he stood. The recent vision came back at him, and he wondered briefly if somehow Pyriel had seen it, had looked into his mind and perceived his very dreams.
'What are you saying, Librarian, that Nocturne will suffer the same fate?' The question came across more petulantly than he would have wanted.
'All worlds end, Dak'ir,' Pyriel answered pragmatically. 'Nocturne's demise might be millennia from now, it might only be a matter of centuries. I wonder if our progenitor brought us here to see something of our home world's fate.' His eyes flashed with cerulean fire. 'Is that what you've seen, brother?'
Seismic thunder erupted from the crash site before Dak'ir had to answer. Both Space Marines, even several hundred metres from the quake, were staggered by it. Then they were running, heading for the swathes of ash pluming into the air as the Vulkan's Wrath shifted and sank. A hundred metres from the ship and the Salamanders were engulfed by a grey cloud that struck their power armour in a gritty wave.
Dak'ir had rammed on his battle-helm, snapping on his luminator as he cycled through the optical spectra to best penetrate the murky explosion of ash. Pyriel needed no such augmentation. His eyes blazed like blue beacons in the darkness, more piercing that any lume-lamp.
'There,' he said, barely raising his voice and pointing towards the dark shape of the strike cruiser's hull. Dak'ir heard him perfectly, and saw vague silhouettes through the ash storm. Some were moving about, others lay huddled with their heads down.
'Ba'ken, report,' the sergeant shouted into the comm-feed.
Crackling static returned for a time, but as the billowing grey wave began to disperse, the bulky trooper's voice came back.
'A seismic shift, brother-sergeant. The entire ship moved with it.'
'Casualties?'
'Just minor injuries. I pulled back the excavation crews when I felt the vessel beginning to move.' There was a pause, as if Ba'ken was gauging what he should say next. 'You're not going to believe what it's shaken loose.'
The grey dust had all but cleared, settling as a veneer across the plains as if it had never been disturbed, though the serfs bore the evidence of it on their overalls as did the Salamanders on their armour. The silhouettes through the ash proved to be Ba'ken and one of the excavation crews. Coughing and spluttering, the humans lay on their backs and gasped for air. Servitors stood alongside them, impassive and untroubled. Ba'ken left them and went to meet Dak'ir and Pyriel as they approached him.
He was stripped out of his armour and wearing labour fatigues. Sweat-dappled muscles were still bunched from his efforts, and he carried a flat-bladed shovel in one hand.
'Brothers,' he said, snapping a quick salute across his broad, black chest.
'Just like being back home, eh, Ba'ken?' said Dak'ir.
'Aye, sir. It puts me in mind of the rock harvest after the Time of Trial. Though it's usually snow and ice, not ash, that I'm digging through.'
'Show me what you've found,' ordered the sergeant.
Ba'ken led them to where the Vulkan's Wrath had clearly shifted during the geological event. A deep, seemingly fathomless chasm had formed between the edge of the strike cruiser's hull and the surface of the ash plain. Languid drifts, motes of grey, trickled into it and were quickly lost from sight in the darkness. The chasm was narrow, but not so acute that a warrior in power armour couldn't squeeze down it.
'I can feel heat,' said Pyriel, peering over the edge into the darkness. 'And the consciousness I experienced earlier, it is stronger here.'
'You think there is something down there, brother?' asked Dak'ir, moving to stand alongside him.
'Besides the chitin-beasts? Yes, I'm certain of it.'
'How deep do you think it is?' Ba'ken leaned over to get a better look but the chasm was only lit by the ambient light for about fifty metres before the blackness claimed it. Even Astartes eyesight couldn't penetrate much further. If Pyriel had any better knowledge, he was keeping it to himself.
'It could run to the core of Scoria for all we know,' Dak'ir replied. 'Whatever the case, I mean to find out.' He turned to Ba'ken. 'Don your armour, brother, and meet us back here. I want to know what lurks in the darkness beneath our feet. Perhaps it will provide some answers as to why we are here.'
