Warhawk, p.19
Warhawk, page 19
Rann was first into contact, bursting out of the gloom with his twin axe-blades and crashing into the lead XVI Legion warrior. That instantly broke the near silence – energy fields flashed into life, helm-lenses blazed, ceramite clanged against steel in showers of sparks as the rest of the Templars engaged. The Sons of Horus squad was smaller – twelve fighters in Reaver configuration, with chainaxes and bolt pistols – but they’d be summoning more soon, so speed was of the essence.
Sigismund hung back for just a second, long enough to pick out the warband leader amid the lumen-streaked dark. He was in a veteran’s Mark II plate, heavily scored and overlaid with battle-trophies. Chains swirled around him as he moved, each one capped with a bleached skull, and he carried a heavy chainsword fashioned into a serpent’s-head design. Like all his squad, he still had that old ganger edge to him, the rough cut of the armour-trim and the crude blood-daubs over the exposed panels. The savagery was more pronounced than Sigismund could remember, though – they were degrading, reverting to an older type, their fighting style wilder, just as dangerous, but looser at the edges now.
He plunged straight at him, shouldering his way through the challenge of another warrior to get to the real prize, all the while calculating the distances, the angles he’d need. His whole body responded now, taut as a drum, every movement efficient, taking in the tactical data around him, processing it unconsciously, using it, turning it to his advantage.
He slammed hard into contact, his black sword screaming up against the teeth of the enemy’s blade. One, two, three swipes, hard and fast, hammering the Reaver backwards and making him stumble on the loose stone. Sigismund’s severe face twitched into a smile under his helm – a flicker of real enjoyment. He hated this enemy. This enemy was an unbeliever, fallen from the light of hard truth, a thing to be exterminated with joy. That was what had changed. It wasn’t about skill. It wasn’t about the abstract goal of conquest. It was about righteousness. It was about certainty.
He crunched and blasted the apostate further back, severing the chains and sending the skulls bouncing. His Templars came with him, using their greater numbers to drive the Sons of Horus back out towards the chamber’s outer wall. They bludgeoned and shot and punched through the last remnants of the old perimeter, pushing the fight out of cover and into the old transitway between the power plants.
Haak immediately ceased firing, just as commanded, and the chasm shuddered into dust-choked silence. The Imperial Fists and Sons of Horus fought their way right into the exposed centre, neither side giving any quarter, the exchanges vicious and heavy.
It didn’t take long to end it. The Reaver commander was a decent warrior, experienced and canny. On another battlefield, he might have reaped a fresh tally of skulls. He was brave, as they all were – a kind of desperate bravery born in the lightless streets of his cursed old world, fuelled by the desire not to be shown as weak.
That wasn’t enough. Sigismund forced him up a long heap of wreckage, driving him out of the dust-roil where the fight could be clearly seen. His sword-swipes were even sharper now, even quicker, all aimed with razor-edged precision. He smacked the chainsword completely away, checking the parry and sending it sailing end over end into the dark. Then the switch, the change of direction, so fast it felt like it must have been preordained, ramming up through the Reaver’s breastplate in an explosion of disruptor charge. The stricken body left the ground entirely, propelled off its feet by the force of the thrust, and for an instance it hung like a marionette amid the snarls of angry lightning-forks.
‘Faithless!’ Sigismund snarled, the only word he had uttered since the fight began. He cast the corpse to the earth, letting it slam into the dust like a rotten side of meat.
It wasn’t a kill. It was a demonstration. The defenders at Haak’s barricades had been watching the whole time, seeing an enemy they were terrified of being casually, systematically dismantled.
There would still be fighting ahead. Enraged Sons of Horus were already advancing in numbers, and would be in range within moments. Survival at this position would still be tight, as all confrontations had to be now.
But that wasn’t the point. Sigismund turned to the Imperial defenders, his bloodstained sword hot in his hands.
‘Witness this!’ he shouted, his hearts thudding with the glorious rhythm of exertion. ‘They can be hurt. They can be killed.’
