‘How long? There’s more of these crystal things appearing every minute.’
‘Soon as I can, sir,’ promised Callins. ‘You’ll know we’re ready when we roll past you.’
Hawkins grinned and signed off, turning his attention to this position. A pair of arguing magi with shaven skulls worked in the guts of a control hatch beside the gateway, but whatever they were doing, it wasn’t working.
‘Bloody Mechanicus,’ said Hawkins, pausing as he passed a cogged skull icon stamped onto the wall next to him. He reached out and touched it, feeling the ever-present vibration passing through the starship.
A little self-conscious, Hawkins said, ‘Speranza, if you can hear me, we could really use some cooperation. We’re trying to defend you, but you’re not making it easy for us.’
‘Since when have Cadian soldiers ever taken the easy fight?’ said Rae, appearing with his rifle held loosely at his hip. ‘We’re born under the Eye and know hardship from birth. Why should life be any easier?’
Hawkins was about to answer when he heard a series of quick taps over the vox. Scout-cant. Three taps on the repeat.
Enemy inbound.
Rae heard it too and shouted, ‘Stand to!’ as a squad of cloaked scouts ran back through the gateway. The squad sergeant, a mohawked soldier with black and steel camo-paint slashed across his face, made a fist above his head. He made a crosswise motion across his chest and thumped his shoulder harness twice.
Two hundred or more.
The scouts sprinted up the ramp, keeping low and seeming to move only from the waist down. The adepts at the gate bleated in terror. One remained hooked into the gate’s mechanisms, the other jerked free and hitched up his robes to run after the scouts.
‘Spry for a tech-priest,’ observed Rae.
‘You be fast if you had two hundred enemy at your arse.’
‘True,’ said Rae as the scouts vaulted over the barricade and the first crystalline creatures, like the ones they’d faced on Katen Venia, poured through the gate.
‘By squads, open fire!’ shouted Hawkins.
A storm of las-fire blazed down the ramp and over fifty glittering enemies broke apart into splintered shards. Heavy bolters flayed the creatures, chugging reports echoing from the enclosing walls of the transit. Grenades burst amongst them and blue-white bolts of plasma heat-fused more where they stood.
Hawkins slotted the skull of a jagged-looking thing of crystal between his iron sights and pulled the trigger. It exploded like a glass sculpture dropped from a great height. He picked another and dropped it, then another, methodically racking up kills with every shot.
Crackling bolts of green energy sliced up the ramp, but the Cadians were well dug in and the annealing properties of the particulate bags were living up to Magos Dahan’s boast. The twin lascannons on the gargoyle-wrapped corbel opened fire, and blew a dozen creatures to shards.
Hawkins laughed. ‘Well, what do you know?’
‘Sir?’ said Rae, a wide grin plastered across his face.
‘Never mind,’ replied Hawkins, ducking down to replace his rifle’s powercell.
Then a section of the barricade exploded in a mushrooming detonation of sick green fire. A pulsing shock wave rolled over the Cadians as burning bodies rained down. Hawkins rolled and coughed a bitter wad of bloody spit.
‘Creed save us, what was that?’ grunted Rae, wiping grit from his eyes.
Hawkins dragged himself upright, pushing aside pieces of wrecked barricade and body parts as he blinked away spotty after-images of light. A ten-metre-wide gap had been blown in the barricade. At least thirty wounded Guardsmen lay scattered in disarray, little more than limbless, screaming half-bodies. Corpsmen were moving through the firestorm to reach them. They called out triage instructions as medicae servitors dragged the most seriously injured soldiers out of the line of fire.
Both Sentinels were down. One was on its knees, its armoured canopy torn open like foil paper and inner surfaces dripping red. The other sprawled on its back, the stumps of its mechanised legs thrashing uselessly beneath it. A burning Rapier lay on its side, the enginseers smeared to bloody paste. The other weapon platform sat in splendid isolation, looking miraculously undamaged.
Crunching over the shattered remains of the first wave of enemies, a gigantic creature of broken glass reflections pushed onto the base of the ramp.
