Defenders of Mankind - David Annandale & Guy Haley

by Warhammer 40K

  He felt the truths he planted take root and flourish. They grew strong, spreading their branches ever wider. In full glory, they would strangle every other thought and hope, converting all drives to their own ends. Already, there had been so much progress. Nessun’s empyrean-self laughed with unqualified delight, laughed with all the force of his being, while his material body let its mouth hang open and utter a low, moaning rasp.

  Actions had been taken. Destinies loomed. There were still many branching paths ahead, but along every one, he saw nothing but the celebration of his Great Lord. Now, he had but to wait a short while before the moment would be ripe for his next move. During that wait, he could revel in the perverse, and watch the Black Dragons make their choice of dooms.

  CHAPTER 16

  THE COMMANDING HEIGHTS

  If Hell had nightmares, Concordat Hill was one of them. Most of Aighe Mortis’s features had been razed, consumed and buried. Thousands of years of industry’s hammer had smashed them flat, leaving only the blackened towers of humanity’s misery to reach for the toxic skies. But some traces of the planet’s shape still showed through, a geological palimpsest. Concordat Hill was an echo of the mountain it had once been, a roughly conical rise distinct enough to lift the spires of its towers above those below. At its peak was a monstrous manufactorum cathedral, and this was the Concordat itself.

  Even after the exodus of Aighe Mortis’s ruling elite, the Concordat retained its force. It was a machine of unstoppable momentum. It was too big, too integrated, too self-contained, and too horrific to kill. The factory floor and the hall of worship were a single space combining machines and tapestries, assembly lines and stained glass windows, workbench and pew. Labour and liturgy were one and the same. Fanaticism changed work into an act of faith that could never be completed, and so the clangour and smoke-belching of the Concordat never ceased. Worker-supplicants slaved, prayed, and drank and evacuated grey meal substitutes until they collapsed at their post. When they revived, their penance for hours lost to sleep was to work twice as hard. Life expectancy was measured in months. But the doors were always open to new employees, while hundreds of vox-casters made the Hill resound with the hymns sung by a tireless choir tens of thousands strong. Whatever desperation walked the streets and warrens of the hive, there was employment to be had here, all applicants accepted. Within a day, new employees had become full initiates.

  The Concordat ran its endless course, untouched by the tides and currents of the planet’s political affairs. It paid no attention to the early infiltrations by the Swords of Epiphany, or to the first stirrings of resentment against the new founding. It ignored the insurrection. Not even the global civil war disturbed its relentless cycle of production. The Concordat had long since lost any sense of purpose or goal. While it did produce its share of small-arms, it also spat out millions of components whose use had been forgotten for centuries, and an eternal flow of incomprehensible fusions of rods and boxes poured from the complex to fall straight into its sewage outflow. This was the Concordat River, and it ran down in discoloured cascades and brown-water rapids to become a moat at the base of the hill, and the closest thing Aighe Mortis had to a lake.

  The Concordat was a mindless devotional machine that existed for its own sake, and even now, as war came to its doorstep, nothing changed. The maelstrom of arms that engulfed Concordat Hill seemed less to be closing in on the complex then to be just another product of the beast, its effluent transporting the blasted insanity of its interior to the outside world. And perhaps there was some truth to this. The convulsion that was devouring Aighe Mortis was the inevitable result of the Concordat’s abomination.

  But the immediate military truth of the battle of Concordat Hill was that the topography and the complex were invaluable. They were the means whose end would be the annihilation of a foe. The force that controlled the Hill would have the only true high ground for hundreds of kilometres in every direction. The elevation was such that the Hill really did look down on the streets and rooftops of the surrounding city. The Concordat’s own roof had a broad landing pad beside its colossal crozius spire. Though fallen into disuse, the pad was big enough for cargo freighters. Big enough to install a battery of heavy artillery. The king of this hill would have the means to level any sector occupied by his enemy between here and the horizon. It was a prize so valuable that two armies were willing to destroy themselves in order to claim it. If, when the smoke cleared, there was no one left standing to make use of the position, the futility would be no more than a fitting tribute to the Concordat itself.

