Spear of Ultramar Page 7

  He will not allow the Iron Warriors to hide, and he will not give them time to prepare an attack. The fleet will spread out like the claws of a grasping hand, sweep around Himera from all directions, and there will be nowhere to run. A single, swift, devastating blow and Corvo will erase the IV Legion’s ships from the system.

  As the fleet closes in on Himera, the hand opens. The Glorious Nova’s course will take it over the north pole of the planet. Corvo knows the manoeuvre is the correct tactical move. It is what Guilliman needs Corvo to do – a quick, definitive end to the threat.

  But it feels wrong.

  It all feels wrong.

  The earth trembles under Sergeant Gorthia’s feet, and he knows the jaws of a trap are snapping shut. Third Squad and the tanks of the Destroyers are just outside the mouth of the pass. The shaking is everywhere. Rocks break loose and cascade down the mountainsides. And this is no earthquake. It goes on too long, is too steady, too mechanical.

  Gorthia turns to look in the direction of the keep, and he sees that he was wrong. The trap’s jaws are not closing. They are opening.

  The plain between Third Squad and the keep vibrates. The rocks that cover it jump up and down as a vast area of the plain begins to rise. The stones have camouflaged an immense trap door, which lifts now, powered by enormous pistons, big as manufactorum smokestacks. The hatch, a hundred metres on a side, rises higher and higher, dirt and stone raining down from the edges, and it reveals one more orbital gun. The cannon is massive. Its barrel is as wide as the other four guns combined. Its monstrous shadow extends across the land, but its menace reaches for the sky.

  Gorthia does not have to give the order to send an alert. He hears Legionary Crethus shouting on the vox, warning the squadron in orbit to stay away. Gorthia knows the call comes too late. Everything is too late. The layers of the enemy’s deception peel away. He sees how deep they went, and how brutal an attack they concealed.

  Castellan battle-automata march out from underground.

  The force that assembles to defend the gun and advance on his position would not be able to take on the full company in open combat. But it will be more than enough to destroy his squad.

  ‘The Mechanicum is here in force,’ Crethus voxes, and Gorthia hopes that the words reach the Ultimus Mundi, because Guilliman will understand what this means for Hierax and the company.

  The tanks, the very weapons that could smash this enemy apart, are inert, vulnerable, their crews adding their numbers to the company in the pass. A storm of enemy fire falls upon the vehicles, melting armour, blowing up fuel tanks, igniting ammunition. Gorthia leaps into the nearest Predator, Crethus a moment behind him. Gorthia mans the cannon while Crethus fires up the engine. His squad of ten could, with enough time, get as many as five tanks moving against the enemy. That might be enough to make a difference. It might be enough to help. Only there is no time.

  Gorthia fires the Predator’s autocannon. The shells strike the Castellan in its mid-section, severing the legs from the upper body.

  Then the entire world thrums. The noise is physical. It deafens Gorthia. Even inside his armour, the hair on his arms stands on end in answer to the cataclysmic discharge of energy that has occurred. The great gun has fired.

  A massive barrage rips open the tank, the disintegrating beams slicing through to take Gorthia too, because everything is too late.

  Carchera lashes out in anger. Its fury is a searing blaze of light. Guilliman squints against the monstrous flare that pierces the void. Its brilliance is divine, but it brings only destruction. The Honour Bound takes the hit. The las annihilates the void shields. It is as though they did not exist. It strikes the frigate to the fore of the engines and stabs right through the superstructure and the bridge, and spears infinitely into the night. A ball of expanding plasma bursts through the hull of the Honour Bound. The superstructure tears away, adamantium shredded like ribbon, an eruption of fragments sailing off on the path of the beam.

  ‘Honour Bound,’ the vox officer begins to call on instinct, then stops. There is no one to answer.

  The forward section of the frigate stays on course. It is not quite dark. Fires spread and lick out into the void from the shattered hull. The dead vessel continues its last voyage, heading for the position over Siderius. Even its corpse is forbidden from reaching that point, and a second shot comes, far sooner than Guilliman would have thought possible. The beam rips down the centre of the Honour Bound’s carcass. Once again, terrible, stabbing light fills the viewport of the Ultimus Mundi. When it fades, the frigate has disintegrated. Larger pieces of the wreckage fall into the atmosphere, glowing red as they burn up. A fragment that still has the rough shape of the hull moves off into the void. The fires are extinguished. It is nothing but cold, splintered bone, a broken monument to war.

