by Andy Hoare
The siege tank ground to a halt almost directly in front of the gate, a storm of small-arms fire erupting against its frontal armour. At such close range, there was little need to even aim the huge cannon mounted in its prow. Another few seconds ground past, and then the cannon roared.
As Thunderheart fired, a great black cloud of dust went up from all around the siege tank. Kor’sarro actually saw the siege shell propelled from the cannon and arcing towards the gates. Instead of velocity, the shell relied on sheer explosive force to penetrate its target, containing a destabilised fusion core that when forced to a critical reaction would destroy almost any target within a highly localised area.
The shell struck the gate and detonated on impact. A ball of orange fire flashed into existence one moment and was gone the next, unleashing a thunderous roar and a blistering wave of heat. Where the shell struck, the gate suffered a near-perfectly circular wound, great runnels of liquefied bronze seeping down its surface and distorting the image of the Emperor’s warriors battling the orks.
Far above, the Raven Guard gunships swooped in for another pass at the defence towers as anti-air defence fire lanced towards them from positions further away. Another dozen hellstrike missiles streaked from their mountings beneath the gunships’ stubby wings, and yet more of the towers were engulfed in flame.
At the same moment that the second salvo of hellstrikes struck the towers, the Thunderheart spoke again. The second siege shell smashed into the gates, the gunner targeting a point lower down than his first shot. Again, the orange ball of nucleonic fire erupted into being and an instant later collapsed in upon itself, leaving a second wound that bled runnels of liquid bronze.
The second attack sent trails of incandescent plasma spitting from the wounds and licking its surface. The battling figures of men and orks melted hideously into one another. The Thunderheart’s mighty cannon lowered still further as the gunner prepared for a third shot.
The next shell struck the lower portion of the gates, which had been so weakened by the preceding impacts that they could not withstand another pounding. Searing nuclear fire erupted at their base, and in an instant the entire bronze structure was vaporised into a rapidly expanding ball of plasma. Impossible energies engulfed the entire portal, and what remained of the two flanking defence towers sagged as rockcrete melted and ran like lava.
Kor’sarro felt the searing heat on his face. He could only imagine what devastation was being wrought upon the defenders stationed behind it and on the walls nearby. Only cinders would mark their passing.
With a grinding crack, the arch above the gateway collapsed, ragged chunks of rockcrete the size of armoured vehicles crashing downwards into the now open portal. For an instant, squat, bunker-like structures and defence towers of the city were visible beyond the gates. But the sight was soon obscured as a vast column of black dust and smoke belched outwards, choking the entire portal and the area before it.
‘White Scars,’ Kor’sarro bellowed. ‘Charge!’ He had no need to use the Chapter’s battle-cant, for no other action was possible. Dozens of engines roared to life as one and the White Scars powered towards the gate.
The defence towers were collapsing even as Kor’sarro bore down on the dust-choked, rubble-strewn portal. The Master of the Hunt judged the rate at which the ruined towers were falling and estimated where they would collapse.
Gritting his teeth, he sped onwards, and as he closed to within fifty metres of the portal, the towers struck the ground, disintegrating with explosive force.
Kor’sarro and his warriors were engulfed in a sea of black dust, but not a single warrior faltered. The entire 3rd Company followed their captain into the churning black cloud in front of the ruined gateway. Visibility was reduced to practically zero and the ground shook with the impact of the towers collapsing. Steering Moondrakkan through the cloud was an impressive feat in itself, one that only a nomad son of the Chogoran steppes could accomplish. Chunks of rockcrete shrapnel the size of fists ricocheted in all directions, some striking the Space Marines, yet still the White Scars rode on. Kor’sarro’s nose and mouth became blocked with dust and he was forced to narrow his eyes to mere slits lest they become clogged so badly that he could not see at all. Still he rode on, leading the brotherhood through the gates of Mankarra, the unerring sense of direction of the Chogoran leading him through.
Moondrakkan’s front wheel struck something jagged, which disintegrated with a sharp crack. Soon the ground beneath the bike’s wheels became uneven, though the smoke and dust was so dense Kor’sarro could not see the surface in front of him.
