by Andy Hoare
As the traitors closed on the walls, they entered the range of the Raven Guard’s boltguns. The enemy were so densely packed that the Space Marines scarcely had to aim their shots. Yet it was obvious that even if every single bolt-round carried by every single Space Marine on the wall claimed the life of a traitor, only the smallest part of the horde would be slain. The warriors of the Alpha Legion, just visible at the fringes of the horde, were ever out of the Raven Guard’s range, a fact that spoke of the Archenemy’s duplicity and evil. The Alpha Legion were well known for their skill at deception and subversion, callously throwing away the lives of countless numbers of deluded servants. It soon became obvious to the Raven Guard that the horde was being used as cannon fodder, until the critical moment came when the Space Marines ran dangerously low on ammunition and the Alpha Legion themselves would attack.
The Raven Guard had no choice but to hold the line until their White Scars allies could bring their force to bear. The Raven Guard were more used to launching surgical strikes from the darkness, but they were Space Marines first and foremost, and they would stand.
Nullus strode through the midst of the horde, attended by his Alpha Legion warriors. The lieutenant of Lord Voldorius bellowed the praises of his gods as death was unleashed all around. Scores of cultists and militia troopers were being scythed down, yet with each death he rejoiced all the more. His lipless mouth sang the names of the Ruinous Powers, his scar-traced features twisting into a terrifying, blasphemous visage. The walls of the defence installation loomed and upon the parapet he could see the black armour of this new foe, though from this distance he could not make out their iconography. Part of Nullus knew disappointment, for he had so hoped that it would be the White Scars. Though it was clear from their livery that the enemy were not the savage sons of Chogoris, they were still Space Marines, and the object of millennia of hatred nursed within Nullus’s twisted heart. Nullus was not yet close enough to the walls to clearly identify the Space Marines, for dozens of Chapters had black as their livery. Whoever they were, these Space Marines must surely be in league with the White Scars, for Nullus had no doubt that Kor’sarro had not only survived the battle at Cernis IV, but would have followed the Alpha Legion to Quintus. He had made sure of that.
Nullus surged onwards, his hatred of the White Scars, of all the Emperor’s Space Marines, of the Imperium, of the entirety of mankind spilling from him. He trampled underfoot those cultists and militia too slow to move out of his way. Death rained all around, the stink of blood and cordite filling the air.
The massive bulk of the Ironsoul ground forwards. A dozen frenzied cultists threw their arms into the air and hurled themselves beneath its tracks, wailing its praises as if they were sacrificing themselves to some god of war summoned to reality by so much death. Where Ironsoul passed, a thick paste made of the pulped flesh and splintered bones of its worshippers trailed after it, gristle and viscera clogging its clanking treads.
Nullus paused in his advance, allowing the super-heavy tank to grind past. He judged that the leviathan was approaching the range at which its weapons would be most effective against the enemies on the wall. The tank’s huge main turret locked upon the wall and the ten metre-long barrel of its main gun elevated, the enemy in its sights.
‘Now die,’ Nullus hissed, his sibilant voice piercing the deafening cacophony of war.
According to the chrono readout projected over Shrike’s field of vision, the moment was almost at hand. The White Scars should be launching their attack. A burst of heavy bolter fire drew his attention back to the immediate task at hand. Shrike’s force was closing on the missile silos and was on verge of overwhelming the last defenders.
Though the attack on the defence installation was no more than a diversionary action, the silos had by now taken on a symbolic meaning. To not destroy the surface-to-orbit missile launchers would have felt to Shrike like a failure, an insult against his pride.
The launchers towered high overhead, and the last of the traitors manning the silo fortifications were being cut down even as Shrike came to stand in front of them. His talons were slick with the blood of the countless foes he had slain, and the chainswords of his Assault Marines were clogged with viscera and well in need of cleaning and oiling. The assault had cost the Raven Guard dear, though every warrior was pleased to lay down his life in the battle against the foes of mankind. The last of the defenders were finally overwhelmed as the Assault squads took the silo’s fortifications, and there were no enemies between the Space Marines and the towering missile batteries.
