by Nick Kyme
Ahead, a ridge of high ground emerged through the darkness, the edges of its lofty buildings picked out by the Sentinels’ search lamps. They had strayed into an urban valley, a basin of land before the city rose up higher and more dominant.
Drakgaard was turning, his Chaplain reaching the same conclusion as his commander, their eyes meeting as a sense of impotent urgency filled them. The order to fall back was barely formed on Drakgaard’s snarling lips before a low rumble filled the valley, swelling to a bellowing crescendo and the world beneath the world rose up to engulf them.
Zantho felt the quake before he heard or saw anything. It rumbled up through the chassis of his Predator tank in subtle tremors that rocked his pintle mount and told him something terrible had just happened.
As he called down for the vox to try to establish contact with Colonel Redgage, he noticed the plumes of smoke and dust occluding part of the city. They came from the direction of the second armour column, the one accompanied by Kor’ad and his troops. The Dreadnought had been en route to link up with Captain Drakgaard’s forces and the bulk of the Salamanders martial strength in Canticus.
If the two had met as planned…
‘Oh, merciful Vulkan…’ Zantho whispered.
Both vox-links to Kor’ad and Colonel Redgage were non-responsive.
‘Drek’or,’ he called down to his comms-operator below, ‘establish a column-wide link.’
After a few seconds, Drek’or replied, ‘Ready now, commander.’
Zantho nodded, and addressed the entire column.
‘All tank commanders, change heading to east now. I repeat, all armour is to proceed eastwards immediately.’
A direct route would take them through the city. They would be vulnerable to ambush. They would lose vehicles to the terrain. Some, most, would likely not make it through. Desperation had forced the commander’s hand, robbing him of choice and sound tactics.
‘Brother-Sergeant Zantho,’ Drek’or began, ‘across that rubble and debris, we risk–’
‘I know the risks. If we have to bulldoze our way through this accursed city to reach our brothers then that is what we’ll do. We have no time left for caution. Warriors are dying, Drek’or.’
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
Heletine, Canticus, inside the ravine
Redgage’s Chimera was on its side and trailing smoke. One of its tracks had been torn off and the front section was ablaze. Still groggy from the crash, he could feel the heat prickling his skin and smell the burning crewmen trapped inside. Mercifully, they were dead before the flames had taken hold but the fat of their bodies crackled and spat all the same.
Blood was leaking down his face from a gash in his forehead. No doubt his helmet had saved his skull, but Redgage couldn’t find it now and wasn’t about to look.
A ravine had opened up in the heart of the city, a yawning abyss that swallowed the allied Imperial forces whole at the exact moment they combined assets. The concerted push by Captain Drakgaard had ended in dismal failure. As far as Redgage could tell from his smoke-choked death trap, everyone in a Cadian uniform or drake-scale battleplate was fighting for their lives.
The enemy had been waiting, goading Drakgaard just enough to keep him eager. Weeks of bitter attritional fighting had led to this moment, though why the plan had been enacted now was anyone’s guess at this point.
Redgage struggled from the half-crushed cupola hatch, surprised at his own clarity. Perhaps his imminent death had ramped up his situational awareness in an effort to save him. Survival was really all that was left to him now, though judging by what was going on below the Salamanders weren’t ready to capitulate yet.
He had heard that said about them, that they refused to admit defeat, willing to fight in the face of impossible odds.
Though he could discern little through the smoke and heat haze, Redgage ventured only two possible outcomes: retreat or destruction.
He crawled out through the narrow hatch on his stomach, dragging his wounded leg behind him. It hurt like the damned Eye, but reminded him he was still alive and kept him awake so he could try to stay that way. Something snagged his belt on the way out and he reached down to find out what it was. He touched skin and looked back into the murky hatch to see what appeared to be Hansard’s fingers grasping at him.
Incredibly, Redgage’s gunner had survived.
‘Hold on, Hansard,’ Redgage told him. ‘I’ve got you,’ he said, grabbing the man’s wrist and heaving even as he lurched from the cupola himself.