Easily the size of three superheavies in a column, it was a hideous amalgam of rippling centipede and draconic beetle. Its head was a brutal orifice of concentric jaws that spun like the earth-crushing drills of a Hellbore. Spikes of weaponry blazed from the upper surfaces of its glossy carapace.
‘War machine!’ shouted Hawkins.
Bielanna listened to the mon-keigh speak as though their actions mattered, as though they were the agents of change in a universe that cared nothing for their mayfly existences.
And yet…
Hadn’t she been drawn here by their actions? Hadn’t she seen their actions deforming the skein, denying her a future where she was a mother to twin eldar girls? Hadn’t she followed their threads to give her unborn daughters a chance to exist?
‘You are lost, farseer,’ said Ariganna Icefang, hissing in pain as the carriage began picking up speed and rumbled over a section of buckled rails. ‘Restore your focus.’
Bielanna nodded and tried to smile at the gravely wounded exarch, but the despair was too heavy in her heart to convince. Ariganna’s helm was cracked and her breath rasped heavily beneath the splintered wraithbone.
‘Lost?’ she said. ‘Perhaps, but not the way you think.’
‘I do not believe you,’ said Ariganna. ‘You were dwelling on what brought us to this place.’
‘You are perceptive,’ said Bielanna.
‘For a warrior, you mean?’
Bielanna didn’t answer. That was exactly what she’d thought.
‘Death’s shadow imparts a clarity denied to me in life,’ said Ariganna, and Bielanna looked down at the blood pooling in the exarch’s lap. So much blood and nothing she could do to stop it.
She swallowed. ‘I was merely thinking that you were right.’
‘I usually am,’ said Ariganna, ‘but about what specifically?’
‘That I would lead us all to our doom. I have been a poor seer not to have seen this gathering fate.’
‘Believe that when we are all dead,’ said Ariganna.
‘Too many of us are dead already,’ said Bielanna. ‘Torai, Yelena, Irenia, Khorada, Lighthand… And Uldanaish Ghostwalker is no longer among us.’
A shadow passed over the exarch’s face and her eyes closed. Bielanna’s heart sank into an abyss of grief, but it was simply the carriage entering the tunnel at the base of the rocky slope.
It had taken Kotov some time to restore the funicular to life, a process that seemed to require a considerable amount of cursing and repeated blows from his mechanised arms. Once moving, it had descended nearly a thousand metres before the fitful beams of its running lights illuminated a yawning tunnel mouth. Crystalline machinery that had the appearance of great age ringed the opening, its internal structure cloudy and cracked.
Ariganna’s eyes opened and she said, ‘I know, I felt the Ghostwalker’s passing.’
‘She Who Thirsts has him now,’ said Bielanna, guilty tears flowing freely. ‘I have damned him forever. I have damned us all.’
‘You walk the Path of the Seer,’ said Ariganna. ‘You are trapped by that role just as I was trapped by the Path of the Warrior. You could no more fail to act on what you had seen than I could deny the pleasure I took in killing in the name of Kaela Mensha Khaine. Just answer me this… Knowing of the deaths your visions have led us to, would you go back and choose a different path? One that would not lead to your daughters’ birth?’
‘I would not, and that shames me,’ said Bielanna.
‘Feel no shame,’ said Ariganna, ‘for I would have it no other way. I would hate to die knowing your purpose was not as strong and sure as the Dawnlight.’
‘Would that we had Anaris,’ wept Bielanna. ‘Nothing could stand before you then.’
‘I am sure Eldanesh thought the same thing before he faced Khaine, but I take your point,’ said Ariganna, her voice growing faint. Her hand reached up, and Bielanna assumed she looked for her chainsabre. The weapon was gone, lost in the fight with the Tindalosi. Bielanna drew her rune-inscribed sword and pressed it into the exarch’s hand.
Ariganna shook her head and passed the weapon back as the last warriors of the Starblade gathered behind Bielanna. ‘I will die as I was… before I… sought Khaine.’
Bielanna understood as Vaynesh and Tariquel knelt beside their exarch and released the clasps holding her broken helmet in place. They gently lifted it over Ariganna’s head and stepped away.
