by Guy Haley
Katsuhiro fired and fired as his comrades were slain. At the beginning of the siege, the conscripts had stood in such numbers they packed the ramparts and tangled their weapons. Now there were too few of them to cover all the defence line. They relied more than ever on the Palace guns and the closer-ranged weaponry of the bastions. They had all become snipers, thought Katsuhiro, which made him think about Doromek. He was certain the veteran had killed Runnecan. Were it not for the million traitors to his front, that might have worried him.
Enfilading fire cut the enemy down some way out from the ramparts, but the dead were so numerous and heaped so high they created cover for those coming behind. Phosphex grenades launched from the tops of the bastions set fires among the slain that reduced them to ash, but the enemy used the black smoke pouring from these ragged pyres to press even further forwards.
Overhead the gunships of the Legiones Astartes roared in to attack the walls. Aircraft duelled around them. Such violence was inflicted on every level of the battlescape, but Katsuhiro was unaware of the larger fight. All he saw were bestial faces twisted in rage, fusillades of las-beams stabbing towards him, and clawed hands reaching impotently from the ground towards the rampart top.
The fumes and poison gases blown away earlier in the day returned. Blood fell in sheets from the racing clouds. Such fury and tumult had the world, Katsuhiro could not hope to survive; but whether he lived another minute or another hundred years, one thing was certain.
The second line was failing.
Siege Camp Penta, 15th of Quartus
Clain Pent watched the battle raging against the wall’s feet. His precious constructs rumbled across the littered plain, each engine fuelled by burning souls and directed by the essences of captive daemons. They were but the first Neverborn on Terra, the machina diabolus. They were protected from the Emperor’s psychic might by their half-material forms. Untold legions of daemons waited beyond the veil, but more blood must flow. Pent’s efforts were key to that.
Pent was nervous. His siege towers were among his finest creations, yet they moved against the greatest fortification in the galaxy.
Around the Pent-Ark, teams of Dark Mechanicum thralls laboured under electro-scourges to load and prime the great cannons. The barrels alone were dozens of metres long, larger than any weapon carried by a Titan, as large as the capital-ship killers mounted on void fortresses. Scores of tracked trucks supported their frames. Platforms along their sides allowed access to unfathomable workings. Grim tech-priests by the hundred oversaw the efforts of their creatures.
Clain Pent’s grotesque body nodded stiffly.
The great guns started to draw power. Giant cables snaked off to trailers behind the cannons, where plasma reactors were lit and coaxed to full power output. Stray arcs of electricity leapt over the surfaces of the weapons. Giant finned energy sinks were filled with coolant in readiness for the cannons’ firing.
The lords of the Ordo Reductor held their machines, waiting for the command to come down from the fleet. In the eight siege camps, Sota-Nul’s disciples, reliant on the ordo’s protection for their infernal devices, watched impatiently.
The order came. Horus Lupercal himself issued the command, a single, rasping sentence broadcast to each of the cyborg siege masters.
‘Unleash your weapons,’ the Warmaster said.
The guns spoke.
Palace outworks, Daylight Wall section 16, 15th of Quartus
Something imperceptible changed the moment before the cannons fired, causing Katsuhiro to cease shooting, and look to the wall to the south of the Helios Gate.
Out over the wastes before the wall, there was movement. From the siege camp came first a flash, and then a spear of black light that crawled across Katsuhiro’s vision. It was energy of some sort, but it moved with a malevolent slowness a man’s eyes could track.
A shock wave preceded it. Although the beam itself did not touch the ground, a line of force surrounding it ripped a furrow through debris, the defence lines, the defenders and the attacking armies. Like an attacking serpent, it slithered quicker, then struck, planting itself against the shields, which wavered and sang with tortured harmonics.