‘Squad Sohen,’ Shrike spoke into the command channel. ‘Melta charges forwards.’
The acknowledgement came back immediately and a group of Assault Marines from Sergeant Sohen’s squad dashed forwards accompanied by a Techmarine. Within a couple of minutes the warriors had placed their melta bombs at strategic points around the base of the missile batteries according to the Techmarine’s instructions.
‘Ready at your command,’ the Techmarine said as he came to stand before Shrike. ‘I recommend a dispersal of one hundred metres,’ he added.
Within moments, Shrike’s squad sergeants and other specialists had gathered around him. The veteran warriors displayed every sign of the ferocity of the battle they had fought, their armour scarred and scratched and several bleeding from numerous small wounds. Yet not one of them showed an ounce of fatigue, their dark eyes glinting with the thrill of battle. Sergeant Morior’s place was taken by the most senior battle-brother of his squad, who would serve as squad leader for the duration of the battle.
‘Sergeant Indis reports that the enemy are closing on the walls in greater numbers than expected.’ The enemy’s numerical superiority held no fear whatsoever for the Space Marine, but he continued. ‘The White Scars have yet to commit.’
At the mention of the White Scars several of the officers met one another’s glances, but none saw fit to comment. ‘I have faith that our brother Chapter will be there when needed.’ The dark looks of several of the officers suggested that not all of them shared that view. ‘Given enemy numbers however,’ he pressed, ‘it is our duty to reinforce the walls, which we shall do the instant the defence batteries are disabled.’
‘When those missiles go up, half this installation will go with them,’ the Techmarine said.
‘Good,’ Shrike snarled. He was about to give the command when the vox-bead in his ear came to life. ‘Brother-captain,’ Sergeant Indis reported, the sound of chanting, screaming and gunfire competing with his voice. ‘We hold, but a new threat has emerged. One super-heavy, Baneblade variant, main class, effective.’
Shrike bit back a curse, knowing that one well-placed or plain lucky shot from the leviathan’s main weapon could wipe out every one of the squads holding the walls.
‘Hold,’ Shrike replied as his officers looked on darkly, each one monitoring the command channel. ‘The White Scars are inbound. And so are we.’
The order was given: the 3rd Company of the White Scars Chapter, the Brotherhood of Kor’sarro, rode to join their Raven Guard brethren in battle. The bike squads and vehicles of Kor’sarro’s company had broken cover, spilling from the caves south of Mankarra and speeding across the volcanic plain towards the flank of the seething horde of traitors.
There was no other place for Kor’sarro, Master of the Hunt, than the very point of the speartip. Riding his revered bike, Moondrakkan, and brandishing high the ancient blade, Moonfang, Kor’sarro was as a hero from the epic sagas of savage Chogoris. Pennants of black horsehair flowed from trophy-skulls mounted upon his back. His cloak, cut from the hide of a mighty lava-wolf, billowed in the wind behind him. His black topknot and moustaches whipped around his noble countenance as he led the charge.
Kor’sarro’s Command squad was at his side. They were his trusted companions and each had hunted with him for many decades. Brother Yeku held the banner of the 3rd Company high. Friend and foe alike
would look to the banner and know the deeds of those who followed it. The others of the Command squad, including the newly appointed company champion, Brother Kergis, bore glittering lances modelled after the weapons used by the wild steppe nomads of the Chapter’s home world. Each was tipped by a power blade capable of scything through the very hardest of armour plate.
A wave of bike squads spread out behind Kor’sarro’s retinue, each rider also armed with a hunting lance. Ordinarily, many of these battle-brothers would have ridden to battle in the back of a Rhino armoured carrier. But for this battle, where speed and shock were of utmost importance, they rode growling bikes, even as their ancestors went to war upon the backs of their trusty hunting beasts.
Then came the last of the host, a column of armoured vehicles, a plume of grey dust billowing upwards in their passing. Rhinos carried Devastator heavy weapons squads while Predator battle tanks sped along beside as outriders. Most potent of all was a single Vindicator siege tank by the name of Thunderheart. The tank’s mighty cannon had cracked bastions and destroyed supposedly unbreakable walls from cursed Luyten’s World to the Hell Gates of the Bleak Void.
