Warhawk, p.20
Warhawk, page 20
The lances struck again, smacking in sequence across the upper decks and sending impact waves rippling across the shields. Alert klaxons went off, just as always, swiftly clamped down on by the crisis teams who had heard enough of them. The lumens flashed out, plunging them all into total darkness, before flickering back on again. The deck shuddered, and the sound of something exploding echoed up from the repulsor chambers far below.
Those enormous las-beams had been launched towards ground-level coordinates, intended to wreak havoc amid the close-packed tank columns. With a wry grin, Nuta found himself wondering if the targeters on the void-ships even knew yet what their energy beams were running into.
‘How much more of this can we handle?’ he asked Io Sleva, his master of operations.
Sleva’s slender head popped up from behind her bank of controls. ‘Hits like that? We’re getting knocked hard. A few more hours, if it doesn’t let up.’
‘It won’t let up. Do what you can.’
A few more hours would be about right. The tanks were moving fast, shadowed by even swifter V Legion speeders. They were making good use of their improvised overhead cover, limiting casualties from long-range fire. Nuta started to think that maybe the whole scheme wasn’t so mad after all. Maybe it even had a chance of working.
‘Incoming comms from Legion command!’ Eisen shouted.
Nuta patched it through.
‘Enemy atmospherics launched,’ came Jangsai Khan’s static-drenched voice over the link from the airborne squadrons. ‘Squadrons moving to intercept, but you will wish to make arrangements.’
‘Acknowledged, my lord khan,’ Nuta responded, before turning towards Eisen’s station again. ‘Get me whatever you can from those forward viewers.’
A bank of lenses positioned around his throne blurted with white noise, hissing like a nest of snakes before some of them cleared to expose jumpy, grainy feeds from the prow-mounted augurs. The images were very bad, a mix of interference and poor processing from the night-vision compensators, and for a moment or two it wasn’t clear that anything much had been picked up. Nuta had vague impressions of the looming space port on the far horizon, barely perceptible amid the slew and the dark.
Then he saw them – blurred points of light racing out, whole clouds of them, soon surrounded by the spark-flicker of massed las-fire. The numbers were immediately intimidating, the reckless flight-aggression even more so.
He took a deep breath, and patched a link to his commander of ordnance.
‘Jafda, alert the air-to-air bolter crews, all sectors. Free-fire on my mark.’
He kept his eyes fixed on the scopes, even as another hammer blow landed from orbit, nearly throwing him from his throne. The lenses went white, the lumens blanked out again, something else exploded.
‘Should have known better,’ he murmured, shuffling back into position and calling up fresh damage readings. ‘Still damned insanity.’
Morarg watched the flyers streak out of the hangars – Fire Raptors, Storm Eagles, a few Stormbirds and Thunderhawks. Some of them went erratically, as if their pilots were struggling with the controls. Or maybe they had just changed too much for comfort, their engorged limbs no longer squeezing into the cramped cockpits. In any case, the XIV Legion had never specialised in flyers. They maintained atmospheric capability, just as any full-spectrum army did, but they never loved them, and those who crewed the machines were not held in especial honour.
So he had little confidence in them. They would do some damage, to be sure, but the V Legion were masters of this warfare, and that ludicrous hunk of hovering adamantium they’d somehow conjured up would take some beating before it finally broke up. The best they could hope for was to strafe the slower-moving ground forces, take out as much of those as they could and block the routes east, but even then he doubted the White Scars would give them an easy time of it.
For a moment longer he stared at the western skies, still unsure whether to believe the evidence of his senses. The orbital plate was not so much moving through the atmosphere as ripping it apart, bringing with it a low-frequency rumble that made the earth itself vibrate. Watching an eleven-kilometre-diameter void-platform thunder its way closer and closer, all the while taking sustained hits from the fleet and a constant rattle of fire from the ground below, was one of the more arresting sights his long service had given him. Sensors indicated that the plate was tracking the speed of the armour underneath fairly well, but from that distance it looked almost immobile, a violation of both physics and common sense, an affront to what warfare ought to be.