Upon contact with the void barrier, the beam thickened, its strange energies dammed by the aegis. A living tar spread over the voids, some arcane reaction making the lenses of the Dark Age energy field constantly visible on normal wavelengths. Like an overlapping wall of shields, the lenses stood against the strike, but as Katsuhiro watched, their vitality was bled away. Where the play of black energy caressed them, the lenses dimmed from healthy blues and greens to angry reds, then through lower frequencies to sulphurous, glowering oranges.
A horrible, discordant squealing came from the contact point, building in volume and intensity, until it overcame the thundering guns completely. The detonation was immense, sending warriors on both sides reeling from their fight in pain. Something gave in Katsuhiro’s right ear. Hot wetness trickled down the angle of his jaw. His left ear screamed with discordancy.
The shields bled light.
He fell to his knees, jaw clenched tight enough to break his teeth. The pain went beyond any suffering he had so far endured. His eyes shook, blurring his vision. He wished then to die, but could not stop watching.
Like dying embers, the lenses under fire burned out, and their failing set up a chain reaction in the cellular construction of the aegis. With painful flares and whooping screams, a great swathe of the landward shield collapsed, robbing fifty kilometres either side of the Helios Gate of shelter, opening the way for the Warmaster’s forces to assail the walls directly. Uncountable thousands of land-based artillery pieces hammered the great walls, or shot over the defences to target the giant buildings they guarded.
The moment had come. Huge chimneys on the motive units of the siege towers belched green smoke. Wheels ten times the height of men churned up the ground, and the massive constructions lurched forwards, their fronts alive with shield flare as Dorn’s defences tried to bring them down.
Dauntlessly, the Death Guard’s towers made all haste for the breach in the aegis and the walls behind.
The ruination of worlds poured down upon the outworks. Quake cannons ripped up the ground. Macro shells gouged craters from the stone. Plasma reduced rockcrete to boiling geysers of atoms. Weapons exotic and mundane hammered into the second and first lines. Now completely unprotected by the shields, they were ripped apart. The bombardment was intense and indiscriminate. Hundreds of thousands of Horus’ followers were obliterated to kill a few thousand defenders. The ground bucked and heaved, swallowing the living and the dead. Bastions up and down the line were smashed like skulls under hammers.
The defenders broke and ran. The veterans who had watched over them fled as readily as the depleted regiments of conscripts. There was no other choice.
Katsuhiro ran when the others did, abandoning his post in a state of detachment. Weeks of horror had numbed his soul. The deafness in his left ear isolated him a little from the battle’s fury. Tiredness cocooned him. He felt as if he floated over himself. The pathways of his body raged with adrenaline that muzzled his consciousness and pushed him only to survive, so that numinous piece of Katsuhiro which existed apart from the slosh of blood and muscle watched disinterested from on high.
He leapt from explosions, he sprinted past glowing lakes of cooling rock. Everything was on fire. Where it was not molten, the ground was a steaming mix of mud and blood. His feet splashed in scalding red puddles. His face burned. His hair crackled back on his scalp. Blood was in his eyes and in his nostrils and mouth. Tears streamed down his face. The few survivors of the lines were black figures, fragile in the roil of flame. They ran without in panic, all of them heading towards t
he soaring citadel of the Helios Gate. The gates were shut tight against the world, and the towers under ferocious attack that would see all the soldiers dead before they came anywhere near shelter, but there was nowhere else to go, so they ran away from one source of certain destruction towards another.
Behind Katsuhiro a wall of fire reached for the heavens, its glare and heat obliterating every other sight. Silhouetted in black before the inferno, Bastion 16 fired wildly when so many others of the outwork forts were gone. The call of wheezing trumpets sounded out in the wastes that even now crept closer to the feet of the defences proper, and from the blasted lands of the plain the giant shape of a siege tower burst through the flames like an axe breaking a shield.
The tower was as tall as the walls that it set itself against. Its forwards arc flashed as incoming fire was annihilated by its void shields, sending oily swirls all around its height. The front was armoured with giant bronze faces stacked atop one another, seven in number, as grotesque as any feral-worlders’ totem pole. Their screaming mouths vomited words of coherent light from cannons in place of tongues, scoring molten streaks across the walls.