And then, Kor’sarro was through the darkness and roaring out of the portal. In front of him was the city, every one of its squat buildings resembling an enormous bunker, complete with gun positions, needle-thin observation towers and bristling communications gear. The streets in between the buildings were cast in deep shadow, and with surprise Kor’sarro realised that the sun was already well on its way towards the horizon. The battle had been raging for many hours, but it was far from over.
‘Kor’sarro to all commands,’ the Master of the Hunt said into the vox-net as Moondrakkan prowled onwards. ‘Voldorius defiles the cathedral at the heart of the city. Slay all who oppose you, but leave the vile one for me. His head is mine.’
As the smoke cleared, the ground beneath Moondrakkan’s wheels was revealed as a jagged, broken and uneven mass. Slewing to a halt some fifty metres beyond the portal so that his forces could consolidate, Kor’sarro realised what it was that made the surface so uneven. Every square metre of the ground behind the portal was carpeted in bones, and the air was laced with the taint of burnt meat. The plasma storm touched off by the third of Thunderheart’s siege shells must have engulfed far more than the gate and defence towers. By Kor’sarro’s estimation, an entire battalion of troops – most likely the indentured militia – had been mustered to defend the gates should they be forced.
Over a thousand militia troopers had been incinerated when the plasma storm had been triggered, reduced in seconds to blackened bones. It was no death for a warrior, but at least it would have been mercifully brief. And then a wave of revulsion hit Kor’sarro – the militia were traitors, even if they were pressed into service against their will. Perhaps their incineration was a merciful judgement. Perhaps it was more than they deserved.
Behind Kor’sarro, more White Scars bikers emerged through the churning smoke, the wheels of their mounts ploughing great furrows through the jagged carpet of bones. Then the growling of mighty engines echoed from the portal and the Thunderheart ground forwards, its commander, Brother-Sergeant Kia’kan, visible as he rode in the command cupola. The Master of the Hunt raised an arm, and the siege tank came to a halt not far behind him.
‘My congratulations, brother-sergeant,’ Kor’sarro shouted above the roar of the siege tank’s engines and dozens of idling bikes nearby. ‘Your deeds shall be recounted at the Hall of Skies upon our return to Chogoris.’
The tank commander’s eyes glowed with fierce pride as he brought his right arm across his chest in salute to his khan. ‘My thanks, brother-captain,’ said Kia’kan, grinning as he spoke. ‘I must admit, the final shot was far more impressive than I had anticipated!’
‘Aye,’ said Kor’sarro. ‘The primarch was with us, for sure.’
‘Blessed be his name,’ said the sergeant. ‘What now, my khan?’
‘Now,’ Kor’sarro replied, nodding towards the mighty horde mustering in the distance. ‘We fight.’
As Kor’sarro mustered his brotherhood to strike the gathering defenders of Mankarra, high above the city, Captain Shrike was coordinating an assault of his own. At his order, a dozen Thunderhawk gunships bearing the black and white livery of the Raven Guard banked high over the walls, before each sped off towards its own pre-designated target.
One gunship was tasked with an assault against the city’s central strategium, the
huge, armoured structure that housed the planetary militia’s command chamber. Another strafed the city’s primary communications node, unleashing a fusillade of hellstrike missiles that brought the hundred metre-tall mast crashing down upon the buildings below. A third gunship deployed a contingent of Devastator squads equipped with heavy multi-meltas, which they unleashed against the main generatorium. The city’s defences would be forced to rely on secondary sources in the battle against the Space Marines.
Almost every one of the city’s buildings was defended by rooftop gun positions, sporting an array of heavy stubbers and autocannons augmented by the occasional lascannon. The Raven Guard gunships strafed every one as they roared overhead, shredding the exposed gunners in a lethal hail of mass-reactive heavy bolter rounds. The few defenders that survived these attacks were cut down as Raven Guard Assault Marines deployed from the gunships, falling upon the traitors as vengeful angels from heaven. Within minutes, a dozen battles were being fought across the most strategically valuable of the heavily fortified structures. Walkways connecting neighbouring buildings became the scenes of desperate and bloody battle for control of the upper levels.
