After the meeting, at which the Ghosts had been drawn to take position along the east flank, against the perimeter of the Ore Works and Smeltery ruins, Corbec took Bulwar to one side.
“With respect, Modile’s a weak link.”
Bulwar nodded. “Agreed. I think the same of most of the Vervun Primary units. No experience. At least my forces have had baptism enough in the moon war. But this is Vervunhive’s show and their House Command has authority over us all, colonel.”
“We need a safeguard,” Corbec said flatly, scratching at his collar. There were damn lice in those chem barns. “I’m not talking insubordination…”
“I know what you mean. My old call sign was ‘anvil’. Let that be a signal to co-ordinate orders above Modile’s head if it becomes necessary. I won’t be hung out to dry by an inexperienced man. Even a well-meaning one like Modile.”
Corbec nodded. He liked Bulwar. He hoped it wouldn’t come to that.
* * *
Another day passed, with only silence and smoke outside the Curtain Wall. Nerves began to fray. All the while the shelling had been going on, there had at least been the illusion that a war was being fought. Waiting, the common fighting man’s worst foe, began to take its toll. Anxious minds had time to worry, to fear, to anticipate. Nearly three quarters of a million fighting men were in position at the southern Curtain Wall of Vervunhive, with nothing to do but doze, fidget, gaze up at the spectral flashes and crackles of the Shield far above, and distress themselves with their own imaginations.
The VPHC was busy. Sixty-seven deserters or suspected derelicts were executed in a twenty-four hour period.
On the afternoon of the twenty-seventh day, troops on the Wall top began to detect ominous grinding and clanking noises emanating from the smoke cover below. Machine noises, vast servos, threshing gears, rattling transmissions, creaking metal. It seemed that at any moment, the storm would begin.
But the noises simply continued until after dark and more urgently through the night. They were alien and incomprehensible, like the calls of unseen creatures in some mechanical jungle.
The twenty-eighth day was silent. The machine noises ceased at dawn. By noon, the smoke had begun to clear, especially after a rising wind from the southwest brought rain squalls in from the coast. But still visibility was low and the light was poor. There was nothing to see but the grey blur of the mangled outhabs.
On the twenty-ninth day, spotters on the Wall near Sondar Gate sighted a small group of Zoican tanks moving along a transit track adjacent to the Southern Highway, two kilometres out. With hurried permission from House Command in the Main Spine, they addressed six missile batteries and a trio of earthshaker guns and opened fire. There was jubilation all along the defence line, for no greater reasons than the soldiers finally had a visible enemy to target and the fighting drought was broken. The engagement lasted twelve minutes. No fire was returned from the enemy. When the shell-smoke cleared, there was no sign of the tanks that had been fired upon — not even wreckage.
During the evening of that day, the machine noises from outside grumbled and clanked again, sporadically. Marshal Croe made a morale-boosting speech to the population and the troops over the public-address plates. It helped ease the tension, but Gaunt knew Croe should have been making such speeches daily for the last week. Croe had only spoken now on the advice of Commissar Kowle. Despite his dislike of the man, Gaunt saw that Kowle truly understood the political necessities of war. He was enormously capable. Kowle issued a directive that evening urging all commissarial officers, both the VPHC and the regular Guard, to tour the lines and raise the mood. Gaunt had been doing just that since his units went into position, shuttling between Hass West and Veyveyr. On these tours, he had been impressed by the resolve and discipline of the Vervun Primary troopers who manned the defences alongside his men. He prayed dearly to the beloved Emperor that combat wouldn’t sour that determination.
On that evening, riding his staff car down the inner transits to check on Rawne’s units at Hass West, Gaunt found the seal Lord Chass’ bodyguard had given to him in his coat pocket. There had been no time thus far to pay the noble a visit. Gaunt turned the token over in his gloved hand as the car roared down a colonnaded avenue. Perhaps tonight, after his inspection of Hass West.
He never got the chance. Just before midnight, as Gaunt was still climbing the stairs of the fort’s main tower, the first Zoican storm began.
Despite the military preparations, no one in the hive was really prepared for the onslaught. It fell so suddenly. Its herald was a simultaneous salvo from thousands of tanks and self-propelled guns prowling forward through the outer-hab wastes less than a kilometre from the Wall. The roar shook the hive and the explosive display lit the night sky. For the first time, the enemy was firing up at the Curtain Wall, point-blank in armour terms, hitting wall-top ramparts and fracturing them apart. Precision mortar bombardments were landing on the wall-top itself, finding the vulnerable slit between Wall and Shield. Other ferocious rains of explosive force hammered at the gates or chipped and flaked ceramite armour off the Wall’s face.
The defenders reeled, stunned. Hundreds were already dead or seriously injured and the ramparts were significantly damaged in dozens of places. Officers rallied the dazed soldiery and the reply began. With its rocket towers, heavy guns, support-weapon emplacements, mortars and the thousands of individual troopers on the ramparts, that reply was monumental. Once they began to fight, a gleeful fury seized the men of Vervunhive. To address the enemy at last. To fire in anger. It felt good after all the waiting. It was absolving.