The scale of the thing defied sense. It was hundreds of metres tall, its wheels immense. It should not have stayed in one piece, let alone move, but it did, flattening the land with a great dozer blade, smoke pouring from whatever engine propelled it forwards.
The incongruity of the tower struck him as wildly funny, and he laughed as he ran. To see a sight like that… In a time of reason, unreason was let loose. Impossible towers in an era of high science and rediscovery. The world had gone mad.
He cried tears of fear and tears of laughter. His throat hurt from smoke inhalation and from screaming. A shell sent up a fountain of earth in front of him, and he skidded to a stop. The tower ground forwards faster than he could run, crushing everything, its protection of energy and of metal impervious to all weaponry.
Katsuhiro sank to his knees.
‘It’s hopeless, hopeless,’ he said. ‘There is no escape.’
War trumpets blared from the construction once again, weakening his grip on sanity. His mind might have collapsed entirely, right then, and left him gibbering to perish in any one of a thousand ways, had the glare of a plasma strike not illuminated the area with more certain light, and shown Katsuhiro a familiar sight. The trenches had been pounded so hard they were hardly recognisable, and the small bunker was half buried in rock and shattered plascrete, but it still stood, and the door was ajar. A rivulet of blood rain poured inside from the wounded earth.
Nexus Zero-One-Five.
Without realising, Katsuhiro had run close to the tunnels’ entrance.
There was a way out after all.
The door was jammed open by a fan of rubble. There would be no closing it, though he dearly wished he could shut out the awful battlefield. Nevertheless, as Katsuhiro descended into the network the tumult receded a little. The inferno became a glow, the noise almost bearable, and when he got to the bottom and set out into the network, it dwindled further until, when he turned a corner into cool blackness, it faded away to a quiet, faraway roar.
He became acutely conscious of his lost hearing. Everything on the left felt muffled. His right ear functioned, but rang with tinnitus.
When he set a foot forwards and heard the soft crunch of fallen debris under his boot he was a little relieved, and he set out deeper into the network, intending to turn north and make his way nearer to the wall in safety. Darkness pressed in. The lumens were all out. The ground shook with the bombardment, sometimes violently. Debris pattered off his head. Without the immediate danger of the explosions and the enemy to keep him occupied, his fear built, and he went cautiously.
He did not find the way towards the wall. Somewhere, perhaps several somewheres, he took the wrong turn, and ended up in the corridor leading to the base of Bastion 16. Once more he smelled blood. His foot rolled on a corpse, and he nearly fell. Stumbling probably saved his life, for it prevented him from blundering into the dead man’s murderers.
Around the corner, dim red light shone, and he heard voices.
He crept forwards, not daring to breathe.
Away down the tunnel, by the base of Bastion 16, Myz and Doromek stood by a crate of explosives. Two more dead soldiers lay close to them. They were talking in urgent whispers. Despite Katsuhiro’s impaired hearing, it was quiet enough in the tunnel that he could hear what they were saying. With growing alarm he eavesdropped on their conversation.
‘It’s time,’ Myzmadra said.
Ashul’s face set.
‘Maybe we should stop a moment. Take a pause to think.’
The detonator nestled in Myzmadra’s palm. Her finger was close by the button, the nail still beautifully shaped under its covering of dirt.
‘There is nothing to think about.’
Doromek looked away. He found it hard to formulate his words when Myzmadra stared at him like that.
‘Do you ever question why we’re doing this?’ he said eventually. ‘If we’re on the right side even?’
She stared at him hard. ‘No. You do though, apparently.’ Her free hand moved smoothly to her holstered laspistol. ‘Should I worry?’
‘No,’ he said. ‘I won’t stop you. But…’ He looked at his feet. ‘After Pluto,’ he began again. ‘It got harder. I don’t know what I think any more. I forgot what I believed once. It’s changed so many times.’