Haak was listening. Her troops were listening. They no longer looked terrified.
‘So stand up,’ he growled. ‘And do your duty.’
The air inside Bhab had changed. It had been foul for some time, due to the general collapse of the atmosphere across the entire Palace, but now the stink had an element of more human weakness.
Fear had a smell. Illness had a smell. So did hopelessness. The men and women working for long shifts at the command stations had been unable to attend to basic hygiene for a long time. Their uniforms were filthy, their hair lank. Most of them were so sleep deprived that they barely knew how long they’d been there. And yet, through all that, through the mind-fog and the reek of it, they kept working, their hands numbly switching levers and turning dials. What else was there to do? Dimly, somewhere deep in their animal-stem brains, they remembered what it was they were fighting, and so they kept going, because the alternative was too horrifying for words.
And that was ironic, Dorn thought, taking a rare moment to look up from his own station to gaze across the signals pits. If the enemy had not been so consumed with its essential sadism, its extravagant orgies of cruelty, then perhaps these people would have thrown in the towel by now. As it was, though, fear remained just a little stronger than the despair. Every vid-feed they saw from the contracting war-front, every capture of what the World Eaters did, what the Night Lords did, that stiffened resolve just enough.
For all that, the painful truth couldn’t be hidden. Every soul in the bastion saw how things were going. Even Archamus, solid Archamus, who had stepped up without hesitation when the first of that name was killed, was fraying now. Dorn didn’t ask him when he had last taken a rest-period. It would have been hypocrisy to order him to stand down, since he himself had long burned past the point of normal endurance, and so he let it slide, just like he did with so much else.
In the past, he would have detected the Sigillite’s advance before the man had even entered the chamber. Now, though, his weariness was so great that the cloaked figure had limped halfway up the steps towards the primarch’s crow’s nest station before he registered it.
‘Rogal,’ said Malcador.
Dorn nodded. It was still easy, even after all the long years he’d known the First Lord of the Imperium, to find the crabbed, wizened face disconcerting. Those eyes had seen plenty in their time. They had peered across a world that had existed before the Imperium, and had then peered across one shaped by its Crusade. Now they seemed destined to peer into its destruction, the final unravelling of plans that he had partly devised himself.
Dorn had always been a soldier, following orders as much as giving them. In the final analysis, his task was to preserve the work of others. Malcador, though, had built this place. The Imperium had been his creation, and this was therefore his defeat. What did he think of all that? Did it crush him? Or was he above such things, having scorched them out of his system over the thousands of years he’d been alive?
As ever, impossible to know. All you got was the exterior – the glittering eyes under the cowl, the long staff gripped by a bony hand, the low voice as dry as a lizard’s.
‘Lord Regent,’ Dorn replied. ‘Any change?’
It was almost an unconscious habit now, to ask. The answer was always the same, of course.
‘He remains silent,’ said Malcador. ‘If it changes, I shall let you know. How stands the defence?’
Dorn smiled grimly. Having to outline it all explicitly felt like a punishment all of its own. And yet, where else could Malcador go for the information, now? With the final failure of all communications, only Dorn had any kind of grip on the wider tactical situation. Only he remembered everything that had been planned, where every last unit had been deployed, where they were likely to be now, given the rate of attrition. The sole measure of pride he allowed himself was in how accurate his projections had been.
If Guilliman had only made it…
‘Falling back on all fronts,’ Dorn said curtly. ‘That good enough for you?’ He took a moment, rubbed hard at his forehead. ‘Three main enemy advances inside the Ultimate Wall, all moving fast. Sixteenth Legion spearheads are within three – maybe four – days’ march of Palatine. Eighth Legion berserker units are not far behind them. Four zone commands are cut off entirely, their defenders now out of supply range. We have effective control over the Sanctum, Palatine, some of the Adamant and Europa sectors. The rest – gone.’
