Every minute these tanks remained in the hangar was costing the lives of Cadian soldiers on the training deck.
Kayrn ducked into cover behind a train of ammo gurneys currently serving as cover to a Cadian infantry platoon. Jahn Callins was issuing orders to a gaggle of serious-looking junior officers. Two ran off to with vox-casters to enact those orders. The third stayed at his side.
He glanced up. ‘How’re the starboard racks looking?’
‘Empty,’ she answered. ‘Two through seven are clear. The rails on eight and nine are buckled beyond immediate repair. Those tanks aren’t coming down without lifter-rig support.’
‘Damn it,’ snapped Callins. ‘There’s Stormhammers up there. You’re sure they’re non-functional?’
‘I’m sure,’ she said, and Callins knew better than to doubt her.
‘Captain Hawkins isn’t going to be pleased.’
‘We’ve gotten four more squadrons of superheavies into the ready line,’ she said. ‘That ought to cheer him up.’
All four of those squadrons were even now rumbling towards the starboard egress ramps after the quickest blessing and anointing the Mechanicus could muster. Throughout the deck, armoured tanks rammed damaged vehicles out of their way. Cadian infantry squads traded shots with their crystalline attackers from the cover of overturned gurneys and wrecked tanks.
‘The Leman Russ are next,’ continued Kayrn, running a finger down the order of battle displayed on her static-fuzzed slate. ‘APCs are mustering at the rear to pick up the infantry.’
Callins nodded and said, ‘Fast work, Sylkwood. Remind me to find out why you’re not with a Cadian regiment when this is over.’
‘Buy me a drink and I might just tell you.’
‘Fair enough,’ grinned Callins.
A bolt of green fire punched through the crate above Kayrn’s head. She ducked closer to the deck as Guardsmen either side of her returned fire.
‘These crates empty?’ she asked.
‘Yeah, apart from a few loose bolter shells.’
‘Not exactly the best cover.’
‘No, but it probably won’t explode if it takes a hit.’
‘Good point, well made.’
A pair of frags coughed from portable launchers. Rattling bursts of stubber fire blazed from a heavy weapons team to Kayrn’s left.
‘None of the turret weapons are firing?’ she asked.
‘In a hangar filled with ordnance and fuel?’ said Callins, putting away his slate and checking the load on his lasgun.
‘Sure, why not?’ said Kayrn. ‘I remember back on Belis Corona we had whole squadrons of Shadowswords firing on a pack of Archenemy battle-engines inside a fyceline depot.’
Callins shook his head.
‘This isn’t a Black Crusade, and we’re not that desperate yet.’
As if to contradict him, the deck plates shook as three ammo gurneys laden with gunmetal-grey warheads and drums of promethium went up like a volcanic eruption. Secondary explosions took half a dozen fuel trucks with them.
Servitor fire-teams deployed to fight the blaze, but streams of enemy fire cut them down. Blazing gouts of promethium spilled in all directions. Tar-black smoke spread like a shroud over the fighting, making the air heavy with toxins.
‘Damn the Eye,’ said Callins, but even as the curse left his lips a flood of oxygen-depleting liquids rained from a score of swinging extender-arms belonging to Magos Turentek’s vast rig apparatus. The boxy arrangement of bio-sustaining hubs that made up the Fabricatus Locum was swarming with crystalline attackers, but Turentek wasn’t sparing any of his functionality for defence.
All that mattered was his forge.
In seconds the vaulted space was awash in hard water residue, and Kayrn was soaked to the skin. The fires guttered and died in the suddenly thin air, suffocated by Turentek’s esoteric deluge.
Their sheltering gurney rocked with the force of a nearby explosion, and Kayrn risked a glance through one of the ragged holes scorched through the ammo crates.
Emerging through the black rain were hundreds of glistening crystalline beasts. From humanoid warriors that looked oddly like Space Marines, to lumbering things that powered forwards on vast forelimbs and things that looked like weaponised servitor guns.
Kayrn wiped her face clear and steadied her pistol on the top of the crate. She had enough shots and spare cells to take out maybe twenty or thirty targets.
