Hammer and Bolter Issue Eighteen Page 6

  ‘What of the Death Guard, my liege?’ asked Corswain. ‘Should we not simply attack, with the aid of the Iron Hands? They are known to have declared with Horus from the earliest days of the rebellion.’

  ‘Until we can establish the loyalty of both factions here, and that of the Mechanicum as well, we should not suppose any aid from either side. The Iron Hands have been leaderless since Manus was slain at Isstvan. Who can say what their current agenda is or where their true loyalties lie? Similarly, it has been reported that those Legions that sided with Horus did not do so wholly. Whole companies and fleets have been spread far across the galaxy, and with the warp storms isolating many sectors we must not hastily pre-judge any situation, little brother. It may be the case that in Perditus, it is the Death Guard who are loyal and the Iron Hands who have turned from the Emperor’s cause.’

  Corswain absorbed his primarch’s wisdom with a nod, while Captain Stenius took up the conversation.

  ‘Is it your intent that we also gain position to place troops on Perditus Ultima, my liege?’ said Stenius. ‘Are we to break through the Iron Hands and Death Guard cordons for low orbit?’

  ‘That is exactly my intent, Captain Stenius,’ replied the Lion. ‘The Invincible Reason will spearhead the thrust to Perditus Ultima, passing between the lead elements of the two enemy fleets. We shall broadcast warnings that any hostile action will be met immediately and decisively with overwhelming force. I will issue fleet instructions when we have concluded here. Are there any more questions?’

  The tone of the Lion indicated that he did not expect any further debate and the assembled captains lowered to their knees to accept their primarch’s command. When the others were dismissed Corswain loitered in the audience chamber, wishing to speak with his lord in private. The Lion waved for him to speak his mind.

  ‘It is possible that what you say is true, my liege, but the likelihood of the situation is that the Iron Hands are loyal to Terra and the Death Guard are sworn to Horus,’ said the seneschal. ‘We should arrange our advance to favour defence against attack from the Death Guard.’

  ‘As you say, little brother,’ said the Lion. ‘Yet do not be so sure in the loyalties of the Iron Hands. We are living in complex times, Cor, and there is no easy division between those who fight on our side and those who fight against us. Antagonism towards Horus and his Legions no longer guarantees fealty to the Emperor. There are other powers exercising their right to dominion.’

  ‘I don’t understand, my liege,’ confessed Corswain. ‘Who else would one swear loyalty to, other than Horus or the Emperor?’

  ‘Whom do you serve?’ the Lion asked in reply to the question.

  ‘Terra, my liege, and the cause of the Emperor,’ Corswain replied immediately, drawing himself up straight as if accused.

  ‘What of your oaths to me, little brother?’ The Lion’s voice was quiet, contemplative. ‘Are you not loyal to the Dark Angels?’

  ‘Of course, my liege!’ Corswain was taken aback by the suggestion that he might think otherwise.

  ‘And so there are other forces whose foremost concern is their primarch and Legion, and for some perhaps not even that,’ the Lion explained. ‘If I told you we would abandon any pretence of defending Terra, what would you say?’

  ‘Please do not joke about such things,’ said Corswain, shaking his head. ‘We cannot allow Horus to prevail in this war.’

  ‘Who mentioned Horus?’ said the primarch. He closed his eyes and rubbed his brow for a few moments and then looked at Corswain, gauging his mettle. ‘It is not for you to concern yourself, little brother. Prepare the task force for the attack, and let wider burdens sit upon my shoulders alone.’

  From his vantagepoint behind the armoured windows that pierced the central tower of Magellix station, Captain Lasko Midoa had an uninterrupted view of the whole Mechanicum complex. His attention was directed to the south and east, towards outposts Seven, Eight and Nine, currently occupied by his Death Guard adversaries. Behind the low octagonal structures spread the mirrored screens that ran the circumference of the entire facility, creating a micro-climate of thermal updrafts that assisted in keeping down the temperature at Magellix, making it inhabitable if not tolerable. Beyond were the upthrusts of Perditus Ultima’s mountains, their bases hidden behind a blanket of dense greenish fog a thousand kilometres across, their summits many kilometres above the plain glistening from golden refractive materials that coated the rock.