Hansard came loose, but only from the elbow. The rest of the poor fool was still in the tank, severed from his limb in the crash.
Redgage gaped at Hansard’s forearm, distraught, before casting it down in disgust and muttering a prayer for the man’s soul as he reconciled himself to an uncomfortable truth. Of his crew, he alone lived.
Free of the wreck, coughing up black tar from his lungs as the smoke intensified, Redgage limped away into cover.
Dirt and debris from the collapsed city block was strewn all around him. Some of his comrades had been crushed by it. He had his back against a pillar and was trying to look up through the grey clouds at the summit of the ravine. It was a hard climb, but even with his leg it was doable.
Redgage started to move. If asked, he would not have described himself as a corpulent man. Several decades had passed since he had taken his physical training seriously, though, and he wished he had recently put more time in on the endurance yard.
Very few Cadian tanks had avoided the sinkhole. Those that did stood proudly on the edge of the ravine, speaking loudly through their cannons. Less than half the Thunderers and Demolishers Redgage had brought with him remained. The rest were broken and on fire like his Chimera. Clambering up the ruined slope, Redgage fixed a point in his mind where a stout wall of armour still resisted and aimed for it. So intent was he on reaching salvation that he failed to notice the cultist until it was almost upon him.
Dressed in whatever rags they had worn when forfeiting their immortal souls, cult worshippers had poured into the ravine like vermin. Driven to the point of desperate fanaticism, ordinary men and women had become murderers by the insidious promises of Chaos.
Salvation, status, vengeance, retribution, a man’s sins were varied enough that the gods of Ruin knew what to offer in return for eternal servitude. Moral corruption was, by its nature, a choice. Every cultist scrambling into the ravine had made theirs – some, Redgage noticed with disgust, were even wearing ragged Cadian uniforms.
One such traitor leapt at him now, combat knife already bloodied and hungry for more.
Redgage had enough time to throw up his arms in defence and managed to seize his assailant by the wrist before the frothing trooper bore the colonel down beneath his weight.
Hot breath, rancid with halitosis, washed over Redgage and he fought not to gag. The blade nicked his cheek like a wasp sting and he roared to push it back again.
Eyes sunken, hair falling from his scalp in clumps, the trooper looked like he was rad-poisoned. But it wasn’t radiation, it was the taint. Redgage barely recognised the man as one of his own. Only the uniform gave weight to the lie that all the Cadians had stayed loyal or died to remain so.
‘Traitor!’ spat Redgage, kneeing his assailant in the chest and using his anger to throw him off. Seemingly fuelled by unnatural vigour, the trooper sprang to his feet and was about to lunge again when Redgage drew his service pistol from its black leather holster and shot the man dead.
A second cultist a few metres away was lining up a rocket tube when the colonel spotted him. Steadying his aim with his free hand, Redgage killed him too. He executed a third who was scrambling up the slope below. He wanted to kill them all, to vent the anger and the horrific sense of frustration threatening to unman him. So many slain – no amount in return could balance those scales. The accountancy of war didn’t work like that and Redgage knew it.
His brief, but frenzied, bravura brought the attention of others and m
ade the colonel regret his lapse in composure. For after the deluge of cultists had stormed the ravine, the genuine warriors of the heretic cause had shown themselves.
Black Legion, the name held terror for most who heard it. For the men and women of Cadia, especially those who stood watch at the Cadian Gate, it promoted a stern but resigned steadfastness.
Said to descend from Horus himself, the sons of old Cthonia were rightly feared throughout the galaxy, at their head a leader so venerable he could remember the days of the primarchs. Such history, millennia old, was little more than fiction for those who lived in the Time of Ending, but not by him, nor his sworn warriors.
Redgage watched as three hulking, armoured bodies muscled through the rubble. Each had drawn a chainblade, their impassive faceplate masks unable to convey their relish of the kill. Skulls hung from their breastplates on spiked chains. Human hair dyed red served as topknots for their horned helms. Eager, murderous fire blazed within their flat, rectangular eye slits.