Las-fire blasted into the charging creatures. Beside her, Callins pumped shot after shot from his lasrifle. This was how Cadians fought, shoulder to shoulder in the face of insurmountable odds. Fighting to the last. No retreat, no surrender.
Fighting until the job was done.
The deck shook with a thunderous, booming vibration.
‘What the–’ said Kayrn, looking through the downpour to see what new threat was incoming.
A firestorm of detonations erupted among the crystalline monsters. Blinding storms of heavy las ripped through their ranks. Chugging detonations and enormous impacts ploughed great furrows in the deck. Fulminate-bright traceries of high-intensity turbo-fire tore the enemy apart in blitzing explosions that sawed back and forth in a torrent of unending fire.
Another teeth-loosening thud shook the deck, each crashing impact like the hammerblow of a god.
Realisation struck. Kayrn turned and looked up.
And up.
Lupa Capitalina and Canis Ulfrica stood side by side, rain-slick and haloed by dying fires. Burning exhaust gases plumed from louvred vents and dark water flashed to vapour on their weapon arms. Amarok and Vilka stalked before their titanic cousins and Kayrn joined the cheers of her fellow Cadians.
Legio Sirius were in the fight.
Far below the surface of Exnihlio, entropy was afoot. The hated machinery of ancient design that had kept the eternally migratory swarms of hrud fixed in time and space failed one after another.
Technology the likes of which had never been seen within the Imperium burned white-hot against the senescent power of so many imprisoned aliens. One hrud could drive a mortal to the grave in minutes, a warren of them was entropy distilled and honed like a breacher drill punching through soft clay.
Gold and brass gobbets of molten metal fell in a glittering rain, transmuting to base metal and then to dust as it fell from the cavern roof. Every scavenged sheet and spar of metal forming the slum-warrens corroded to ruin in moments, like a time-lapsed picter. The rock upon which their prison had stood crumbled and turned to powder as millennia of erosion took hold.
The collapse was total, thousands of tonnes of disintegrating metal and rock tumbling into the geothermal abyss over which it had been built. Had this been any mortal settlement, thousands would already be dead, thousands more killed in the cascade of collapse.
By the time the first dilapidated structure fell from the porous and crumbling cliff-face, the hrud had already gone. Freed from the iron grip of machines holding them fast to this moment in time and space, they shifted their wholly alien physiology through multi-angular dimensions unknown to the minds of humankind.
Unfettered by such limiting notions as matter, time and space, the hrud migration from Exnihlio began in earnest. They would cross galaxies and oceans of time to be rid of this world’s constricting touch.
But first they would have vengeance for their stolen freedom.
Submitting to one last notion of fixed vectors, the hrud burrowed invisibly down through the rock to the planet’s core.
Ultimate entropy took hold of Exnihlio’s molten heart.
And crushed it.
Bolter shells chased the Renard’s shuttle into the sky, but the vessel was too fast to bring down with small-arms fire. Tanna shot anyway, but lowered his weapon when the shuttle climbed beyond range.
Surcouf shouted Ultramarian curses at the ascending vessel.
Ilanna Pavelka knelt beside him with her head bowed. If she still had eyes, Tanna might have thought her weeping. Ven Anders and his soldiers formed a loose circle around Kotov, who watched Telok’s departure with a mix of despair and frustration.
The eldar warriors surrounded their seer. Her alien features were too inscrutable to read with certainty, but it seemed to Tanna that the corners of her lips were upturned. As though their failure to stop Telok had been her plan all along.
‘Did you know this would happen?’ he asked, priming himself to rip her head from her shoulders if her answer displeased him.
‘This? No,’ she said, and, strangely, Tanna believed her. ‘It was merely one of myriad possible outcomes, but it is a moment in time that opens up so many potential futures I had not dared hope might ever come to pass.’
She looked out over the slowly advancing army of implacable crystaliths, as though this particular future had been inevitable.
‘I will never meet them,’ she said.
‘Who?’ asked Tanna, working fresh shells into his bolter.
‘My daughters. I will never birth them, never hold them and never see them grow,’ said Bielanna, her face wet with tears. ‘I hoped your deaths would restore the future where they are given the chance of life, but such ill-fated intent only brings further misery. Everything I set out to change has come to nothing.’