The lumbering forms of a vehicle convoy ground to a halt at the peak of the ridge. Exhaust fumes pluming smoke, their engines growled like war-hounds straining at the leash. N'keln and his warriors had arrived.
Tsu'gan watched them from the redoubt, his view enhanced through the magnoculars. The sergeant had switched to night-vision, rendering the image before him into a series of lurid, hazy greens. Embarkation ramps in the Land Raider and Rhinos slammed down in unison, the squads within debussing as one coherent unit. Tsu'gan watched the Salamanders deploy in a firing line along the ridge, and cursed.
'Close up,' he hissed, inwardly bemoaning N'keln's apparent over-caution. 'Your guns are outside effective range.'
A few seconds lapsed before the firing began. Iridescent beams from the multi-meltas stabbed into the gloom in lances of red-hot fury. Missiles spiralled from the ridge, buoyed along on twisting contrails of grey smoke. Gun chatter erupted from the heavy bolters, pintle mounts and secondary arms. The heavy chug-chank, chug-chank of the Fire Anvil's forward-mounted assault cannon joined it, building to a high-pitched whirr as it achieved maximum fire-rate. Blistering and bright, the storm of shells and lashing beams torn apart the darkness like a host of flares.
Throughout the fusillade, the Iron Warriors hunkered down. Unwilling to commit themselves, they stayed out of sight, content to let the fortress walls weather the assault.
The barrage persisted for almost three minutes before N'keln, a distant figure in the lee of the Land Raider's rear access hatch, ordered a halt to allow the firing smoke to clear. It revealed little: just patches of scorched metal and the odd ineffectual impact crater. No breaches, no dead. The gate was still intact - the assault had failed.
'Vulkan's teeth, bring them forward!' snarled Tsu'gan, unwilling to vox in case the Iron Warriors were monitoring transmissions, overheard him and discovered his guerrilla force staked out in the redoubts.
Even in the lull, the traitors didn't act. Only when N'keln gave the order to withdraw and re-advance did the Iron Warriors show their strategy.
Seemingly innocuous at first, a single hunter-killer missile emerged from behind the battlements on an automated weapons platform. Escaping incendiary choomed loudly as the missile's booster ignited and coiled off towards its intended target at speed. It fell short of the reforming Salamanders by several metres and for a moment Tsu'gan thought its homing beacon must be out. That was until a chain of explosions tore across the ash ridge from a field of hidden incendiaries.
Grimacing at the sudden burst of fire, Tsu'gan turned away. He adjusted quickly and when he looked bac
k he saw the ridge collapsing under its own weight, the foundations pulverised in a single blast of explosives. Cries echoed from the gloom as the Salamanders foundered in it. The ground was disintegrating beneath them and their bulky power armour was dragging Tsu'gan's battle-brothers along with it. Flailing and cursing, they tumbled down the diminishing ridge, barely coming to rest before a raft of tracer lights knifed into the dark and illuminated the fallen Salamanders. Sporadic bolter fire replied but it merely pranged off the armoured carapace of automated defence guns churning into position across the length of the wall. Chugging thunder erupted from above Tsu'gan as heavy bolter and autocannon emplacements started to eat through their ammunition belts.
Crying out in rage and anguish, Tsu'gan saw three of his battle-brothers threaded by munitions fire. Power armour was tough; tough enough to withstand such weapons as these, but the sheer rate of shells increased their potency threefold.
Unfortunately, in Tsu'gan's eyes at least, N'keln had not been one of those caught in the ash slide. Barking swift commands from what was left of the ridge peak, he attempted to restore some coherency to his forces. Pinned down in the basin, though, the stricken Salamanders were getting slaughtered.
'Use the transports as armoured cover,' Tsu'gan implored. 'Bring them down into the basin. Our brothers are dying, damn you!'
Igniting columns of smoke spilled out across the ridge as Vargo's Assault squad took to the air. It was an act of desperation, an attempt to alleviate the relentless volley targeting the warriors in the basin and force the enemy to split its fire.