After a moment longer, he shook his head wearily, and went to find Kalgaro. It took him a while, for the ways of the space port were still unfamiliar, and everything seemed to be in a state of total disarray. When he finally located him, partly thanks to the prompting of a helpful daemon hanging like a clutch of rotten fruit from the roof-arches, he was pleased to see that the Siegemaster, at least, seemed to be taking things seriously.
‘What word of the primarch?’ Kalgaro asked, never breaking stride as Morarg joined up with him. Together, they trudged their way down towards the lower levels.
‘He was intrigued, when I told him,’ Morarg said.
‘That’s it? Nothing more?’
‘Something to do with his new perspective, maybe.’
Morarg remembered just how Mortarion had been, once the news had been broken. A sad smile, as if it was something that was somehow entirely expected, and could not be avoided now, but was to be regretted all the same. And then an injunction to make all ready, and refocus the Legion, do what needed to be done.
‘And it is a drain on his soul. The art.’
Kalgaro grunted. There were some in the Legion who still had mixed feelings about ‘the art’. ‘I’m glad you’re in charge, up there, Caipha,’ he said. ‘I can’t even understand some of the others now. The ones that changed the most.’
The two of them lumbered heavily down a twisting stairwell, with the pale green witch-light flickering around them.
‘I have serious concerns,’ Morarg said, trying to remain calm about it. ‘Nothing is in place. Half our units are stripped down for refitting. The Lord Typhus took a substantial force with him east, and we have too many detachments placed on the main battlefront, out of reach. Getting things moving is… difficult. We are not as strong here as we should be.’
Kalgaro chuckled. ‘You worry too much.’
‘Do I? That iron bastard did so much damage coming in there’s no longer a hard perimeter left to secure. The outer walls are in ruins, the old void generators are blown to pieces. It’s not what it was, brother, we never intended it to be, and now we’ve been caught napping.’
Kalgaro stopped walking, turned to face him. ‘So they’ll get in,’ he said. ‘Let them. Bring them. Have you seen what’s happened to the interior? Down in the dark? This place is becoming a hell-world again, and if it’s hell for us, it’ll be worse for them.’
‘They’ll be expecting it. We’ve fought one another too often to be surprised now.’
‘That’s right, we have – we’re like old sparring partners, heading to the pits just one more time.’ He snorted a harsh laugh. ‘I was worried we might miss it. I was worried the primarch would take so long to give the order that there’d be none of them left to kill. So this is good, for me. They ran from us at Catullus. Now they’re coming back for more, and I can’t be sorry.’
Morarg almost pressed him on that. They had been on the front foot in the void, with the numbers, with the momentum. They had planned it, with all the care that they always planned offensives. That was where they excelled – the slow vice of control, meticulously conceived, everything accounted for. Now the situations were reversed, calling for swift response, for a rapid change of course, for improvisation. Even with all their advantages, after everything they had already achieved, those had never been their strong suits.
‘At least release the armour we’ve got standing ready,’ he said in the end. ‘Something to slow them down while we rearm the rest. If they are to get in, I want them damaged while doing so.’
‘Already done,’ said Kalgaro, starting to walk again. ‘They’ll bleed for the passage here, and they’ll bleed for the wall-crossings too.’ Once again, that hard-edge chuckle. ‘And then, once they’re through all that, we’ll truly go to work. Trust me, Caipha – we’ll be knee-deep in Chogorian blood before their madness ends.’
Aika 73 blasted through a loose ramp of rubble, rocked a little, then boosted onward. Ernama, the commander of the squadron’s lead tank, was setting a hard pace, barely pausing to take loc-readings, and the rest of the six-strong unit had to work to keep up.
‘Steady,’ Kaska told Dresi, still unsure exactly how to handle her. The driver was concentrating furiously – almost too furiously – and they were skirting at the edge of wearing out the main engine.
She didn’t respond, just leaned forward in her seat and maintained the rate of speed.