Tanna drove a round into the breech.
‘Nothing is for nothing,’ he said.
‘Do you realise how ridiculous that sounds?’
‘You set out to change something,’ said Tanna, remembering the last words of Aelius before his death at Dantium Gate. ‘That you failed does not diminish the attempt. Knowing you might effect change, but failing to try… That is contemptible.’
Even as he spoke, Tanna was struck by the utter incongruity of a warrior of the Adeptus Astartes offering words of comfort to the xenos witch who had killed his former Emperor’s Champion.
Beyond the galaxy, far from the light of the Emperor, such a thing did not seem so far-fetched. Tanna took a breath, knowing that even if he lived to return to the Imperium, he would take that thought to his grave.
The army of crystalline monsters were a hundred metres out, drawing close at a measured, inexorable pace. Tanna moved away from the eldar. Their deaths were to be their own, and he would not have his body’s final resting place among them.
He passed Kotov, who had his gold-chased pistol gripped tightly in one swaying mechadendrite. The two skitarii flanked the archmagos, ready to give their lives in service to the Mechanicus. Kotov gave Tanna a look that might have been apologetic, but probably wasn’t.
‘Brother-sergeant,’ said Kotov with a grim nod of acknowledgement towards the enemy ranks. Diamond-sharp blades of glass shone under the clear blue of the sky. ‘Any grand plans or stratagems? Any words of wisdom from Rogal Dorn or Sigismund to see us victorious?’
‘No pity, no remorse, no fear,’ said Tanna, holding out his combat blade to Magos Pavelka. ‘The techno-sorcery you worked on our weapons, will it work on these crystaliths?’
Pavelka lifted her hooded head, and Tanna hid his revulsion at the sunken scorch marks around her dead optics.
‘Maybe,’ she said. ‘If you drive your blade deep enough.’
‘Be assured of that,’ promised Tanna.
The veterans of the war on Khai-Zhan spoke of Vogen in hushed tones, and those same soldiers traded knowing looks when talk inevitably turned to the Palace of Peace. The tales of heroism surrounding the battles fought there were already legendary.
‘I remember every soldier of Cadia wished he could have been there,’ said Rae, firing his rifle empty in six controlled bursts of semi-auto. This was the sergeant’s fourth rifle, the burned-out frames of his previous three abandoned along the fluidly shifting battle line.
‘Funny thing,’ said Hawkins, ducking back as a series of green bolts slammed into the wall above him. ‘Always easier to wish you were there after the fighting’s done. Not so much fun being there when the las is coming like rain off the Valkyrie Peninsulas.’
‘Aye, there’s truth in that, sir,’ agreed Rae.
Rock dust and infill fell, reminding Hawkins that this wasn’t Vogen and the structure behind him wasn’t the impregnable fortress of the Palace of Peace. To either side of him, hundreds of Cadians in hastily prepared positions fought to keep the enemy from crossing Angel Square. Hawkins had his soldiers deployed as Colonel Hastur had during the Final Ten Days, when a combined host of Iron Warriors and the Brothers of the Sickle mounted their fifth assault.
Hastur’s infantry platoons had been more than a match for the traitorous slave soldiers, but it had taken heavy armour to blunt the Iron Warriors’ assault. Heavy armour Hawkins didn’t have.
Rae tossed aside his lasrifle, its barrel heat-fused and useless. He tore a frag from his webbing and hurled it towards the statue of Sanguinius at the centre of the square.
‘Fire in the hole!’
A knot of four crystal creatures fell to shattered ruin as the grenade exploded.
‘And forgive me, Lord of the Angels,’ added Rae as the force of the blast ripped one of the statue’s wings loose.
‘Better to ask for forgiveness than permission, right?’ said Hawkins.
‘Depends on who you’re asking,’ said Rae, hunting for a fresh rifle among the fallen.
‘Rae!’ shouted Hawkins, throwing over his own rifle.
‘Much appreciated, sir,’ said Rae, catching the weapon and resuming firing without missing a beat.
‘What you seeing, sergeant?’