  The Black Dragons came to bring an end to futility.

  For all the vortex of street-to-street, building-to-building clashes, the struggle for Concordat Hill was, in its broad lines, quite simply defined, and Toharan’s plan took advantage of this. The Mortisian Guard were advancing up the western slope, while the cultists had the east side. The race to the top had ended in a dead heat. The back and forth skirmishes at the summit had turned into a perpetual flesh grinder. There was no pause as opposing troops stormed into the maw of war, gunfire giving way to the butchery of melee weapons. A tide of blood had flowed into the Concordat River, giving it a slick shine visible even in the night. The wave of battle splashed up the sides of the complex, with more hand-to-hand massacres taking place on the Concordat’s lower ziggurat levels. Anyone climbing above the first three terraces was taken down by opposing fire. The building’s immense doors, metres thick, had closed automatically as the first combatants had arrived, and were still unbreached.

  Toharan had the friendly rebel forces advance as far as the base of the hill. He didn’t ask them to engage in combat directly. It would be enough, he thought, for them to witness what would happen, and they would clamour to fight in the Emperor’s name. Tactically, all they had to do was hold and protect the rear. The Dragons, meanwhile, would move to support the Guard, pushing the advance forward and driving the cultists from the summit. The Dragon Claws were to strike behind the enemy lines, at the base of the eastern slopes, and disrupt the foe’s march. The plan was a good one, Toharan thought. It was simple, it was adaptable, and it would make good use of the terrain and the Space Marines’ strengths. He felt the imminence of glory and redemption as he charged into battle.

  The Battle Pyre unleashed the Dragon Claws. It flew in from the south, coming around the curve of the hill to the eastern positions. Anti-aircraft fire from both sides denied all access to the airspace directly above the summit, but Keryon wasn’t interested in that approach. All eyes were on that quadrant. He brought the Thunderhawk in from an ignored corner of the sky, weaving low between the filth-blackened towers. The gunship struck like a scythe: a slash from the side, deep into the enemy’s flank. Hellstrike missiles cratered the target zone. The sponson heavy bolters chewed the enemy into so much meat. The enemy attempted to respond. Disorganised return fire clanged off the armour. The momentum of the march bled off. ‘Give them a judgement of flame,’ Keryon voxed.

  ‘They’ll be kindling for their own pyre,’ Volos responded, and the Claws launched.

  The squad split into two fire teams. Volos led the first. They hit the ground with the fury of an orbital strike, shredding cultists and heretic troopers. They struck the centre of the main advance. Four broad avenues, running along the cardinal points of the compass, went up in relatively straight lines to the Concordat. They were the means by which ground transport fed the beast raw supplies and received its still-usable output. The east road was now the main tributary of the Chaos flood. The Claws brought chaos of their own, a bloody turbulence in the middle of the flow, and the advance slowed even more.

  Volos had opted for a flamer again. He didn’t need range for this stage of the combat, just a maximum spread of death. He spun, torching cultists, and those who weren’t instantly carbonised ran flaming into their fellows, creating an expanding ring of burning casualties. Five metres to his right, he saw an enemy-commandeered Hellhound. He burned a path to it, pounding over
fragile bodies, shrugging at the rounds that glanced off his armour. The turret rotated his way. With a burst from his jump pack, he shot up out of the line of fire and landed on top of the vehicle. He extended a blade and, a part of him still unable to believe that he could actually do this, punched through the armour-plating of the Hellhound’s promethium reservoir. He tossed an incendiary grenade inside and blasted back. He was still in the air when the tank exploded. A mushrooming fireball rolled over the cultists, gifting them with slashing shrapnel. Across the entire width of the avenue, Braxas and the other Claws of Volos’s team were butchers with bolter and flame, creating barricades of corpses, interdicting the upward slope of the road.