Each Raven Guard squad was as an army in itself. Fighting within the confines of the fortified buildings, individual Space Marines slaughtered entire platoons of the enemy, for the environment forced the defenders to face them one at a time in a supremely unequal struggle. Even when a Space Marine fell in desperate close quarters battle, he took dozens of the enemy with him. Soon, panic was spreading as garbled pleas for aid drowned out all other traffic on the defenders’ vox-nets. Terror spread until the entire defence stood upon the brink of utter collapse.
Having secured the rooftops of the most important structures, the Raven Guard began their descent. The defenders were trapped between the anvil of the White Scars’ ground assault and the hammer of the Raven Guard’s aerial attacks. The defenders were faced with three, equally lethal options – stand against the terrible vengeance descending from above, leave their fortified positions and face the White Scars, or cower inside the buildings and await their inevitable deaths.
Circling overhead in his command gunship, Captain Shrike coordinated each battle, communicating with his squad sergeants and ensuring that each desperate, bloody skirmish contributed to the success of the whole. Squads were redeployed with masterful tactical awareness, specialists despatched to where they were needed the most, and ammunition levels constantly monitored and balanced. Throughout it all, Shrike kept his force’s most lethal weapon – himself – in reserve, ever vigilant for the moment when he and his Command squad would be needed to turn the tide of battle. As Shrike looked down from his gunship’s cockpit, he caught sight of the White Scars as they closed upon the mighty horde beyond the gate, and knew that moment would soon come.
The White Scars’ charge against the massed horde was not led by Kor’sarro’s bikers but, due to the narrow space between the buildings, by the Predator battle tanks. Though not as fast or manoeuvrable as the bike squads, the tanks were equipped with a fearsome array of anti-personnel weapons, which they unleashed in a storm of mass-reactive rounds as they advanced forwards across the bone-strewn ground.
The horde of militia troopers the White Scars charged towards were being pushed forwards by some agency Kor’sarro could not yet discern. Though not so numerous as the horde the Space Marines had encountered on the plains in front of the defence installation, this group still outnumbered the Space Marines by scores to one.
The Predators set about evening those odds.
As the tanks opened fire, the entire front rank of the horde simply evaporated. Those struck in the torso exploded, their ragged limbs arcing high into the air. Within seconds, scores of the traitor militia were dead, reduced to chunks of steaming meat scattered about the ground or splattered across their compatriots. Yet amazingly, the horde did not falter, but surged forwards to meet the White Scars head on.
With a near deafening roar that seemed to Kor’sarro equal parts despair and rage, several thousand militia troopers pressed forwards, running into the fusillade of shells that filled the air between them and the Predators. Spent shells poured from the tanks’ ejection ports in a constant stream as dozens of rounds were expended every second.
Kor’sarro had witnessed even warlike orks fall back in the face of such a barrage. He had known tyranid bio-organisms, bred for nothing but war, to falter against such a weight of firepower. He had seen only two types of foe continue forwards against such odds. On the third moon of Woebetide, whilst serving as a Scout many decades before, he had faced an Enslaver plague, and watched as ten thousand mind-slaved meat puppets, each formally a stoic Cadian shock trooper, were compelled by their alien masters to cross a minefield a hundred kilometres deep into the combined fire of the White Scars, Red Hunters and Celestial Lions Chapters. The other occasion had been on Delta Arbuthnot, when a potent, alpha-level psyker had forced an entire planetary population of ratling agri-serfs to rise up against the landowners in an orgy of bloodshed, even though they were armed with no more than shovels and their foes with automatic weapons.
Without a doubt, Quintus was irredeemably under the heel of the Ruinous Powers. The insidious taint of the warp was everywhere, even in the air itself. Voldorius must have supplanted the government generations earlier, and only revealed his hand when Kor’sarro’s hunt had run him to ground and left him nowhere else to hide. The militia troopers must have been born into the service of Chaos, and raised with its yoke around their neck, even if they had no idea of the true identity of their leaders. What a rare thing true faith must be in such a place, for surely it must have been stamped out the moment it was discovered.