Redgage knew he couldn’t outrun them. He did the only thing he could – he levelled his sidearm at one of the power-armoured monsters and declared with more courage than he felt, ‘Come on then, scum!’
Then fired.
The bright flare of laser discharge lit up the slope for a few seconds as Redgage drained the pistol’s power pack. Barring a few scorch marks, the warriors emerged undamaged and undeterred. More than that in fact, they were laughing at him.
Lost somewhere during the crash, Redgage had no close combat weapon so he picked up a length of pipe instead, and tried to prop himself up against the rubble so he could swing it.
‘Bernadetta, my love…’ he whispered to the wife he would never see again, ‘I am so sorry.’
The growl of hungry chain-teeth filled his senses as Redgage faced down the three traitors.
Uselessly brandishing the pipe, Redgage prepared his soul for the end. The prayer died in his mouth as the first warrior evaporated in a ball of actinic blue light. The others turned at once, recognising a worthy foe.
Huge, imposing and horrendously powerful, Kor’ad strode amongst them. His plasma cannon was recharging for another burst, but the Dreadnought still had his thunder hammer and smashed a second warrior aside with it.
The third went in close, shouting for reinforcements in his own crude language, aiming for the Dreadnought’s weak points with his chainblade.
Sparks spitting from a ruptured power cable in his casket, Kor’ad backed up and knocked the warrior down with a punch from his massive fist. Then he quickly stepped forwards and crushed the traitor underfoot.
Two more were coming, and Kor’ad shifted his massive bulk into their path.
‘Rise, colonel,’ he bellowed through his vox-emitters. ‘Return to your men.’
The reinforcements looked tougher than their predecessors. Both were clad in hefty suits of war-plate, larger and more formidable than power armour. As one of the warriors stood firm, he unleashed a long-barrelled cannon. Redgage threw himself down as a hail of shells filled the air. Kor’ad bore the brunt of it, staggering as several dense rounds pierced his thick armour. There was no respite.
In the wake of the salvo, the second warrior drove into the Dreadnought, chainfist swinging. Kor’ad reacted on instinct, striking a glancing blow that took off the warrior’s helm and sent him sprawling. Beneath the blood and the mass of shorting cables, the warrior wore a face of flayed skin.
Kor’ad advanced on him when a second burst ripped from the long-barrelled cannon. This time the Dreadnought could angle his body without fear of Redgage being hit and avoided most of the shell storm. Turning back, aware the warrior with the chainfist was coming at him, Kor’ad fired off a bolt from his plasma cannon and the Black Legion shooter disappeared from sight.
Dead or smashed back down the slope by the impact, Redgage didn’t know. He saw the other warrior hit Kor’ad again though, and heard the ominous clunk of a grenade being attached to the Dreadnought’s casket.
The detonation came seconds later as Kor’ad’s plasma cannon exploded, taking his left arm with it and severing the cables in the right so the Dreadnought dropped his thunder hammer. Kor’ad had enough power left to reach for the unhelmeted warrior and crush his skull in his fist before throwing him bodily into the air and back down into the ravine.
Redgage had never seen a Dreadnought kneel; he didn’t know they could until that moment. Close up, he realised it wasn’t just the arm that had been damaged when the krak grenade had gone off. Part of Kor’ad’s casket was split too, and he could see the remnants of the warrior the Dreadnought once was languishing within.
He was just a man inside, a withered torso and head, whose flesh was puckered with cables and venting fluid, a war-maker no more.
‘What can I do? Tell me,’ Redgage pleaded, his knowledge of Dreadnought repair woefully lacking.
Kor’ad was bloody, struggling for breath. Dying. Without his vox-emitters, he sounded frail and rasping.
‘You’ve stood with me… colonel,’ said Kor’ad haltingly. ‘That is… enough. Run… save your–’
The whine of rocket propulsion cut off the end of the sentence, followed by the ear-shattering explosion of the missile striking the Dreadnought’s back. There was a scream, half mechanised through the emitters, half croaked by the failing lungs of the withered corpse entombed in his dying machine.