‘We’re getting hit hard on the right, sir,’ answered Rae. ‘I reckon there’s a big push coming there. Some clever bugger in the enemy knows we don’t have armour there to enfilade.’
Percussive blasts rocked the training deck as the recreation of the Vogen Law Courts finally collapsed. Even over the crash of falling masonry and flames, Hawkins heard the screams.
‘Hellfire,’ swore Hawkins. ‘Hotshot company were in there.’
‘Heavy weapons?’
‘Heavy weapons,’ agreed Hawkins, thinking back to the Last Ten Days. The Law Courts had offered a perfect vantage point for Hastur’s support platoons to rain plunging fire onto the thinner topside armour of the Iron Warriors Land Raiders. In the final stages of the battle, it had come down to arming mortar shells by hand and soldiers dropping from the fire-blackened windows with demo-charges clutched to their chests.
The original building had been blast-hardened to withstand repeated artillery barrages, but this structure hadn’t been nearly as tough. Without those weapons, the right flank was completely open. Bulky shapes of jagged-edged glass were already lumbering from the ruins. Powerfully built monsters the size of a Sentinel.
‘Westin!’ he shouted, ‘Westin, where are you?’
The vox-man scrambled over pitted sheets of flakboard and ruptured kinetic ablatives. Westin had tried to keep up with Hawkins, but better vox-men than he had been left wallowing in the captain’s wake. Westin’s camo-cape flapped in the anabatic thermals of high-energy las as he scooted into cover beside Hawkins.
He half turned, presenting the vox-caster’s workings.
Hawkins cranked the handle. No point in shouting at Jahn Callins. If the tanks weren’t here, there was a good reason for that. He had to get guns to bear on that flank. The vanguard of the enemy’s thrust emerged from the ruins, a towering brute with arms like kite-shields and a profusion of weapon spines running the length of its back. A hosing stream of heavy bolter fire ripped into it. The shells impacted on its wide arms without effect as three missiles slammed into it.
One arm blew off in a shower of razored shards and the beast collapsed, its weapons spines blazing harmlessly at the ceiling. Another two of the heavily armed creatures lumbered from the collapsed structure, flames reflecting from
their multi-faceted limbs. More followed them, enough to overrun this flank for sure.
Hawkins shouted into the vox.
‘Creed! Two support teams to the right flank, sector tertius omega!’ he yelled. ‘Step quickly now.’
Creed’s answer was lost in a blaze of static and a roaring stream of fire that came from the newly arrived creatures. Hawkins flinched as the blast struck the Palace of Peace. A balcony of missile-armed Guardsmen came tumbling down fifty metres to Hawkins’s left.
Before he could detach soldiers from any other platoon, a flurry of streaking rockets arced up on an exacting parabola and slammed down in the ruins of the Law Courts. Violet-hued explosions threw deformed sheets of prefabricated steel and plascrete thirty metres into the air. Collimated bursts of turbolasers swept the ruins.
Hawkins hoped there weren’t any Cadians left alive in there.
‘By the Eye, would you look at that!’ shouted Rae as a host of lightly armoured tanks on articulated spider-limbs advanced down what had been known as Snipers’ Alley.
Of course, it had been the Lord Generals who’d called it that, because that was the only route they traversed. Any soldier who’d fought in Vogen knew that every street was a snipers’ alley.
Hawkins recognised the vehicles. Mechanicus scout tanks in the main, faster than most fighting vehicles, but nowhere near as heavily armoured or armed as Hawkins would have liked.
The Mechanicus designation for them was something meaninglessly binaric, but the Cadians had dubbed them Black Widows. Fast, agile and lethal to lightly armoured targets. Less useful against heavy armour, but better than nothing. Skitarii packs flanked the Widows, adding their own weight of fire to the counter-attack.
At the heart of the Mechanicus tanks was an open-topped Rhino with a thundering battery of quad-mounted heavy bolters on its glacis. Riding atop the Iron Fist like a god-king of some ancient host of warrior-priests was a multi-armed figure in gold, silver and brass. His lower arms were electrified scarifier tines and his upper limbs held a bladed halberd with a crackling energy pod at its base.
Forge of Mars - Graham McNeill Page 104