Kaska turned back to the scopes. His narrow station right at the top of the turret was lined with them – a slew of greasy lenses with spider’s webs of tactical data churning down them. Aside from the night-vision scanners, he had augur readings for the rest of the squadron and a battery of tactical data on the terrain and environment. A narrow armoured slit just ahead of him gave him his only realviewer on the action ahead, though he had the use of an extendable periscope when that failed.
For all that, he could barely see a thing. The atmosphere outside was a spewed mess of blown dust and smoke. The interior of the Leman Russ was its usual roar of engine noise, reverberating throughout the claustrophobic crew stations, and the whole thing rattling around like a kicked ration-can. He was under strict orders not to open the hatch, even before the enemy had been sighted, and so everything had to be done through the scopes and auspex, all of which flickered and jerked and kept disappearing into static-fields just when you needed them. It all felt so artificial, so dislocated. He could almost imagine they were in a training simulator again, a box wired up to faulty cogitators and motion-engines.
They were going too fast. He’d already voxed Ernama to tell her so, but she hadn’t replied. His loc-readings were unreliable now, and he could barely keep tabs on the other tanks in the convoy. Messages from Legion command had filtered in a while back, telling them all that the air cover was in place, but aside from the fact that the few snatches of open sky he could see were darker and redder than usual he couldn’t really tell what that meant – it wasn’t as if he could stop, get out, and take a proper look.
‘Enemy sighted, dead ahead,’ came a comms-burst from Ernama over his headset. ‘All units, move to engage.’
Engage what? Damn Ernama. He caught glimpses of old walls and structural interiors, stripped to bare rockcrete amid a man-made sea of dust and masonry-chunks. The remains of the once huge buildings rose up on either side, enclosing a channel less than a hundred metres across. The squadron was uncomfortably concentrated, squeezed together by the urban cliffs on either side – it would have been better to fan out, free up room to use the guns without hitting a friendly. In this murk, under these conditions, Kaska could all too readily imagine a shell smashing through his tank’s weaker rear armour, sent flying blind by an enthusiastic gunner with a nervous trigger finger.
‘Vosch, make ready,’ he ordered his own main gunner, who crouched beside him on the far side of the cannon’s solid breech chamber. ‘Targets ahead. Jandev – keep them peeled.’
A Leman Russ’ armaments were crude but effective. The forward lascannon had a decent rate of fire and could pepper a target with high-power beams as long as the powercells remained active. The main gun had a much slower rate, but it packed a mighty punch when it scored a hit. Vosch knew what to do with it, too – Kaska had never served with anyone more adept at making sense of the incoming screeds of sighting data that her scopes fed her, expertly pulling the pistons and cranks to get the optimal angle out of the long barrel.
Kaska adjusted the auspex gains, and the main lens zoomed forward through a soup of black-grey muck. He was sweating now, both from the punishing warmth of the engine grilles below him and the close tension of the upcoming firefights.
‘Keep us hard right,’ he warned Dresi, who was working very hard to remain in formation at such high speed. ‘We get in front of Frahlo’s guns, he won’t hold back.’
Then he saw it, eight hundred metres ahead, smashing its way straight through the remains of an old iron balustrade and dropping down onto the dirt with a crash. A XIV Legion Sicaran, followed swiftly by another, both of them armed with turret autocannons and sponson-mounted lascannons. Behind them came other indistinct outlines – heavy infantry, power-armoured, far taller and broader than any standard human troops.
Ernama, closest of the Leman Russ tanks, fired instantly. The shell from her main cannon flew long, exploding against the upper walls of the buildings beyond. Her lascannon’s beams flashed out a second later, joined by those of the following two tanks in the squadron, streaking out in blinding lines and igniting the rooflines with stark white flashes.
‘Hard right!’ ordered Kaska again, quickly gauging the terrain through his auspex. If they maintained this position they’d neither get a clear shot nor guarantee getting out of the path of shells from the rear. ‘Vosch – get your fix on the second one.’