Kor’sarro’s savage heart was filled with the glory of the charge as Moondrakkan powered across the plain. The wind sang in his ears and his mount’s engine roared its own song of war. In front of the Master of the Hunt was the undulating mass of the traitorous horde and beyond it the beleaguered walls held by the Raven Guard. Those warriors had moved to the protection of a stout bastion and a moment later, Kor’sarro knew why the Raven Guard had redeployed. A huge, super-heavy tank in the midst of the horde opened fire at the wall.
As the tank’s main cannon fired, an invisible blast wave surged outwards from its barrel, felling scores of nearby traitors as surely as any fire the Raven Guard might have unleashed. A shell almost the size of a man slammed into the curtain wall where the Raven Guard had stood moments earlier. The resulting explosion sent chunks of masonry arcing into the sky, some crashing down amongst the horde and slaying dozens more traitors. When the smoke cleared a great rent had been opened in the wall of the defence installation, and a ramp of debris had been formed in front.
The Alpha Legionnaires fired indiscriminately into the flanks of the horde, herding the frenzied cultists and the desperate militia towards the breach and up the newly formed ramp.
So great was the cacophony of chanting cultists and firing weapons that none of them heard the charge of the White Scars. As the White Scars descended on their prey the first of the traitors threw themselves against the breach. At the same moment the Raven Guard emerged from their bastion and gunned down scores of enemies. Still more pressed forwards, clambering over the shredded corpses of their fellows. In no time at all, the breach was slick with blood and viscera, yet still the attackers came. Kor’sarro knew that the Raven Guard must surely be running dangerously low on ammunition and would be unable to hold the attackers at bay for much longer.
‘White Scars, ride like lightning!’
A hundred throats echoed Kor’sarro’s war cry as he descended on the outer edges of the horde’s flank and battle was joined.
Nullus bellowed his worship of the blasphemous powers of the warp as utter carnage engulfed the field of battle. The Ironsoul ground forwards over a carpet of dead cultists and militia, its weapons firing an unrelenting barrage at the Raven Guard on the ruined wall. Striding forwards, he crushed the dead and dying beneath heavy armoured boots, the power of death infusing the daemon-thing within him. With a word of command, his Alpha Legion warriors formed up behind, ready for their assault on the deluded fools of the Raven Guard.
For the Alpha Legion to take the breach the multitudinous horde had first to do its duty. As each attacker was gunned down by the fire from the Raven Guard at the summit the next would take his place, scrambling over the shattered corpse of his slaughtered fellow, before he in turn was struck down. With each death, however, the attackers gained ground, if no more than a metre. The breach was being taken and soon the ramp of debris would be replaced by one of corpses, up which Nullus and his Alpha Legion would assault the Raven Guard and slaughter them to a man for the glory of Chaos.
Nullus drank in the sheer power of battle. He gloried in the sound of the cultists’ chants mingling with their death screams. He laughed at the desperate wailing of the militia troopers as they were funnelled into the breach. Many of them now saw that a death opposing the invasion of Quintus would have been far better than the surrender that saw them forced into the service of Voldorius. He felt the low, throbbing growl of Ironsoul’s engines, beating in time with the constant fire from its heavy bolters.
Then, another sound came to Nullus’s ears.
Over the din of battle and death, Nullus heard the unmistakable roar of Adeptus Astartes bikes. Turning towards the horde’s flank, he shoved aside a whirling cultist, seeking out the source of the noise. Now it was clearly audible, and growing louder. Nullus saw a slight rise in the ground, and strode up it, seeking a vantage point to survey the plain to the south.
The instant he reached the top of the rise, Nullus saw the source of the roar and his vile heart soared for the glory of war. The hated White Scars had come.
Captain Shrike and his Assault squads vaulted from bastion to bastion as they made for the wall, the roar of battle growing ever louder as they neared the outer limits of the defence installation. Behind, a vast mushroom cloud climbed into the sky, the fires of the missile battery’s destruction raging inside. The spaces between the bunkers were strewn with the dead and smoke billowed from every enemy position.