  The ever-present mist layer distorted the distances, so that although the outer stretches of the facility were several kilometres away, their bulk was magnified to make them seem almost within bolter range. Heat shimmer from the mirror wall compounded the problem. It did not help the captain’s sense of perspective to know that his foes were inside the stubby keeps, ready and able to launch an attack at any moment. With Midoa stood Captain Casalir Lorramech, commander of the Ninety-Eighth Company. The two Iron Hands officers had their helms removed, making the most of the processed atmosphere inside Magellix; for the bulk of the thirty-eight days since they had arrived on Perditus Ultima they had been in full battle gear. The pair were almost identical, with close-cropped silvery hair, broad faces and leathery skin. Only two features separated them. Lorramech had natural blue eyes while Midoa had silver-lensed inserts. Midoa also had a tracheal respirator replacing his lower jaw and throat, which hissed rhythmically with his breathing. When he spoke, his voice issued from a small speaker-comm unit set into the bone of his right cheek. The speech device transmitted Midoa’s words in a sing-song cadence that was quite at odds with his mechanical appearance.

  ‘And you are sure that they are heading directly for orbit?’ Midoa asked, responding to Lorramech’s report that the Dark Angels had continued towards Ultima at full speed.

  ‘Yes, Iron Father,’ said Lorramech, whose voice was deep and gravelly, each word uttered with gritted teeth and barely moving lips. Midoa was incapable of smiling at the use of the ancient honorific, but it was a source of pride that his fellow captains had chosen to raise him up to command of this expedition. ‘Course and speed are consistent with an orbital heading. They will be in high orbit in less than three hours.’

  ‘But they still have not breached the comm-dampening shell?’

  ‘We have not yet been able to directly communicate with the Dark Angels.’

  ‘And what of them?’ said Midoa, pointing out through the window at the Death Guard positions. ‘What are they doing?’

  ‘The enemy seem intent on an intercept course,’ replied Lorramech. ‘With your permission, I will signal the fleet to counter-manoeuvre. We will engage the Death Guard ships and provide a screen for the arriving Dark Angels. They have two battle-barges amongst their flotilla, which would be valuable orbital support.’

  ‘You have my permission,’ said Midoa. ‘We have an unforeseen and fortuitous opportunity, Casalir. Have all but one in ten squads drawn down from their patrols and garrisons and mustered in the main vehicle pool. It is my intent to launch an attack.’

  ‘It will be as you say, Iron Father,’ said Lorramech. ‘With the aid of the Dark Angels, we will drive the Death Guard from Perditus and secure the Tuchulcha engine.’

  It took most of the next hour for Midoa to gather together the forces he required for the counter-offensive. Squads and companies were drawn in from their positions across Magellix and the surrounding rocky plateau, moving in secret along underground highways that had been dug beneath the surface of Perditus Ultima long before the Emperor’s compliance fleet had arrived.

  The Iron Hands sallied forth from the main gateway of Tower Two, Predator battle tanks and Land Raider armoured carriers spearheading the thrust, while the force’s Rhinos and the larger Mastodon transports followed behind the more heavily armed screen.

  Almost immediately, defensive fire from Tower Eight punched through the gloom of Perditus’s atmosphere: stabs of laser and the flare of heavy cannon fire. The vanguard of the column spread out into covering positions,
the tanks taking up stations behind enormous scattered boulders, jagged escarpments and the shallow ferrocrete blocks that housed the station’s atmosphere filtration fans. Soon the return fire of the Iron Hands was lancing into the slab walls of the outer towers, ripping trails through ferrocrete and cracking massive glassite observation decks.

  Behind the storm of fire, the next wave charged onwards in their Rhinos, hatches and doors battened down as the transports roared across the undulating rocky ground at full speed. Midoa was in the lead vehicle, keen to set an example for his warriors to follow. The slower, bulkier Mastodons, each quadruple-tracked and towering above the Land Raiders, powered through the dust and fog as quickly as they could, their heavy tracks carving fresh ruts in the baked surface of Perditus Ultima.

  Before they reached Tower Eight, the Iron Hands came into range of the guns at Tower Nine. Midoa had known this and speed was the best defence against the strengthening crossfire. There were three hundred metres of ground to cover where both towers could fire at full intensity, before the bulk of Tower Eight obscured the arcs of fire of its neighbours.