Myzmadra could have shot him right then, and he half expected she would. But she didn’t. Her face retained the same fixed, slightly fierce expression it usually wore. They’d escaped the sicknesses that killed so many, but they were underfed. She was frighteningly thin. The war was using them up.
‘You used to trust me.’
He shrugged. ‘I still do.’
‘Then listen to me,’ she said. ‘I have always said this was for the Emperor.’
‘You did.’
‘That this is the only course of action.’
He nodded.
‘I never told you why.’
He shrugged. ‘I did not need to know why. I believed you. I never believed Him.’
‘I was not lying. I do not think the Legion were, when they came to me, and told me that this was the only way. It all makes sense now, seeing the things we have.’
‘Myzmadra,’ said Ashul. ‘Come with me. We can get into the city. Ride this out, see which way it goes. We have no orders. No contact. We’re making this up as we go along. Destroying this bastion is an insignificant action. You’re throwing your life away for the sake of it.’
‘Every death is a triumph for us,’ she said defiantly. ‘Every act of destruction serves. This bastion is the last obstacle between the traitors and the Helios Gate. If I bring it down, they may get inside today.’
‘You can’t believe that,’ he said.
‘Does it matter if I do or if I don’t?’ She looked him in the eye. She was so proud. He admired her more than any other person he had ever met.
‘You can go now,’ she said, distantly, as if he were a servant to be dismissed. ‘There’s no need for both of us to die.’
’There’s no need for either of us to die,’ he said. ‘What’s the point of this? This is one bastion from hundreds. We’ve done our part, why keep fighting?’
‘There is no wasted action in this war. We are here because we are meant to be. This action will mean something.’
‘How do you know?’ he said.
‘I just do,’ she said, with conviction.
‘That doesn’t sound like you.’
‘How do you know what I sound like?’ she said. ‘We don’t know each other at all.’
He stared at her. He could have said she could go, that he would stay. He could have told her the truth, that he’d had enough, and was sick of the war and his role in it. But he didn’t. Life finds a
way to make itself persist, even if it means turning a man into a coward. He had already made his choice. He wouldn’t give his life up for anyone. Not even Myzmadra.
‘All right,’ he said. ‘All right.’
She looked relieved. ‘There’s more for you to do before this is all over. But my story ends here.’
Ashul held out his hand. She clasped it.
‘Alpha to Omega,’ she said. Her smile was small but brave, and bright as polished steel in her dirty face.
‘Alpha to Omega,’ he replied.
They held hands for what seemed to be an age. Ashul had never touched her like that before. It was a simple, warm, human gesture, and he wished he had done it a long time ago. A different version of his life with her by his side flashed through his mind, the two of them against the universe. Once upon a time, he had wanted a life like that.
As if guessing what he thought, she frowned and she shook his hand free. A woman like her would never be with a man like him. She had her cause, and so did he.
‘Get out of here,’ she said coldly. ‘I’ll give you one minute, no more.’
Katsuhiro waited for the next earth-shaking detonation, and slipped away before Ashul caught him.
Daemonfall
Lord of the night
Red Angel
Daylight Wall, Helios section, 15th of Quartus
Midnight-blue gunships set down on the parapet under heavy fire. Gun positions in the city spires raked the wall tops where the enemy landed, but Skraivok chose his drop-craft carefully. All were of the increasingly rare Stormbird Sokar pattern, and void-shielded. They landed in a tight group, ramps slamming down simultaneously. Support squads poured out first into the rain, arraying themselves near the Stormbirds and targeting the nearer weapon installations with missiles and lascannon fire. The gunships angled their ball turrets up and added to the infantry’s efforts. Breacher squads came next, heading off away from the Helios Gate to block Imperial reinforcements coming up from the south. Rapier weapons platforms were dragged out from the holds. Further down the wall a heavy transport deposited a pair of Predator tanks to bolster the line. Lesser vessels flew as air support, strafing the buildings with their cannons, their missiles demolishing fortified balconies and bolted-on gunnery blisters before roaring past and coming about to make further passes.