Vargo landed a few metres short of the wall, ahead of the redoubts, just as Tsu'gan knew he would. Chainswords whirring, primed melt bombs winking in their mag-locks, the Assault squad made ready to jump again.
Chained detonations erupted down the length of the wall, engulfing Vargo and his squad in exploding frag. It was a first-strike deterrent, designed to stun and weaken an impatient attacker who sought to sack the bastion in his first foray. Smoke and flame died away to reveal the casualties of that ill-conceived strategy. Brother-Sergeant Vargo was on his feet but dazed, his armour blackened and cracked at the edges. Three of the Assault squad were down, unmoving. Four more carried obvious injuries, limping and cradling arms as they tried to drag their prone brothers next to the wall and outside the firing arcs of the sentry guns stitching lines of ammunition into the area where they had faltered. Jump packs looked shot to pieces, their turbines shredded or full of frag.
Tsu'gan was ready to abandon his post, when at last the vehicles came roaring down the half-flattened slope.
'Hellfire,' he snarled into the comm-feed, the order reaching all four combat squads. 'Execute!'
Brother S'tang hammered the switch on a palm-sized detonator taken from his combat-rig and flung himself to the ground along with his squad.
Explosions rippled across the edge of the redoubts, sending thick clods of dirt spitting high into the air amidst clouds of smoke and flame.
The Salamander assault force had been prepared for this, thanks to the careful instruction of Brother-Sergeant Typhos. Using it as a distraction, the beleaguered Space Marines managed to regroup.
Tsu'gan was first out of the redoubt. Debris from his grenade line was still falling as he raced towards the wall, bolter blazing. Behind him, the mobile armour of the vehicles had slewed into position and was taking fire. Another missile-launcher choomed overhead and one of the Rhinos went up in a ball of flame, flipped onto its back and burning. Astartes crawled out of the wreckage, using what was left of the hull for cover as the inevitable shots rained down at them from the walls.
'Combine fire!' Tsu'gan cried, skidding to a halt and dropping to one knee to steady his aim. Through his bolter sight he found an autocannon sentry gun, its muzzle lit by barking munitions. It jolted and collapsed as Tsu'gan brought his wrath to bear, Brothers Lazarus and S'tang adding to the fusillade that destroyed it.
Once the killing was done, Tsu'gan ordered the squad to move on, making it as hard as possible for the automated guns to track them. 'Advance!' he yelled. 'We have their attention now.'
Tiberon was picked off by an accurate bolter shot. It took him through the joint at his knee, crippling the Salamander instantly.
'S'tang,' said Tsu'gan as he saw Tiberon fall, 'to your brother.'
S'tang obeyed at once, jinking as he doubled back the short distance to Tiberon and dragged him into the cover of a crater cut by the grenade line.
Whickering fire came down at Tsu'gan and the other combat squads in earnest, as the Iron Warriors realised the more immediate threat in their midst. Tsu'gan didn't have time to take out another sentry gun before he was forced to move on lest the remote weapons platforms draw a bead and shred him and his squad.
The sound of rumbling adamantium offered a solution as the Fire Anvil, using the momentum from the ridge ramp, bulldozed through the recently vacated redoubts, smashing them into rubble and slewing to a stop in front of the brother-sergeant.
The other combat squads took the initiative and rallied to the formidable assault tank. A missile whooshed overhead and struck the Land Raider's roof, spilling fire and shell debris like rain. Smoke dispersed quickly. The Fire Anvil was left unscathed and started to rotate on its tracks, one side locked whilst the other churned it into position.
'Flamers!' yelled Tsu'gan as he realised what was coming next.
Brother Honorious and the other special weapons troopers came forwards, bodies pressed against the Land Raider's rear armour.
'Cleanse and burn!' Tsu'gan roared as the Fire Anvil's flamestorm cannons erupted gloriously. At the same time, Honorious and his brothers stepped from behind the Redeemer-pattern battle tank and added their own fire to the conflagration.