Ariganna Icefang’s features were cut glass and ice, violet-eyed and lethal, but that changed as the war-mask fell from her. As though another face entirely lay beneath her skin, the warm features of a frightened woman with the soul of a poet swam to the surface.
‘Laconfir once told me there was no art more beautiful and diverse than the art of death, but he was wrong,’ said Ariganna with the face she had worn before entering the Shrine of the Twilight Blade. ‘Life is the most beautiful art. I think I forgot that for a time, but now…’
The former exarch reached beneath her cracked breastplate and withdrew her clenched fist.
‘Though my body dies, I remain evermore,’ said Ariganna, placing her hand upon Bielanna’s outstretched palm. ‘My spirit endures in all my kin who yet live.’
The exarch’s hand fell away, revealing a softly glowing spirit stone. And Bielanna loosed an ululating howl of depthless anguish that blew out every window of the funicular in an explosion of shattering glass.
The sight of the crystalline war machine might have put other soldiers to rout, but the Cadian 71st had fought the armies of the Despoiler across Agripinaa’s industrialised hellscape. The Archenemy’s war engines were blood-soaked things of warped flesh and dark iron, wrought to horrify as much as kill.
Having faced them and lived, this thing’s appearance gave the Cadians only a moment’s pause.
Las-bolts refracted through its translucent body, shearing away fused shards of crystal. Grenades cracked the glassy surface of its bullet-headed skull. They were hurting it, but too slowly.
Spiked extrusions from its segmented back spat emerald lightning. The bolts arced and leapt across the barricade, and not even Dahan’s annealing particulates or the kinetic ablatives could withstand their power. Howling soldiers were vaporised in the coruscating electrical storms, the skin melting from their bones in an instant.
Hawkins turned to Rae and shouted, ‘With me, sergeant!’
‘Where are we going?’
‘Don’t ask, just follow,’ said Hawkins, and pushed off the barricade. He ran to the top of the ramp, hearing Rae cursing him with all the force and inventiveness of a Cadian stevedore.
He forced himself to ignore wounded soldiers calling for help, weaving a path through the rubble piled atop scores of the dead. Lethal bolts of green fire spanked the ground, and Hawkins bit back a shout of pain as searing heat creased his shoulder.
A steady stream of fire blitzed the war machine, but lasguns and plasma guns just weren’t cutting it. He skidded into the cover of the Rapier, taking a moment to catch his breath. Rae tumbled in behind, breathless and streaked in sweat.
‘Can you even fire this thing?’ asked Rae.
‘Callins showed me the basics when we served on Belis Corona,’ said Hawkins. ‘Easy as stripping a lasgun, I reckon.’
Rae gave him a sceptical look as he scrabbled to his feet and turned around, doing his best not to expose himself to fire. He ran his eyes over the control mechanism. A mixture of amber and green gem-lights blinking on a brass-rimmed panel. Dozens of ivory switches that could be turned to a number of settings.
But, reassuringly, a set of rubberised pistol handles with brass spoon-triggers.
‘How hard can it be?’ he said, gripping the firing mechanism and mashing the oversized triggers.
A bolt of blinding light stabbed down the ramp and punched through the bulkhead to the left of the advancing war machine. The beam’s white-hot point of impact reduced two dozen crystalline foes to microscopic fragments, but left the war machine untouched.
‘How in the name of the Eye did you miss?’ yelled Rae, as the war machine pushed more of its bulk into the transit. Hawkins looked for a control to adjust the Rapier’s aim, but came up empty. Why would he have expected this to be easy?
‘Push it,’ he shouted over the hiss of lasguns and metallic coughs of grenade detonations. ‘A metre to the left.’
Rae looked up at him as though he were mad.
‘Seriously?’
‘I don’t know how to shift its aim. Now get around this thing and push it!’
Rae rolled his eyes and scrambled around the bulky weapon system. Flurries of snapping energy bolts tore up the ground and portions of the barricade next to him. The sergeant rammed his shoulder into the side of the Rapier, grunting with the effort. It didn’t move.
‘Put your back into it, man!’
Rae shouted something obscene that Hawkins chose to ignore as a number of Guardsmen broke from cover to help. Two were cut down almost immediately, another fell with the flesh stripped from his legs. But enough reached the Rapier alive and slammed into it with grunts of exertion.