  They were a virus in the bloodstream of the Chaos ranks, and the army responded like antibodies to the invader. The advance contracted as troops from uphill and the side streets rushed to crush the Claws. Volos and his brothers welcomed them to damnation with open arms. They burned and shot and sliced and smashed: dark gods of black ceramite and white, murderous bone. They were giants, monsters of war breaking little human dolls into bloody, smoking shreds.

  It almost wasn’t sporting, Volos thought, snarling as he tore into another clump of cultists. A traitor Guardsman got off a lasrifle shot at Volos’s face, scorching his mouth grille. ‘I just had this repaired,’ he growled, his voice distorted into an electronic, inhuman rasp. He wrapped his fingers around the man’s neck and squeezed. The Guardsman’s head popped off. No, it almost wasn’t sporting, but heresy deserved no better, and what the traitors lacked in force, they made up for in quantity. Given will and enough time, they could, like the doubtworm-infected on Antagonis, overwhelm a Space Marine. They were attempting to do that now as they choked the avenue with their numbers. It was exactly what Volos and his brothers wanted them to do.

  Nithigg, heading up the other combat squad, voxed. ‘At your leisure, brother-sergeant.’

  Fangs bared, Volos grinned in anticipation of carnage. ‘No, brother,’ he said. ‘At yours.’

  ‘How very kind. On three, then.’

  ‘On three.’

  Two beats, two more savage moments during which dozens more cultists died, and then the Claws lifted off from the choked morass of the avenue. Above, the demolition charges set by Nithigg’s fire team detonated.

  Bisset had told Volos about the insurgents’ opening salvo of the war and the fall of the Munitorum Palace. ‘They should be repaid in kind,’ Volos had replied.

  Now they were. The charges took out the street-side facade and structural supports of an immense spire. The job, Nithigg had explained, was like felling a tree, and the art lay not only in making the tree fall, but in controlling where it did. With an outraged roar of murdered stone, the tower seemed to twist, its bulk fighting gravity for a perversely graceful second before it came down like the fall of the heavens themselves. It collapsed along the length of the avenue, destroying the network of upper level roads and walkways, triggering a chain reaction. For the cultists, it was as if an entire mountain chain descended on them. Volos and the Claws rose through a night filled with flying rockcrete and dust, and below them an entire swath of the insurgent army vanished, crushed out of existence.

  The Dragon Claws landed uphill of the destruction, and began to burn and slash their way to the summit.

  Is it time yet? Rodrigo Nessun wondered. It was hard, sometimes, to keep track of minutes and hours in the materium. So much of his consciousness was at play in a realm where time was not just meaningless, it wasn’t even a concept. But it was important that he remember he had things to do on the material plane. That was, after all, where the game was being played. That was where there were destinies. He reached out and touched the minds that were open to him, and read what was being experienced. The full picture of the Concordat Hill struggle coalesced before him. He saw that yes, it was indeed time. He sent another player onto the board.

  The main force of the Black Dragons surged through the Mortisian Guard and hit the front lines of the Concordat battle like a battering ram. Lettinger ran with them, doing his best to keep up, but it was a lost cause. Setheno, more than a head taller, was better able to match the pace, and he lost track of her power-armoured figure early in the charge. The Dragons used no vehicles. With this concentration of troops, even a bike would get bogged down. On foot, the Space Marines had a duck-weave-smash momentum that ate up distance and shredded opposition. Lettinger swallowed the humiliation of being the straggler. It wasn’t easy. The secrecy of his actual ordo notwithstanding, he was unmistakeable as an inquisitor, and he was used to the awe and cringing he inspired when he emerged from the shadows. There was no such reaction from the Guardsmen he ran past. He was too pathetically human, too ordinary, in the wake of the storm of gods that had just passed.