  Shipmaster Taius Netertian gives the order to retreat. The crew has anticipated the order. Everyone on the bridge knows too well what must be done in these critical moments. Guilliman does not interfere. It is his task to look further ahead, and to counter the enemy’s move.

  ‘That second shot was too fast,’ says Prayto.

  ‘The Mechanicum has had time to prepare,’ says Guilliman. ‘They must have built up an enormous reservoir of plasma.’

  ‘Even so,’ Gorod says, ‘how many times can a gun of that power fire in such quick succession?’

  ‘Before running out of energy or before destroying itself?’ Prayto asks.

  ‘It will fire enough times,’ Guilliman answers. ‘Just enough.’ Whether the lethal shots destroy ships or not, the cannon eats away at time, and the grains are streaming through the sandglass.

  The Ultimus Mundi is into its turn when the next shot comes. The las strikes the battleship just aft of the bow. The void shields, far more powerful than those of the Honour Bound, resist better, absorbing more of the annihilating energy of the blast. Then they too collapse, and the entire leviathan of war shakes. Netertian jerks in his throne, straining against the mechadendrites that link him to the Ultimus Mundi’s machine-spirit.

  Guilliman feels the strength of the blow in the heaving motion of the huge ship. Even before the klaxons sound, he knows that the las has struck like a dagger plunging into flesh. The hull is breached. Fires sweep the decks. Bulkhead doors slam down, sealing off the area, dooming the crew members who have not already been burned or sucked into the void. A screen a short distance to the left of the command pulpit lights up with long columns of red. Guilliman ignores the damage reports for now. What matters is that the ship is still mobile, and can still manoeuvre. If it cannot move beyond the gun’s horizon before it is hit again, then the information on that screen is irrelevant.

  The next shot misses, and the Ultimus Mundi has completed its turn, its engines straining to build momentum, a glacier attempting to sprint. After too short a reprieve, the beam lances from the planet, and hits the Cavascor. Flames envelop the middle of its starboard flank, but the cruiser survives. A brief message from its bridge signals that its race is not done yet.

  The cannon fires at a forbidding rate, but the monster must draw a breath between its flames, and the ships move out of its range. Even before they do, Guilliman has left the command pulpit and is in the strategium, considering the three arms of his attack. He has hurled a trident at the heart of the foe, but he has not struck home yet. And this move, the one he had to make, is seeming more and more like the one the Iron Warriors wanted him to make all along.

  The warp storm is still getting worse. Communications across the fleet are ragged, but enough are getting through for Guilliman to have a broad sense of the battle. He knows that Aquila has boarded the station, and he knows that Corvo is closing with the Iron Warriors squadron. But he is not on the station with Aquila, and he is not on the bridge with Corvo. Down on Carchera, though, Hierax is inside a trap. The Destroyers have the Mechanicum at their back, and the Iron Warriors before them, a
nd are caught in a narrow pass.

  Guilliman’s options are few, but they are greater than none. ‘We are going planetside,’ he says to Gorod and Prayto. Doing so will narrow his focus to one portion of the battle. Keeping hold of the broader strategic picture will be more difficult. Yet this is what must be done. ‘We strike with speed and fury.’

  The grains are running, faster and faster.

  Five

  Triggers

  The Destroyers have advanced against the Iron Warriors’ artillery. It could not target the company directly, and Hierax has led his legionaries in short, rapid charges through the chaos of explosions and triggered rock slides. Hierax has been fighting desperately to keep up the speed of the advance.

  ‘They cannot stop us,’ he voxed to the company. ‘But they think they can slow us. Defeat them twice over!’

  And so the Destroyers have closed in on the last kilometre that separates them from Siderius, keeping ahead of the Mechanicum forces behind them, though the distance has been diminishing. The approach of the Mechanicum was preceded by a sustained series of explosions to the rear. Hierax was puzzled at first, but then the thick clouds of dust and the distant rumble of heavy armour gave him his answer. The barriers he and his men climbed over were a double trap. They slowed the Destroyers and forced them to leave their tanks. But all this time, they had been mined, ready to be blown away when it was time for the Mechanicum to close in. And now the company is struggling against artillery fire from two directions.