  Being first across the killing zone had its advantages. The gunners were unable to adjust their aim quickly enough to target Midoa’s Rhino, but ten metres behind him Sergeant Haultiz’s transport was struck full-on by a lascannon beam. Engine boiling smoke, the breached Rhino skidded to a halt, the black-and-silver armoured warriors within spilling out onto the dusty rock while more transports poured past them. Midoa’s orders had been simple: stop for nothing. The Iron Hands in the other transports barrelled past their stranded brethren, knowing that the surest way to protect their fellow legionaries was to mount an assault on the gun positions manned by the Death Guard.

  The fifteen seconds it took to dash through the blazing kill zone was the longest fifteen seconds Midoa had felt in his life. He was crouched in the rear compartment with his command squad, all of them tensed and ready to extract if a hit forced them to bail from their transport even while it was moving. Over the comm, Midoa learnt of a second Rhino being hit, and then a third, but by the time the lead transports were within a hundred metres of Tower Eight’s secondary gate, seven of the Rhinos and three Land Raiders had pierced the cordon of fire. A further eight Mastodons followed behind, each carrying forty Iron Hands warriors, their power fields soaking up autocannon shells and lascannon blasts with actinic flashes of energy.

  As the Rhinos slewed to a halt beneath the guns of Tower Eight, Captain Tadurig and his squad disembarked swiftly, approaching the wall of the tower ahead. With them they had brought a phase field generator; a device Midoa had overseen the creation of since arriving, with the aid of his Mechanicum allies. It took only a few seconds for the Iron Hands legionaries to assemble the four-legged platform and install the phase field generator, the bulk of the machine taken up with an energy distillation dish at the centre of which were thousands of wire coils to transmit the phase field into place.

  Joining his warriors, Midoa made a last few adjustments to the machine which he had painstakingly assembled and rigged from old tunnel-delvers and other pieces of warp-tech machinery left over by Perditus’s previous inhabitants. They had used the channelled power of the warp as freely as the Imperium employed plasma and electricity, much to the amazement of Midoa.

  With a thrum of magnetic actuators sliding into position, Midoa pulled the activation lever and stepped back. He had not yet had time to test the device – he had been planning on using it during a subterranean assault on Tower Nine in a few days’ time – but he knew that in theory it would work. Muttering an old Medusan proverb, he waited for the power capacitors to reach full potential and then switched on the conductor coils.

  The phase field sprang into life, looking like a cone of pearlescent energy. Everything within the field disappeared, including a circle of the Tower Eight wall some three metres in diameter. After a few seconds, Midoa signalled for the machine to be shut down and with his squad on his heels, stepped through the newly-made gap.

  Inside, the phase field had displaced a swathe of the room within the tower, along with another interior wall and the ceiling twenty metres further on, exposing the floor above and a basement level below. Neatly severed cables sparked while sliced atmosphere recycling pipes dribbled contaminant-laden steam into the air. Their suit lamps piercing the darkness inside the tower, the Iron Hands pushed on with weapons ready.

  ‘What do you mean, Tower Eight has been breached?’ Calas Typhon, First Captain of the Death Guard Legion, Commander of the Grave Wardens, was in a foul mood already, and the news of the Iron Hands’ success did not improve his humour.

  ‘A phase field generator, commander,’ replied his second, Captain Vioss, who was forced to take a step back as his senior turned; Typhon and his subordinate’s massive suits of Terminator armour almost filled the command blister on the top of Tower Seven. Vioss’s voice was a low, slurred hiss, his speech impaired by an ugly suppurating wound in the right side of his jaw. ‘Sarrin had too much focus on the gateways and the breach through the wall has him outflanked.’

  ‘Why now?’ demanded Typhon, his top-knot of dark hair flicking like a horse’s tail as he twitched his head in annoyance. ‘Have they received some signal from the Dark Angels?’

  ‘Impossible, commander,’ said Vioss. ‘The Terminus Est’s dearthfield is still functioning, no communication is able to pass from surface to outer orbit.’

  ‘And the Dark Angels continue on their course directly towards Perditus Ultima?’

  Vioss nodded, his sallow face deeply creased by a scowl.

  ‘They will have orbit in less than two hours, commander.’