  It didn’t matter, he reminded himself as he reached the upper quadrant of Concordat Hill. Today did not matter. The battle did not matter except as a test of the Black Dragons. A test not of their martial ability, but of whether there was anything worth salvaging, or whether he and Toharan should proceed with seeking an act of mercy for an irredeemably tainted Chapter. That decision was what mattered, and so, when all was said and done, he could put up with a little wounded pride. He held the fate of a Chapter of the Adeptus Astartes in his hands. That was true authority and power. He knew there would be no songs written about Werner Lettinger in the centuries to come, but his name might certainly be spoken in hushed whispers, and that would suit him very well.

  Ahead, the Black Dragons must have already been having an impact, because the mass of Guard was moving faster. The vehicles were doing more than inching, and the men were actually marching. Lettinger ran a bit faster, his cloak flapping night. He was a wraith weaving in and out of the men, and at last he reached the battlefield. The summit of Concordat Hill was a volcanic eruption of blood and confusion, a hurricane of close-quarters fighting where unit cohesion and even a sense of direction fell apart. Within seconds, Lettinger didn’t know if he was advancing or retreating. There were heretics on all sides, and he pounced from one to the next, a lethal shadow. He wasted no energy, putting one shot from his laspistol in the skull, point blank, of each target. He was a piece of the dark, and they couldn’t see him coming, couldn’t fight what they didn’t know was there.

  He heard a series of explosions, and then a rumble so huge it might have been an earthquake, and the ground did shake beneath his feet. The Dragon Claws’ mission had succeeded, then. He sensed a shift in the nature of the struggle. The current became more defined. He was moving consistently in one direction: the top, driving the enemy away from the Concordat.

  Then there was another big sound. From the wrong direction.

  The In Excelsis was a Goliath-class factory ship. It was almost five kilometres long. Amidships was a plasma refinery. The transport was Aighe Mortis-registered, and it now re-entered its home system for the first time in years. It broadcast its identity and destination, and slowly approached the position of the Imperial fleet as if the presence of the warships and the ominous flashes on the planet’s surface were nothing out of the ordinary.

  ‘In Excelsis , hold position,’ the Irrevocable Fate demanded.

  The factory ship did not. It came closer. After its first broadcast, it fell into vox silence, and no hails were answered. It moved with grace and majesty. And will.

  Toharan was on the summit when the explosions happened. Without pausing his extermination of heretics, he glanced down the east slope and saw the billow of dust rise towards the invisible heavens, glowing from the flashes of fireballs. The enemy reinforcements were blocked. The troops on the hill were outnumbered now, with no way up or down. It was time to crush them, and place the Concordat in Imperial hands.

  Then there were more blasts, like echoes, only they came from the rear lines. Toharan frowned and voxed on the entire command network. ‘Does anyone know what that was?’

  There was so much static and interference, the answer had to be relayed along line of sig
ht from person to person until it reached Toharan. ‘It’s those Throne-abandoned rebels we left to guard our rear,’ Symael reported. ‘They’ve done the same thing as the Claws. They’ve dropped towers across the main avenues away from the hill.’

  Both armies were boxed in now, Toharan realised. The traps weren’t airtight. Egress was possible. But it would be slow. He felt a premonitory dread.

  On the Immolation Maw , helmsman Maro listened to the unanswered message from the Irrevocable Fate to the In Excelsis . As the type of ship he was looking at and its precise course sank in, he ordered firing resolutions for the factory ship. He sent an urgent vox to Admiral Hassarian: ‘Cripple it! Cripple it now!’

  Nessun sat in the mind of Captain Henrik Rogge of the In Excelsis . Nessun had brought the truth to Rogge years before, and had held him and his ship in reserve for just such a crossroads of fates as now. ‘Send it out,’ Nessun whispered to Rogge.

  The In Excelsis opened its cargo bay. The missile inside was carried off the ship by two tugboats. They transported it a safe distance from the hull before its engine fired and it streaked towards Aighe Mortis.

  The Immolation Maw ’s augurs scanned the missile, divined its nature, plotted its trajectory, and fed the data to Maro, who sat in the pilot throne, mechadendrites linking him to the being and spirit of the ship. The missile was ancient, of unknown make, and Chaos-distorted. It was also atomic, and its ground zero was Concordat Hill.