Touching down on the corpse-strewn roof of another bunker, Shrike was but a single leap from the outer wall. The Tactical and Devastator squads under Sergeant Indis were firing downwards into the breach relentlessly. Enemies would appear at the top of the great wound in the fortification only to be gunned down without mercy, but it was clear to Shrike that the endless horde pressing upwards must surely prevail.
Not for the first time that day, Shrike’s thoughts turned to the White Scars and their flank attack. Where were they?
A clipped report came across the command channel. It was Sergeant Indis, delivering the news that his force was down to ten per cent of its ammunition. Shrike had arrived just in time.
‘Stand by, sergeant,’ the captain said into the vox-link. ‘First wave inbound.’
Shrike had no need to pass on any order to his Assault squads for it was clear that the Space Marines holding the wall were in dire need of reinforcement. Shrike activated his jump pack and leapt high into the air. At the height of his leap, he caught a glimpse of the plain beyond the walls, at the heaving ocean of ragged cultists and militia converging on the breach. As he dived onwards, Captain Shrike glimpsed for a fraction of a second what must have been the white and red livery of the White Scars scything towards the horde’s flank. And then it was gone, and Shrike was upon the walls.
Even with his armour’s baffler activated, the cacophony of the horde was almost deafening. Wave after wave of sonorous chanting rolled and boomed across the plain, intermingled with the screams of the wounded and the insane and punctuated by gunfire and explosions. Shrike had rarely faced such bedlam, the spectacle exceeding even the barbarous mobs of the orks of Skullkrak. But this was not simply a matter of volume, for the chants were devotions to the unnameable powers, the daemon-gods of the beyond that craved to consume the soul of mankind. For a man to worship such powers was for him to surrender his soul to eternal damnation, and the utmost blasphemy in the eyes of the God-Emperor and His devoted servants such as the Space Marines.
Shrike felt sickened by the taint of the warp made manifest by devotion and death. The horde must be turned, before all was lost.
With a great roar of sacrilegious filth, another wave of traitors surged upwards through the breach, hundreds of bodies packed together as grox for the slaughter. Cultists wailed and thrashed, brandishing
wicked, hooked chains, while terror-stricken militia troopers fired their autoguns wildly. Despite the stout defence Sergeant Indis had mounted, Shrike knew that the breach was lost. The tide was unstoppable.
‘Fall back by squads, pattern upsilon-twelve,’ Shrike ordered bitterly.
Though he resented the necessity of ordering such a manoeuvre, Shrike’s massively outnumbered force would be overwhelmed were it to remain at the wall. Indis and his men had fought valiantly, as hard as any of the Chapter’s venerated heroes, but they had done all they could. There was a time and a place for a glorious last stand, but this was not it. In falling back and drawing the enemy into a close-quarters battle amongst the fortifications and redoubts, the Raven Guard would have a chance of robbing it of momentum, trading time for Kor’sarro’s flank attack to take full effect.
In response to Shrike’s order, the Tactical squads at the wall began moving back, each ten-man unit dividing into two, one providing fire support for the other as it withdrew to a new position before the roles were reversed. Then the heavy weapon-armed Devastator squads began their redeployment, covered by the Tactical squads as soon as they had established a new firebase amongst the smoking remnants of an inner line of fortifications.
Shrike could not join his men yet, for the first of the traitors were dragging themselves over the corpses of their fellows.
Shrike raised his talons and arcs of blue energy surged up and down their razor-edged blades. The blood that had dried to a crust along the edge of each talon burned off in a second, leaving the lethal weapons gleaming and eager to kill yet more of the traitors.
As the wave of traitors clambered to the summit of the breach, the ragged mass resolved itself into individual enemies. The first to come before Shrike was a rabid fanatic, the man’s dirty robe that of a priest of the Imperial Creed. Bile rose in Shrike’s throat as the man hurled himself forwards, screaming filth at the top of his voice. Shrike restrained himself from charging forwards to strike the traitor down lest he be consumed by the sheer mass of the horde. With a contemptuous strike of a talon Shrike sent the traitor’s head spinning into the air, still mouthing blasphemous devotions as the body collapsed at Shrike’s feet.