  ‘Then we have less than two hours to punish our idiot foe for his foolhardiness. He should have waited until orbital supremacy was guaranteed. Signal the fleet and tell them to stave off engagement as long as possible. That should afford us an extra hour at least while the Dark Angels are forced to consider their options.’

  ‘You plan to bring forward the next attack, commander?’

  ‘Yes, right now, may the Father take your eyes!’ Typhon crashed his fist into Vioss’s shoulder, sending him reeling into the wall of the glassite-domed cupola. Motes of rust drifted in the air from the impact, shed from the corroded edges of Vioss’s armour. ‘We must free Tuchulcha while we have the chance. A lot depends on our success here. Tell Ghrusul to assault from Tower Nine, we will trap our enemy between us and drive onwards to the central facility.’

  ‘For the Father,’ said Vioss, bowing his head. ‘The Grave Wardens will not fail.’

  Thesubterranean passageway was five metres high and twice as broad, lit by thin, dust-covered yellow strips in the floor and ceiling. The rails of an ancient locomotive system rusted at the centre of the tunnel and raised platforms ran along the walls to either side. Normally it was a gloomy place, but the arrival of the Iron Hands and Death Guard had turned it into a place of pyrotechnic brilliance.

  Bolter fire echoed along the five-hundred-metre length of the interchange, the shells expelled by the exchange hurtling in both directions in a criss-cross of bright flares. Now and then the miniature blue star of a plasma shot shrieked across the gap or the red flare of a missile trail illuminated the murkiness. Blossoms of frag missile detonations appeared amongst the line of twenty Death Guard Terminators advancing on Tower Eight.

  At their head, Commander Typhon roared his men onwards. Like his warriors, he was protected by the massive bulk of his modified cataphractii armour, painted white in the colours of the Death Guard.

  Rounded plates that heaped up higher than the top of his knightly helm protected his shoulders, his chest and gut encased in segmented slabs of ceramite, arms and legs sheathed in thick greaves and vambraces. Adamantium mail hung in sheets across the joints of his armour. The left arm of his suit was incorporated into the bulk of a reaper autocannon, its twin barrels spitting a rapid-fire hail of shells towards the Iron Hands, chewing through the ammunition belt like a starving dog devourin
g a strip of sinew. In his right Typhon held a manreaper, a wickedly-bladed power scythe, symbol of his rank, and a smaller copy of the weapon wielded by his primarch, Mortarion. The glow of its power field shone a sickly yellow light on the white Terminators around him.

  Heavy support Terminators backed up the twenty warriors of the spearhead, their cyclone launchers sending showers of missiles over the heads of their companions, detonations cracking the plastite sheathing of the tunnel walls and tossing silver-and-black armoured legionaries into the air. Combi-bolters spat rapid-fire rounds as the Grave Wardens continued to close, marching unharmed into the teeth of the enemies’ fire.

  The Iron Hands fell back, unable to match the Grave Wardens with their heavier armour and weaponry, but progress was slow. Ghrusul had reported entering Tower Eight twenty minutes earlier, yet Typhon was still two interchanges from breaching the tower from below. He was expecting word from Vioss at any moment, telling him that the Dark Angels were in orbit, but until then he was determined to press on with the attack.

  The leading squads of the Grave Wardens were within fifty metres of the end of the interchange held by the Iron Hands when Typhon’s helm crackled with the signal of an incoming comm-link. Rather than the sibilant whisper of Vioss, he heard a deep voice filled with authority that caused him to involuntarily stop in his tracks. Around him, the rest of the Death Guard were similarly immobilised and the fire from the Iron Hands died away within seconds.

  ‘The world of Perditus Ultima is under the protection of Lion El’Jonson of the First Legion,’ boomed the message. ‘You are to immediately cease all warring and quit this planet. Any resistance will be met with ultimate force and there will be no prisoners taken. Failure to comply with my demands will result in your immediate destruction.’

  As if breaking from a trance, Typhon staggered forwards a step, almost losing his footing. Only in the presence of Mortarion had he ever experienced anything like the reaction he had just felt and he quickly realised that it was not just the Dark Angels that had arrived: their primarch was with them. He could sense the unease of his warriors as they came to the same conclusion, and the advance that had shuffled to a halt was slowly turning into a withdrawal. Ahead, the Iron Hands were backing away from their positions too, cowed by the same tone of authority that had pierced the minds of the Death Guard.