‘I won’t let you down, sir,’ Mack said, saluting the colonel. Strike stopped himself from admonishing the trooper and instead returned the gesture.
Tzula approached Liall. ‘Thank you, Liall. What you’re about to do takes a lot of courage.’
His hollow eyes seemed to bore right through her. ‘No, you are quite wrong. Courage. The quality of mind or spirit that enables a person to face danger without fear. Courage.’
‘Wrong?’ Tzula said, puzzled. ‘You don’t think you’re going to face any danger?’
Liall tilted his head sideways as if he was visually appraising the junior inquisitor. He lowered his voice so that Mack and his team could not hear. ‘Oh no. The danger we will face up there is almost beyond human comprehension. The horrors that will be wrought upon our bodies cannot be given name but pale into insignificance compared to the atrocities our souls will endure. What you are wrong about is that I face that danger without fear.’
Tzula fought down the urge to throw her arms around Liall and hug him. ‘You do remember that there is another message you have to send, once you’ve sent the message to fleet command?’
‘Of course. Standard operational procedure,’ he replied.
‘C’mon. Time to go, Liall,’ Mack said, shouldering the flamer he was using for the mission in place of his unwieldy heavy bolter. He approached the astropath and gently put a hand on Liall’s elbow, guiding him towards the breech in the hive wall.
‘The Emperor go with you,’ Tzula said after them.
As Mack’s team disappeared into the darkness, each one of them saluted Tzula and Strike. Right before Mack led Liall through the gap, the astropath turned back one last time. Tzula could have sworn he was smiling just before the darkness engulfed him.
‘Care to tell me what all that business with the other message was about?’ Strike asked, taking up position behind an impromptu barricade assembled from empty ammo crates.
‘I’m sorry, colonel, but that’s–’ Tzula said, drawing her pistol and kneeling beside him.
‘Classified,’ Strike finished for her. Two rapid shots from his lasrifle burst open the chest of a charging cultist.
‘If it’s any consolation, if the message does get through you’ll find out soon enough.’ With catlike reflexes she rose from her position, took the head off a cultist about to put an axe through Strike’s skull, before resuming her firing position all in one fluid movement.
‘Provided we live that long, of course.’
833959.M41 / Interior. Atika Hive, Pythos
A quick burst from Mack’s flamer illuminated the darkened stairwell and showed them the route upwards. Although the Catachans had been billeted in tents and temporary constructs around the base of the hive ever since they’d arrived on Pythos, they all knew the layout of the interior as the bars, cantinas and other pleasure venues were the destinations of choice when they were granted a few hours R&R. Keen for the Catachans not to mix with the population any more than they had to, Strike had insisted that, where possible, his regiment use access tunnels and maintenance stairways to get around. Which was where Liall, Mack and the rest of the squad found themselves.
The way they moved was straight out of the Catachan basic training manual, or at least it would have been had the Catachans had a basic training manual rather than the oral tradition of teaching warfare that they practised. One trooper would advance up the steps to the next stairwell and, after he’d recced it and made sure it was all clear, signal for the rest of the squad to follow. That trooper would then cover their rear while another trooper moved to the next stairwell, checked it out and called up the rest of the squad. Although it was a slow process, Mack and his men had taken out three enemy guards without any Catachan casualties in the hour they had been ascending Atika Hive.
Lendpar, a young, dark-skinned trooper, all bundles of muscle and sinew, signalled for the rest of the squad to move up to the stairwell he had just checked for signs of the enemy. In single file, eleven more Catachans and a scrawny, bedraggled youth strode past him. Boniax, barely older than Lendpar but with the same toned physique, took his place at the head of the formation and was about to climb the next set of steps when he felt a meaty hand on his shoulder. It was Mack.
‘Be extra careful up there. It’s been a while since we had enemy contact and Liall has started getting twitchy.’ He motioned with his thumb to the astropath who was shivering like he had been plunged into a vat of ice-cold water.