Against Cadian strength, the weight of the Rapier had no chance, and the track unit shifted. Hawkins looked over the top of the machine. He stared down into the cavernous, blade-filled mouth.
‘Got you,’ he said and mashed the triggers again.
This time the beam punched down its throat. It lit up from within as the awesome power of the beam refracted through its entire structure. The war machine detonated in an explosion of molten glass and glittering metal-rich dust.
Its body slumped, coming apart in an avalanche of broken glass.
And finally, to Hawkins’s great surprise, the gate began to close with a grinding screech of metal that hadn’t moved in centuries. Hawkins saw the lone tech-priest hunched in the lee of the pilasters at the side of the gateway. The adept was still connected into the hatch by trailing cables, and Hawkins swore he’d pin a Ward of Cadia on his damn chest.
The gate slammed down with a booming clang and a crunch of pulverised crystal. The few enemy still on the Cadian side of the gate were swiftly gunned down with coordinated precision. Within thirty seconds, the area was secure.
Hawkins forced himself to release the Rapier’s fire-controls, his fingers cramped after gripping so hard.
‘Sir,’ said Rae, carefully and calmly, ‘next time you want to put us in harm’s way like that could you, well, not…?’
Hawkins nodded and let out a shuddering breath.
‘I’ll take that under advisement, sergeant,’ said Hawkins.
The enemy wasn’t getting through this gateway any time soon, so it was time to consolidate. Well over half his men were down. Those too wounded to remain in place were evacuated to pre-established field-infirmaries. Fresh powercells and water were dispensed to those who remained.
Replacement sections of barricade were installed and with reinforcements arriving from the reserve platoons, the position was secure within four minutes of the attack’s ending.
Hawkins checked with his other detachments, listening to clipped reports of furious firefights throughout his sectors of responsibility. Some were still engaged, some had repulsed numerous waves of attackers. Others had yet to make enemy contact. Only one position had been abandoned as crystalline foes appeared without warning in flanking positions in overwhelming
numbers.
Hawkins adjusted his mental map of the fighting, seeing areas of vulnerability, angles of potential counter-attack and areas of the Speranza where the greatest threats might arise.
One location immediately presented itself as the greatest danger – as he’d always suspected it would.
‘Sergeant Rae,’ he said. ‘Assemble a rapid-reaction command platoon. I need to be moving on the double.’
‘Where are we going?’
‘Just get it done, sergeant.’
Rae nodded, dragging squads out of the line and hustling them into formation. Hawkins tapped the bead in his ear, cycling through channels until he reached the Mechanicus vox-net.
‘Dahan, status report?’
The Magos Secutor’s response was virtually immediate.
‘I am orchestrating the ship’s defence from the Secutor temple. All skitarii positions holding, though the randomness of the enemy arrival points is proving to be most vexing.’
‘Always a pain when the enemy doesn’t play nice, isn’t it?’
‘A predictable enemy is an enemy that can be more easily overcome,’ agreed Dahan. ‘Observation: I discern a lack of cohesion in this assault. Each enemy contingent appears to be working to its own design, independent of the others.’
‘Keeping our attention divided,’ said Hawkins. ‘Trying to mask the real danger.’
‘What real danger?’
‘The training deck,’ said Hawkins. ‘Lots of ways in and a more or less straight run to the bridge. We’re on our way there now.’
‘An unnecessary redeployment, Captain Hawkins,’ said Dahan. ‘Skitarii forces are emplaced and all static weaponry has been granted full lethal authority.’
Rae signalled the command platoon’s readiness, and Hawkins took his place in the line.
‘Call it gut reaction, magos,’ said Hawkins. ‘I get the feeling this attack will cohere soon enough, and when it does, they’re going to throw everything they’ve got at us.’
Thanks to the empty window frames, the reek of stale air and turned earth had been growing stronger in the funicular with every kilometre travelled. By the time it reached the end of its long journey through the planet’s crust, the graveyard stench was almost overpowering.
Forge of Mars - Graham McNeill Page 95