Roaring promethium scathed the walls, spilling through murder holes and firing slits, invasive and consuming. Muffled cries rewarded the blitz attack, and Tsu'gan smiled. The traitors were burning.
The rear embarkation ramp of the Land Raider slammed down and out stomped Veteran Sergeant Praetor and his Firedrakes in full Terminator armour, wielding crackling thunder hammers and storm shields.
All around them, the Salamander heavy weapons had been revivified. Heavy bolters raked the ramparts, splitting sentry guns apart in showers of metal; multi-meltas drawn up to lethal range burned into the walls, stripping away ceramite; missiles zoned in on the towers themselves, blasting the stoic bodies within to fragments.
'Concentrate fire on the wall guards,' bellowed Tsu'gan into the comm-feed, tactical-band, so it reached all fighting forces. Advancing upon the fortress, the brother-sergeant had realised something that had been staring him in the face since the redoubts.
'My lords,' he said, turning to acknowledge the Firedrakes.
'I am at your disposal, brother-sergeant,' boomed Praetor, his squad behind him like silent green sentinels.
'Break the gate and we break this siege,' Tsu'gan told him. He released a melta-bomb where he'd mag-locked it to his battle harness. Sergeant De'mas did the same, whilst some of their battle-brothers palmed krak grenades. 'There's enough explosive here to rip down three gates,' Tsu'gan boasted, eyeing the stretch of open ground between the Land Raider and the wall. 'I just need you to get me there and finish the job.'
Praetor nodded, though whether he saw Tsu'gan's plan or simply trusted him implicitly, the brother-sergeant didn't know.
Another missile strike lit up the flank of Fire Anvil this time, even as the flamestorm cannons continued to spew burning death from their battle-scorched maws.
'We advance under the blaze.' Tsu'gan had to bellow to be heard.
'Into the fires of battle then, brother…' The voice came from the shadowy confines of the Land Raider. It was harsh and filled with steel. Chaplain Elysius emerged into the half-light, though it was as if the gloom of the tank's hold clung to him like a shroud. The grinning skull mask of his battle-helm made him macabrely jocund.
'Unto the anvil of war,' Tsu'gan concluded. 'I a
m honoured, Brother-Chaplain.'
Elysius swung his crozius arcanum loose from its strap and impelled its power field into a vivid coruscation. He bade Tsu'gan go on.
The brother-sergeant turned back to Praetor. 'Can you make a mobile shield wall, brother?'
Praetor's loud laughter sounded like thunder. With well-executed precision, he and the Firedrakes formed a barrier wall with their storm shields, warding the front and flanks of Tsu'gan, De'mas and seven other battle-brothers. Elysius stepped outside of the protective cordon.
'Shoulder them, brothers,' Elysius bellowed with stentorian conviction. 'The Emperor and the will of Vulkan is my shield.'
Praetor wasted no further time. 'Forward, assault pattern Aegis,' he boomed, and the Firedrakes began to move.
Heavy weapons fire hammered against the Terminators and their upraised storm shields, but fell away harmlessly against their locked defence. Elysius strode alongside them, matching their ponderous pace, hurling canticles of faith and the litanies of the forge at the traitors like barbed spears.
'…and lo, upon the anvil did Vulkan smash the heretics, his hammer like a comet that falleth from heaven. Into the blood of Mount Deathfire are they consumed…'
Rosarius field flickering with every blow, the Chaplain did not once relent.
'…quail, base traitors, and receive the promised price of your perfidy. Burn, malfeasants, burn! Flayed in fire before the Emperor's glory!'
A rattling chorus of staccato gunfire joined Elysius's diatribes and was heard by Tsu'gan from within the protective shell of the Firedrakes' storm shields. Four Terminators formed the brunt of the armoured wall, shields locked in a seamless barrier. The energy fields generated by the shields crackled and spat with their joining, throwing off azure sparks and the reek of ozone. Two further Firedrakes guarded each flank, their shields held up and combined to configure a makeshift roof with the storm shields of two of their brothers that bisected the front line of four and acted as the spine of the formation.