‘Will do, chief,’ Boniax said. He swung his lasrifle around onto his hip and advanced upwards, the barrel of the weapon pointing his way. Reaching the top of the flight, he put the muzzle of the weapon around the corner into the next stairwell before following it around with his head. He didn’t like what he found.
‘Stay back,’ he stage-whispered back down to the waiting Catachans. ‘They’ve left a corpse here. Classic booby trap.’ He slowly moved forwards, uncertain whether the body was really dead or shamming, ready to spring an ambush. ‘Just give me a minute to dis–’
There was a split second between Boniax feeling the tripwire against the fabric of his fatigues and the ensuing explosion. The force of the blast ripped away all extremities from his body and human shrapnel blasted back down the stairway along with the debris of collapsed masonry. The waiting Catachans, caught unawares, could only duck in reaction to the heat, dust and rockcrete fragments cascading down upon them. All of them, with the exception of Lendpar bringing up their rear, suffered burns and scratches, and several gagged and vomited through a combination of inhaling grime and the stench of charred human flesh.
Mack reacted first and, after patting down Liall’s robes to put out smouldering sections that could easily have set him alight, scrambled up the remnants of the stairs to see how bad the damage was. The next flight was impassable, choked with rubble among which Boniax’s scorched and still twitching torso sat grotesquely.
In that moment, Mack suddenly became aware of two things – he could feel a draught coming from somewhere and the intense ringing in his ears was giving way to another sound. Singing. Atonal, discordant singing.
Bringing his flamer up into firing position, he turned around and activated the firing stud just in time to incinerate the first of the cultists swarming through the hole blown into the wall of the maintenance stairway.
833959.M41 / The base of Atika Hive, Pythos
Whether it was because the enemy knew what Strike was attempting or because operations were over elsewhere, the enemy forces surrounding the base of the hive had swelled significantly in the past few minutes and the fighting grew ever more intense. From behind improvised barricades and hastily dug trenches, Catachan lasrifles filled the rapidly dwindling no-man’s-land between them and the forces of Chaos with searing energy only to have their assaults returned upon them tenfold.
Tzula had stayed by Strike’s side throughout the battle, her already haggard appearance made worse by the cauterised scar she now bore on her cheek as the result of not ducking quick enough to avoid a cultist’s shot. Strike was bleeding too from numerous wounds where he and his blade had got up close and personal with a few frothing madmen who had made it to Imperial lines, but nothing that hampered either his ability to lead or fight.
Power pack depletion and weapon malfunction due to overheating was becoming a real issue, and the Catachans would have had to retreat already if it wasn’t for the ministrations of K’Cee running along the lines and servicing their weapons. Naturally, the jokaero had introduced some refinements of his own after getting his hands on the Catachan lasrifles and almost every shot that struck an enemy combatant was a kill shot thanks to the improved power and accuracy.
‘To your right, colonel!’ implored a trooper next to Strike. Instinctively, the Catachan commander turned and loosed off a rapid succession of las-shots, felling the cultist hurtling towards him. As the dying man went down, something cylindrical and metal fell from his hand and skittered towards the barricades.
‘G
renade!’ Strike yelled, the final syllable lost beneath the detonation. He put his arms over his head to protect himself from the mud and debris raining down on his position. Tzula did likewise.
‘Thanks, trooper. That was a close one.’ Strike patted the man next to him on the shoulder, but the trooper’s body had gone limp. The colonel spun him around and the man’s head, half of it missing as a result of the grenade blast, lolled sickeningly to one side. Taking the trooper’s knife and tucking it next to his own on his belt, Strike returned his attention to penning the enemy back.
Something had changed. Instead of the sporadic fire followed by a charge upon the barricades, the enemy’s fire had become more sustained, as if they were trying to pin the Catachans down so that they could not return fire. The reason for this soon became apparent.
From the rear of the enemy lines, massive shapes coalesced. Armoured figures, their profiles broken by vicious spikes, loomed over the smaller cultists and bloodcurdling cries issued forth. Many of the Catachans stopped firing altogether, spooked by the guttural howls until Strike ordered them in no uncertain terms to keep shooting.