Malcador took it all in. ‘Then the general order for withdrawal to the Sanctum–’
‘Not yet. Not yet.’ Dorn felt another wave of pressure on him, another voice of doubt to add to the hundreds that already whispered in his mind. ‘We still command the key arterials. We can bring them back. But right now, we have to hurt them, while we can. Once we’re penned in here…’
And that was the final trap. No escape. The shape of the siege, for all the surface complexity of its hundreds of interlocking walls and war-fronts, had always been simple in outline. Concentric rings: the Outer Palace and the space ports, then the Inner Palace, then the Palatine core, and then, last of all, the Sanctum Imperialis, the final bastion, guarded by the Eternity Gate itself. Once the Palatine strongholds were surrendered, the final ghost of hope would be gone – there would be no more room to manoeuvre, no room to breathe, no room to do anything but die, crushed up against one another as the walls were slowly driven in.
‘I understand the strain you’re under, Rogal,’ Malcador said carefully. ‘No one doubts your commitment. But do we really have–’
‘No, we don’t have anything like what we need for it,’ Dorn snapped. ‘Jaghatai’s made his move now, you know that? A third of our Legion strength, gambled away on a damned port. We’ve had our armour reserves plundered to make it all viable, and what does it get us? Not enough. He could have been here, with us.’ Just rehearsing it all made him angrier. ‘It knocks out the Fourteenth, that’s true. Having more Death Guard inside the walls wouldn’t make me any happier. But now I’m searching for reasons not to think it’s rank insanity.’ Again, though, control, control. ‘Sanguinius is with us still. Vulkan is with us. Throne, I’m thankful for that.’
‘And Sigismund fights on.’
Dorn’s gaze, which had been wavering, flickered up. ‘On my command.’
‘Rumours of it have reached the Dungeon. The Black Sword. They say he’s making ground.’
‘He’s not there to make ground. He’s there to give them something to fear.’
‘Because the line troops are failing.’
Reluctantly, Dorn nodded. ‘I can’t even bring myself to blame them. Maybe you don’t feel it. The… weight.’
‘Oh, I feel it.’
‘The Lord of Death, they tell me. Safe in his own fortress, making the world sicken.’
‘And so maybe Jaghatai has a point.’
‘Only if you think it’s possible.’ Dorn felt his lids growing heavy again. He felt the dead pull of all his fine armour, not put to serious use since encountering Fulgrim on the parapets. And there was so much to do here, so much to put right, just to squeeze out another week of resistance, another day, another hour, preventing him from arming up and charging out into the dark, doing what he burned to do, because someone had to keep a grip, to care about duty.
‘But it is set, now,’ said Malcador. ‘Nothing can prevent it.’
‘Just as you say,’ muttered Dorn wearily. ‘And so the world ends thus, not in defiance, but in madness.’
Atmospheric friction
Weak suit
Percentages
Yes, madness, thought Ayo Nuta. The only word for it. It had never been done, and there were good reasons for that. The Skye orbital plate’s very presence in the lower atmosphere had already been something skirting the absurd, but moving it – dragging it hundreds of kilometres across an active warzone – was beyond anything he’d been asked to contemplate before.
Nuta had struggled to get some of the crew to follow orders, once they’d realised what he was asking them to do. He might have reprimanded them for that, but in truth he understood how they felt. They were run-down. They were scared. They knew that their chances of making it out of this alive, always small, had just vanished, and now came the insanity of making a powered run through the full atmosphere, something that had only really been theorised about in the constructor’s tomes held securely in Luna’s shipyard archives.
But then the immersion drives had always invited the possibility. If you could lower a plate into the true atmosphere, keeping it intact and self-powered and able to function, why couldn’t you push things a little further, and use it as a proper mobile platform? You’d wreak havoc on everything within a kilometre or so, churning up Throne-knows-what and making the weather run amok, but in the current circumstances that no longer seemed like something worth worrying much about. The entire planet had been stirred up into a permanent electric storm by the volume of ship-mounted las-fire loosed on the surface, and whatever physics had once applied to the atmosphere had been wholly superseded.