The tide of the militia ploughed on, the troopers treading the bodies of their fallen companions into the ground as they ran. Part of Kor’sarro came to believe that the spectacle before him was mass suicide, the unwilling traitors martyring themselves upon the White Scars’ guns that their treachery and their suffering might be ended. Perhaps Quintus might not be worth saving at all once this all was over. Should he survive to claim the head of Voldorius, Kor’sarro might order the Lord of Heavens to annihilate Mankarra and the other cities, cleansing the world of the taint of Chaos once and for all.
The first wave of the traitors hit the White Scars’ lines. The last dozen or so metres saw nine out of every ten militia troopers gunned down, but when the survivors got to within a few metres of the tanks’ weapons, the crew could no longer pick out their targets. The militia scrambled up the Predators’ hulls to assail the armoured vehicles with whatever weapons they had to hand, from grenades and guns to fists and clubs.
‘Kergis!’ Kor’sarro motioned the company champion forwards as a wave of militia swarmed up the front of the Predators. Kergis bounded onto the rear deck of the nearest vehicle. In an instant, the champion was face to face with a militia sergeant who was desperately trying to pry open the turret hatch with an improvised crowbar. The two leaders sized one another up. Then a chainsword flashed, and the two halves of the traitor sergeant’s body fell to the ground on either side of the tank.
A dozen more of the troopers clawed their way up the tank’s frontal glacis plate. One was firing an autopistol at point-blank range into the driver’s vision block, emptying an entire magazine in a couple of seconds. The act had little effect, for the driver’s sights were constructed of thick armoured glass, made to stand up to far stronger attacks. Another trooper was ramming a grenade into one of the four exhaust units on the side of the vehicle, an action that could feasibly damage the tank’s engine systems. Kergis drew his bolt pistol, and exploded the man’s head with a single, almost point-blank shot.
The troopers died as more of Kor’sarro’s warriors opened fire. Sparks flew as bolter rounds exploded or ricocheted from the armour after ripping devastatingly through traitor flesh. The vehicle’s white livery ran red with the blood of the enemy, and no militia troopers were lef
t alive within twenty metres. Along the line the other Predators were likewise cleared of the enemy, freeing the tanks to concentrate their own fire on the horde of traitors still surging forwards.
In seconds, no more traitors remained. The ground in front of the White Scars was a charnel plain of broken and shattered bodies. The sudden cessation of shouting and gunfire was almost shocking, allowing the other sounds of the war-torn city to press in. From overhead came the roar of a Thunderhawk’s mighty engines, and still more of the gunships could be heard further out. Explosions spoke of hellstrike missiles pummelling their targets from afar, while the sharp crack of boltgun fire told of the rooftop battles the Raven Guard were even now winning.
The route ahead would not remain clear of enemies for long, and the brotherhood was soon under way again. As before, the Predators led the way, their turrets scanning back and forth. The force passed the area strewn with the blackened bones of the enemies caught in the plasma fires unleashed when the gate fell. Soon, however, the White Scars found the ground so covered with the remains of those gunned down by the Predators that the tanks had to grind a path through the bodies which the bikers and other units followed. Kor’sarro had witnessed many grisly sights throughout his years of service, but riding through a mire of blood and body parts was amongst the more unpleasant.
Finally, the ground up ahead cleared of corpses and the force spread out. Consulting Moondrakkan’s command terminal, Kor’sarro oriented himself with his objective, the Cathedral of the Emperor’s Wisdom, where Shrike’s contact had suggested Voldorius and his mysterious prisoner were waiting.
The terminal displayed a two-dimensional map of this part of the city. Up ahead lay a large, open area labelled as the grand square. Kor’sarro ordered the bike squads to press on towards it at full speed. The slower Predators and other vehicles followed up behind dealing with any serious resistance using their heavy weapons.