When he saw what leapt over the enemy lines and began charging towards them, those orders soon changed to retreat. Reports had come through during the early hours of the invasion that the enemy forces were backed up by Traitor Astartes, but it was only now that he saw them for himself for the first time.
‘Berzerkers! Fall back! Fall back!’ Strike yelled at full volume, struggling to be heard above the unholy warcries. ‘Make for the docks.’
The Catachans did not need to be told twice and, under a hail of bolter fire, a sea of green flowed out of the trenches and back towards the docks.
Covering his men until the last of them was clear, Strike aimed a shot at the nearest berserker and struck the behemoth in the knee with a clean shot. Fuelled by battle lust, the other onrushing Traitor Marines simply trampled him underfoot, so bent were they on reaching the base of the hive.
‘Did we buy them enough time?’ Tzula asked, plasma pistol glowing hot in her hand.
Strike took one last look up at the hive. ‘Emperor willing we did,’ he said before they both turned to follow the retreating Catachans.
833959.M41 / Interior. Atika Hive, Pythos
Lendpar was the first to fall, a solid round from an autoweapon taking him cleanly between the eyes and dropping him to the floor of the hab level before he even knew he was dead.
All about them, cultists screamed in rage and pain as Mack and the two other Catachans armed with flamers burned a path through the throng.
‘Keep moving. Head towards the ramp,’ Mack yelled, igniting another robed lunatic who dropped to the floor and rolled around in a futile effort to put out the inferno his clothes had become.
The Catachan squad had emerged from the ruined stairwell onto one of the many hab levels of Atika Hive, straight into the line of sight of several dozen cultists. Many more had flooded out of the low rise hab buildings at the sound of gunfire. Mack found it odd that the first thing the cultists had done after taking over the hive was set up home in the vacated dwellings. When he saw that they were still wearing their crude armour and brandishing weapons, he realised that they weren’t trying to live there but were looking for the people who used to live there. That was good. It meant that the enemy did not know that the civilians had been evacuated below the hive. He would have to tell the colonel this when he saw him again.
Then he remembered he was never going to see the colonel again.
Another Catachan went down beside him, a las-round hitting her in the throat and ripping it away in a spray of arterial blood.
‘C’mon. We’re nearly there!’ Mack was using the flamer with one massive hand, his other was planted firmly on Liall’s shoulder. The astropath’s shivering had ceased and he seemed completely unfazed by the melee going on around him. It was almost as if he knew what hand fate had dealt him and was going to play it out with a serene grace.
Torching another two cultists who had taken up position on the ramp, Mack and Liall ascended to the next level of the hive. Ramps like these connected all of the hive levels to their vertical neighbours to allow bikes and other motored vehicles access, and with their stealth mission up the service stairs uncovered, they were going to have to fight their way up Atika Hive the hard way. The Catachan way.
The other surviving members of his squad followed Mack up shortly after, laying down a wall of flame to prevent close pursuit.
When the conflagration abated, the handful of cultists still drawing breath made it to the base of the ramp in time to hear the plink plink of the pair of grenades the Catachans had rolled down after them.
833959.M41 / Atika Dock, Pythos
‘Thorne? Are those damned tanks loaded yet?’ Strike bellowed down the vox. Night was beginning to fall again over Atika but the quayside was lit up as bright as day, such was the volume of las-fire being exchanged.
‘Still another fifty or so to be loaded. We’re rolling them on as fast as we can,’ Thorne replied down the crackling vox-link, his frayed temper evident in his tone. Since the Chaos forces had made planetfall, Thorne had eschewed sleep entirely to make sure all of the 183rd’s armour was loaded onto the massive ore transporters, and though the man was doing his best, it still wasn’t quick enough for the colonel’s liking. Even assigning Brigstone to help Thorne hadn’t sped things up.
‘It’s desperate down this end. I’m not sure how much longer we’re going to be able to hold them off,’ Strike said, his tone more conciliatory. ‘I don’t want those tanks to fall into enemy hands. Put them on the bottom of the ocean if it looks like any of your ships are going to be captured. Do you hear me, Brigstone?’