The air around them exploded into a criss-cross inferno of interlocking fire-beams. The Sicarans were highly manoeuvrable and crewed by pilots with superior reactions and perception – they seemed to slip across the ruins like eels, despite their bulk. They were slippery in other ways, too – their shallow-sloped armour made scoring a decisive hit harder, not like the brick-square hulks of the Imperial tanks. Sicaran autocannons were ferocious things, twin barrels spitting out shells far faster than the manual gunners could respond in kind, backed up by the silent flares of lascannons.
The effects of all that were ruinous. A Leman Russ on the left – Alchak’s, Kaska thought – was hit hard under the turret mechanism, the impact blowing it up and sending armour plates clattering away to the ground. Ernama got another shot away before her hull was slammed by heavy volumes of shell-fire, smacking into the engine intakes and immobilising her. The only remaining squadron vehicle ahead of Aika 73 slammed straight into an autocannon storm that rocked it almost completely over. Having found its range, the second Sicaran swivelled to finish the Leman Russ off.
‘Full stop!’ Kaska yelled. ‘Lock down that target!’
Grinding to a stop in a firefight was dangerous. Some commanders never did it unless they had to, but Kaska had learned the hard way that the targeting cogitators on a Leman Russ came up with the numbers faster when things were less complicated.
Dresi slammed on the brakes. Jandev calmly lined up the lascannon, and Vosch expertly ratcheted down the main gun.
‘Fire!’
Aika 73 shuddered as the battle cannon blew. Kaska jerked away out of instinct as the breech shot back in its sleeve, filling the turret with clots of smoke. Merck got to work instantly, wrenching open the hatch and reloading. Jandev fired steadily in concentrated bursts, piling las-beams onto the target Sicaran. The enemy disappeared behind a wall of black smog, its outline totally obscured.
‘Again,’ ordered Kaska, peering into the scope and risking another shot while static.
Vosch responded, her second volley adjusted a fraction to bring it in hard against the bolter-mount on the Sicaran’s front armour-slope.
It was a good shot, hitting the weak point full-on and driving the armour inward. Jandev followed suit, sending las-fire spitting into the wound even as Dresi got the Leman Russ moving again. By then, the other two active units of the squadron had also found their range, opening up at the beleaguered Sicaran and blasting at its compromised hull. Something in that barrage must have drilled straight through the enemy’s armour plates, getting into the engine compartment and rupturing the fuel tanks. The entire heavy tank lifted from the earth for a moment with the force of the detonations, before collapsing back again, smoking and disabled.
That still left the first one. The Sicaran finished off Ernama’s lead tank with a slamming rain of autocannon shells, stripping its victim’s tracks into ribbons and punching holes along its hull length. It then closed on the third wounded Imperial vehicle, swinging its turret round to spray more armour-piercing rounds. Even as it fired again, however, the remaining mobile Leman Russ units trundled into position, each long barrel swinging round hard. The trio fired at once, sending three corkscrewing shells whistling into contact, followed by a flurry of las-bolts that zeroed in on any rupture.
The Sicaran disappeared behind another billowing cloud of black smoke, followed immediately by a muffled crash. Inky plumes gushed out from every orifice, every open barrel, and more bloody flashes went off as further systems ignited under the steady rain of las-bolts.
Both enemy tanks were down, but the danger wasn’t over. The supporting infantry, recklessly outpaced by the lead armour, were now lumbering into range, more than a dozen of them, their stolid treads kicking up the dust. Kaska only had fleeting glimpses of the troops themselves as his sights juddered and skipped, but he saw enough to realise that something was very wrong with all of them – they dragged themselves along almost like invalids, limping and staggering, their armour stretched and twisted and glistening. A pale light glimmered around them – their eyes, their blades, their armour-joints – and that alone was enough to send his heart hammering, to make him want to pull back, to order full-reverse and somehow accelerate his way out of the path of those impossible, horrendous things.
Massed infantry had always been the danger. The schedule of the cross-terrain charge had been so tight that the usual mixed-armed support structures weren’t ever in place. The instructions from the V Legion had been to send priority comms-bursts whenever enemy squads were encountered, but there wasn’t time now, because those monsters were dragging themselves closer, and everyone knew what a Legion warrior would do once it closed in on a wounded tank.