  The pass has narrowed dramatically. The cliff faces have been shattered, filling the pass with rubble. There is virtually no room to manoeuvre, and the Destroyers must clamber over endless barricades of jagged granite, and they have now reached a position where the Iron Warriors can attack them directly. The traitors have placed their armour in fixed positions, and the Predators unleash an impenetrable curtain of las.

  The advance has stalled. Hierax crouches against a hill of tumbled rock. Concentrated artillery fire pummels the ground just beyond the rise, and a crossfire of las stitches across the peak. The barrage has driven the Ultramarines back. The Predators were a surprise, and casualties are high. The tanks are in sheltered positions, high up on the cliffs on either side. They might as well be in reinforced bunkers.

  Hunkered down beside Hierax, Aphovos says, ‘I am feeling the absence of our tanks.’ He has to shout to make himself heard.

  ‘A well-engineered absence,’ Hierax growls. ‘The traitors have drawn us where they knew we could not bring them, but they had time to instal their own.’

  ‘If they keep us pinned down here much longer, the Mechanicum will be upon us.’

  ‘We need a hole in the Iron Warriors barrage,’ Hierax says. And quickly, he thinks. Aphovos is right. If the Mechanicum catch the Destroyers here, being pinned down indefinitely is not the worst that might happen, and that would be bad enough.

  Peering through the smoke and dust kicked up by the bombardment, Hierax surveys the mountain faces on both sides. The pass is so choked and narrow, it is hardly more than a crevasse between walls hundreds of metres high. On the right-hand side, where the cliff has fallen to create the barrier, the slope of the rubble against the rock wall is not as steep as to Hierax’s left.

  ‘Brother Antalcidas,’ Hierax voxes the Destroyer Dreadnought, ‘we have need of you on the front lines.’

  ‘What are you thinking?’ Aphovos asks.

  Hierax points to the right. He traces the line of the rubble along its rise from the jumbled floor of the pass, and up the mountain to one of the Iron Warriors’ tank positions. ‘The enemy can be reached along this path,’ he says. ‘A sudden, massive attack should be able to take out the heavy armour there. That might give us the hole we need in the barrage.’

  ‘That ridge is very narrow,’ the Librarian says. ‘We would have to go single file. They could pick us off easily long before we got to them.’

  ‘Which is why we will not take that route.’

  Antalcidas clanks over to Hierax’s position. The Dreadnought marches heavily over the broken terrain, his massive piston legs crushing rock beneath each deliberate tread. Antalcidas’ progress through the pass has been the most slowed by the rockfalls, but he has kept up a steady pace, blowing up what he could not climb.

  ‘Brother-captain,’ Antalcidas says, his voice ancient and metallic through the vox-caster of his sarcophagus.

  Hierax tells the Dreadnought what he has in mind. ‘If you take the southern slope, do you think you can reach the tanks’ positions?’

  ‘I can,’ says Antalcidas.

  ‘Good. Scour them from existence. We will move up directly from this position and draw their fire.’

  Hierax voxes his sergeants. ‘Prepare your squads for a massed charge.’

  Antalcidas turns and makes his way back towards the beginning of the rubble’s southern rise. As soon as he begins his ascent, Hierax signals the beginning of the attack. The Destroyers rush the mountain face. The squads of ten move in tight formations, sending up blistering waves of fire before them. The rock face bursts from the impact of bolter shells. The dust in the pass grows thick as night, adding to the Ultramarines’ cover.

  The Iron Warriors respond with fury. Tank las and autocannon shells cut through the dust clouds, blowing up the slope, destroying cover, sending up shrapnel of stone, of ceramite and of bone into the air.

  Hierax seeks no shelter. There is none to be had. He leads his squad in sharp jerks to the left and the right. He knows the Destroyers cannot reach the tanks. The climb will soon be too steep, and the Ultramarines will become slow-moving, helpless targets, exposed to the enemy’s guns.

  They seek to delay us, Hierax thinks. Now we will delay them. Delay them from looking where they should.