Under Strike’s orders, Brigstone had been assigned to command the flotilla ferrying the tanks away from the planetary capital. The tank commander wasn’t happy about it – the way he looked at things he’d already missed too much of the action tearing blindly through the jungle – but he saw the sense in Strike’s thinking. Better to be deprived of Imperial armour altogether than be facing it across the other side of the battlefield.
‘Understood, colonel,’ Brigstone said, breaking across the vox channel. ‘I’ll get them out into deep water and await your orders.’
Strike cut the link and turned his attention to Tzula who was running at a low crouch across the quayside to avoid the superheated beams whizzing overhead.
‘What in the Emperor’s name are you doing back here? I thought I ordered you to evacuate the wounded to Olympax in that shuttle of yours?’ Strike said. Almost as soon as the first drop pods had hit Atika’s surface, Strike had ordered the Inquisition shuttle be moved from the landing bay and down to the docks. His original plan had been to load it on one of the container ships with the tanks but, now that Tzula had made it back out of the jungle, it had been put to better use ferrying the severely wounded out of Atika.
‘I came back for you,’ Tzula said, her jaw fixed as hard as it was the first time Strike had seen her after she came out of the jungle.
‘You’re wasting your time. I’m staying right here with my men and when I call the retreat, I’ll be at their head leading them to Olympax.’
‘And what good will you be to your men and the people of this world dead?’ She fiddled with the gold Inquisition insignia hanging from the chain at her neck. ‘I could pull rank on you, you know?’
‘Yes,’ Strike said, ‘and I could shoot you, you know?’
The tension in the air was as real as the las-rounds passing through it. It was only broken when Tzula snorted and shook her head.
‘Now stop hanging around drawing fire and get my men and that infernal knife out of here,’ Strike said, sidling up to a stack of oil drums and shouldering his lasrifle.
‘The Emperor protects,’ she said coldly, before ducking her head and running back in the direction of the shuttle.
A few minutes later, the whine of twin engines carrying her craft aloft filled t
he docks as the backwash sent dust and debris kicking up from the battlefield. A few hopeful shots were aimed in its direction but they bounced harmlessly off its thick hull and before long Tzula’s craft was two bright lights heading in the direction of the Olympax Mountains.
As it had done back at the base of the hive when the berzerkers had first appeared, the noise from the Chaos lines changed, and instead of chanting or warcries, the sound became a reverent whisper. All gunfire from the enemy stopped and for the briefest of moments, Strike thought that they had miraculously surrendered and laid down their arms.
He quickly realised it was the exact opposite of a miracle.
Heralded by cultist and Traitor Astartes alike prostrating themselves before him, an enormous figure, taller than the berzerkers thanks in part to the topknot he wore in his hair, strode through the chaos. The gold trim of his black armour reflected the pale light of Pythos’s moon and an ancient power claw hung menacingly at his side, flexing in anticipation of the slaughter to come. Here, in all his brutish majesty, was Abaddon the Despoiler, Abaddon the Warmaster and, in that moment Strike knew, Abaddon the Conqueror of Pythos.
Strike’s guts turned to ice, such was Abaddon’s imposing presence even at more than a hundred metres away. All around him, men pissed themselves in fear.
The vox at his belt crackled rudely to life, desecrating the sombre hush that had descended.
‘Colonel Strike? This is Major Thorne. It’s the enemy, sir. They’ve stopped firing like they’ve given up. I hate to admit this but I’m not sure what to do. What are your orders, sir?’
From the other side of the battlefield, the son of Horus bared his teeth in a wicked parody of a smile. The sound of weapons beating against armour and cries venerating the Warmaster’s name rushed in to fill the vacuum of silence.
‘Are you receiving me, colonel? What are your orders?’ This time Thorne’s words registered with Strike.
‘Get out of there,’ Strike said, his voice catching in his throat. ‘All of you, get out of there now,’ he added, finally able to move legs he had thought turned to stone and followed the already fleeing Catachans to the last escape route left open to them.
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