The ride was a horror show, all the same. Colossal resistance smeared across the forward plates, ratcheting up quickly into a full firestorm that tested the limits of the re-entry armour. The plate’s structure, vaster and more cumbersome than the mightiest void-going battleship, shook and screamed and pinged rivets across its full expanse. The noise was incredible, a constant boom and a thunder that reverberated up from the drive-rooms and made thinking impossible. Every lens in the main control dome flashed crimson, telling the crew nothing much they couldn’t already feel – that this was mad, mad, mad.
And for all that, Nuta couldn’t help but enjoy it – the daring of it, the colossal, shameless audacity of the thing. They were doing it. They were making their mark on the battle just when they had looked destined to serve out time as a redundant atmospheric hangar. Who knew what was passing through the minds of the enemy now, having burned their way right up to the Ultimate Wall, only to see a fire-wreathed hunk of orbital salvage roar straight back at them, slicing the atmosphere in two and sending friction lightning raking for kilometres in all directions.
‘Maintain course and speed!’ he shouted, his voice already hoarse. ‘Clamp down on that power-drain – the upper voids are on the edge!’
He could see nothing on the realviewers, all of which were now portals onto walls of fire. Many of the ranged augurs were scrambled, but a few of them still gave him a shaky picture of the outside world.
They had ground their way across their mooring station in the southern Palace, across the Europa and Sanctus sectors, finally cresting the Ultimate Gate and veering due east. He’d witnessed snatches of the gradually deteriorating battlefields during that time, from the intense combat still going on inside the Ultimate Wall to the emptiness of the sectors outside the old Anterior barbicans. He wondered if the orbital plate’s progress had disturbed any of those conflicts – if enemy battalions had been momentarily shaken by the sight of the heavens erupting above them and flooding their augurs with static. He hoped so. Every morsel counted, every slight twist of fortune.
Only once they had cleared the Ultimate Gate fortress, its heights still burning wildly, did the orders start to come in from Colossi. Nuta slowed the advance a fraction, aiming for perfect coordination with the planned land advance. That had been a complicated business – the Skye plate had truly colossal inertia, driven by its immense mass and limited-power manoeuvring drives, and so velocity had to be calculated with a high degree of precision. Around ninety per cent of its entire power output was devoted to the monumental repulsor-coils that kept it from crashing to earth, leaving comparatively little for anything else.
In the end, the timings had been as close as could have been hoped for. The plate crashed on eastwards, driving an incandescent path over the summits of the Colossi comms-vanes, just as the land assault snarled up to full speed and began its long race to the space port. The remaining squadrons of V Legion fighters screamed out around them, shadowing them all the way out. The plate itself had minimal armaments of its own – it had been a platform for nova cannons once, all of which had been stripped out and used on the Palace walls – but its remaining atmospheric escorts flooded from the hangars too, and its residual heavy bolter arrays swivelled into action.
Then the void-to-surface las-fire started. Nuta had been braced for it. It was why they were there – to shield the otherwise exposed armour. The orbital plates had always been designed to withstand battleship-grade weaponry, and Skye’s void shields were fully powered and operational.
Even so, the first impacts were shattering. Lance after lance shot down from the heavens, thrusting out of the racing storm fronts and jagging straight into the plate’s upper disc-face. The void shields shrieked, flexing concave under the impacts and scattering into interference patterns hundreds of metres in diameter. There was no prospect of firing back, nothing to do but weather it, keep moving, keep the power feeds from shuttering the generators and exposing the physical hull.
‘More spikes detected!’ cried the master of signals, a Terran named Uwe Eisen. ‘Impacts incoming across zones nine and ten!’
Nuta tensed, his fingers drumming on the arms of his command throne. Aside from rotating the harmonics of the void units, there wasn’t much he could do. ‘All hands, brace,’ he ordered. ‘Keep all forward sensors open and scanning.’