  He climbs higher, leaning in to the steepening slope, surrounded by the pounding chaos of explosions. The world is a dark, smothering cloud cut through by lascannon beams. If he is almost blind, so are the Iron Warriors, and the traitors are marking their own positions with muzzle flashes. The smoke and dust are so thick that Hierax cannot see Antalcidas, and the obscurity gives him hope for the Dreadnought’s success. He does not break vox silence, but trusts in the indomitability of the ancient warrior.

  The Destroyers force their way higher yet, a disciplined mass of death moving closer to its target, as if it might truly scrape the Iron Warriors from the mountainside. Then more enemy fire strikes the Ultramarines, slamming into their right flank. The Mechanicum forces are near, in range now for direct fire. From above and to the side, a storm catches the Destroyers in a vice.

  The Iron Warriors retreat at speed down the Barbican’s corridor, back towards the centre of the station. The impulse is to pursue them. Aquila’s body reacts to that impulse, and his squad is with him. But instinct does not govern him. Reason is his watchword, and reason recognises the sudden retreat of the Iron Warriors for the anomaly it is.

  ‘Back!’ Aquila shouts, just in time. The Ultramarines retreat in their turn, and moments later, explosives detonate the length of the hall, along the walls, floor and ceiling. The next deck up collapses, and the floor opens up to the levels below. Thousands of tonnes of metal compact onto one another. A portion of the space station closes in on itself, tight as a fist. Aquila and his squad scramble back from the crushing walls.

  ‘Find us another route,’ says Aquila.

  Legionary Vascas calls up a schematic of the Barbican on a data-slate. ‘If we return to the last intersection and go up three levels,’ he says, ‘we can go around this collapse. It will be a bit slower.’

  Aquila nods, and voxes Tarius, who leads the other contingent of Ultramarines. The complements of the boarding torpedoes have succeeded in forming up into two groups, and they have done so quickly, though Aquila wishes they had done so even faster. He updates the sergeant of his squad’s position and destination.

  ‘They�
�ve blocked us here too,’ says Tarius, ‘but we have a way forward to your alternative junction.’

  ‘Then we will see you there,’ Aquila says.

  ‘The enemy’s tactics are futile,’ says Vascas. ‘They can’t block every route to the bridge without rendering the station useless to them.’

  ‘I don’t think they could even if they wanted to,’ Aquila tells him. ‘They don’t have the numbers. How many Iron Warriors have we seen?’

  ‘Two,’ says Vascas.

  Aquila voxes Tarius again. ‘Have you been able to estimate the traitor’s strength?’

  ‘Not with any confidence, but we’ve only seen three.’

  Is it possible, Aquila wonders, that the Iron Warriors only have a single squad on the station? ‘It’s a delaying tactic. Everything is a delaying tactic. How many entrances are there to the bridge?’

  ‘One,’ Vascas says.

  Many routes to the bridge, but only one door. ‘These are nuisance tactics,’ says Aquila. ‘The traitors will make their stand at the bridge.’

  Aquila tried to avoid the main routes to the bridge. The most direct path would have been down the access corridors that have collapsed. The Iron Warriors anticipated his move. Now the route that Vascas has designated will take the company through the space station’s major arteries. ‘Expect our route to be barred again,’ Aquila says to Vascas. ‘Make sure we have plenty of alternatives. We may have to choose them quickly.’ He wonders how many demolition charges the traitors have, how much damage they can really do to the great station.

  Following Vascas’ guidance, Aquila takes the squads up three levels to one of the primary junctions of the Barbican’s network of corridors, where they meet with Tarius. The Ultramarines company re-forms in a grand hall whose walls and ceiling are clad in obsidian. Inlays of gold and diamond depict the ever-expanding reach of the Imperium. Worlds are linked to worlds, and systems to systems. In each system is a glittering cluster of diamonds, forming the icons of the space stations holding guard. The rays of their might extend out from their systems to meet, and join, the lines radiating from other systems. Thus are formed the unbreakable links of the Imperium’s might. The art travels the length of the walls and over the vaulted ceiling. The inlays are a representation of might, a delicate but unbreakable tracery sunk into a canvas of brute strength.