Kor’ad fell face forward. His back was a smoking ruin. The Venerable was dead, slain by an honourless blow. Redgage thrust out his pistol, searching for a target but it was an empty gesture. His enemy was lost to him through smoke and fire. He paused, holstering his pistol as he regarded the wreck of his saviour, once so formidable but now laid irrevocably low.
Then he ran, scrambling, up the slope.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
Heletine, nearing the border of Solist
The screaming began about forty kilometres out from Solist. Sitting quietly in the gunship’s troop hold, Stephina had the vox frequency switched to that of their so-called allies. In that moment, surrounded by the solemn figures of her Seraphim whose heads were bowed in prayer and guilt, she wondered if that word could really be used for betrayers.
As abhorrent as that truth was, it was also irrefutable.
Sister Helia went to cut the link but Stephina’s raised hand stopped her.
‘No,’ she uttered flatly. It was the first time any of them had spoken since the vox-feed had been opened.
‘We need not listen to that,’ said Helia, her seraphic appearance at odds with her obvious discomfort.
Stephina looked up to meet her fellow Sister Superior’s gaze.
‘Does it bother you, my Sister, to hear their cries of pain and curses against our Order?’
The voices conveyed by the vox not only screamed their death agonies, they also vowed revenge upon the Ebon Chalice and the daughters of the Emperor who had chosen to abandon them.
‘Craven men will oft lay blame at the feet of the blameless,’ Helia replied.
Stephina quickly got to her feet, causing several of her fellow Seraphim to look up from their devotions.
‘Your own words betray you, Sister, and barely convince yourself!’ she snapped, but then calmed down. It would not be proper to act thusly in front of the others. ‘We have both seen them fight. They are not craven men.’ She let that hang in the air for a moment to gauge Helia’s reaction and see if she dared refute it.
Helia’s mouth shaped a response but the words died on her lips, and she shook her head.
‘No.’
‘Nor are they savages, deserving of savage treatment.’
Helia lowered her gaze and let out a resigned breath.
‘Our orders come from the preceptor, she who is the will of the–’
‘The will of the Throne, yes I am well aware,’ said Stephina, reaching out to gently lift Helia’s chin. She spoke with a quiet intensity. ‘Whatever work Canoness Angerer is engaged in cannot be worth the souls of thousands of Im
perial servants, the very angels of the Emperor Himself!’
The vox-feed cut to static as whoever was broadcasting the signal could do so no longer. A brief silence followed.
Helia’s eyes were pleading, tearful.
‘We must have faith in Angerer’s plan…’
‘Even if that plan is to leave our allies to slaughter?’
Stephina turned away, not waiting for an answer as she contacted the transport’s pilot.
‘Sister,’ she began with authority, ‘we are turning around.’
There was a short pause as the pilot tried to comprehend the order.
‘Superior?’
‘Do not question. Obey. Make heading for Canticus at all speed. This is my order: you are my Seraphim. Let it not be said that we too abandoned our God-Emperor sworn honour.’
The vessel slowed with the dull roar of turbo fans, banking sharply as the pilot changed course.
When Stephina had relayed the same order to Avensi and Cassia in the second transport, who were both wise enough not to argue with their commanding superior, she addressed the hold.
‘Know who you are,’ she said, shouting above the engines as they pushed hard and complained loudly. ‘Know your purpose is divine and that there is no greater expression of faith or loyalty to the Throne than in battle against the enemies of the Ecclesiarchy. We are less than forty souls aboard these two ships, but we will fight as more than four hundred.
‘Our allies are dying on the battlefield, our promise to them ash in the wind. Take up your arms and follow me. The righteous have no fear. A holy wrath descends upon the perfidious and the traitor – it falls on ebon wings, your wings. I would have them occlude the very sun.’
Stephina gritted her teeth, stirred by her own rhetoric.
‘If any here believe we follow an unjust path, that I lead you to damnation in the eyes of Throne and God-Emperor, speak and let us all hear your condemnation.’