The Curtain Wall firepower decimated the Zoican forces now advancing towards the Wall-foot outside. Vervunhive laid down a killing field four hundred metres deep outside their Wall and obliterated tanks and men as they churned forward. It was later estimated that 40-50,000 Zoican troops and upwards of 6,000 fighting vehicles were lost to Vervunhive fire in the first hour of attack.
But the sheer numbers of the enemy were overwhelming, both physically and psychologically. No matter how many hundreds were killed, thousands more moved forward relentlessly to take their place, marching over the corpses of the slain. They were mindless and without fear in the face of the mass slaughter. Observing this from his trench position just inside Veyveyr Gate, Brin Milo reflected that this was precisely what he had been afraid of: the insane tactics of Chaos that Vervunhive’s war plans simply did not take into account.
“You could fire a lasgun on full auto from the wall-top,” wrote General Xance of the NorthCol forces later, “and kill dozens, only to see the hole you’d made in their ranks close in the time it took to change power cells. If war is measured by the number of casualties inflicted, then even in that first night, we had won. Sadly, that is not the case.”
“So many, so many…” were the last words spoken into his vox-set by a mind-numb Vervun Primary officer at Sondar Gate just before one of the VPHC shot him and took control of his frazzled forces.
At Hass West, Gaunt arrived on the main rampart just after a mortar round had taken out a section of wall-lip and blown the head off Colonel Frader, the commander of the area section. Gaunt took command, calling up a Vervun Primary vox-officer and grabbing the handset from his pack. Gaunt was accompanied by Liaison Officer Daur, who confidently relayed vocal commands to the troops in earshot. Gaunt was glad of him. Daur knew the tower and knew the men from his time stationed here, and they responded better to an officer of their own. Many had seemed overawed by the Imperial commissar. Gaunt accepted that fear was a command tool, but he loathed what the iron rule of the VPHC had done to the resolve of the local troops.
Gaunt reached Rawne on the vox-link. The major had the Tanith strength spread out along the lower towers and wall-line below the main fort.
“No casualties here,” the major reported, his voice punctuated by cracks and pops of static. “We’re pouring it on, but there are so many!”
“Stay as you are! Keep up the address! We know t
hey won’t break like a normal army, but you and I have faced this enemy before, Rawne. You know how to win this!”
“Kill them all, colonel-commissar?”
“Kill them all, Major Rawne!” And for all he personally trusted the man no further than he could throw him, Gaunt knew that was exactly what Rawne would do.
“What’s that?” bellowed Feygor, firing over the buttress. Rawne ducked along to him. “What?”
Feygor pointed down. An armoured machine, three times the size of a main battle tank, was advancing towards the wall’s skirt, a huge derrick of armour-plated scaffolding growing out of its top.
“Siege engine! For feth’s sake! Get on the vox, tell Gaunt!”
Feygor nodded.
Rawne scrambled closer to the lip and the las-storm below. “Bragg! Bragg!”
The big trooper crawled over, hefting his missile launcher.
“Kill it!”
Bragg nodded and raised the launcher to his shoulder, then banged off three rockets that curled down towards the vast engine on plumes of blue smoke. They hit the superstructure and ignited, but no serious damage was done.
“Reload! Again!”
The monstrous siege engine reached the foot of the Wall and there was a shrieking sound as the metal tower scraped against the ceramite and stone facings. Gas-fired anchor ropes were shot into the Curtain Wall to hold the engine in place. Hydraulic feet extended beneath the armour skirts of the engine to steady it on the broken ground. With a wail of metal, the derrick tower began to telescope up, extending to match the height of the wall. Segmented armour, badged with the Zoican crest and other, less human insignias that made Rawne sick to see them, unfurled upwards to protect the rising throat of the siege tower.
At the same time, the base unit of the vast machine opened a well-protected hatch in its rear and Zoican troops began to pour into it.
The tower-top rose above the wall’s lip, forty metres from Rawne. Hydraulic arms wheezed out and gripped the buttress, steel claws biting into the ceramite. The tower-top was an armoured structure with heavy flamer mounts positioned either side of a hatch opening.
“Get down! Get down!” Rawne bellowed.
The flamers drenched the top of the Wall with liquid fire, swivelling to rake the defences back and forth. Forty Vervun Primary troopers and nine Ghosts were incinerated as they fled back from the engine.
In addition to the shrieking flamers, automatic grenade launchers on the tower-top whirred and began to lob explosives out like hail. Multiple detonations exploded along the scorched wall.
Rawne fell into cover behind a bulwark with Bragg, Feygor and several other Ghosts. Feygor was firing his lasgun at the tower, but his shots were simply dinking off the armoured superstructure. Vervun troops, some on fire, fled past them.
“Bragg!”
“Got a blockage,” replied the giant, fighting with his launcher.
“Load him!” Rawne ordered Trooper Gyrd.
Gyrd, a grizzled Ghost in his forties, swung in behind Bragg as the big man got the launcher settled on his shoulder. The older Ghost fed fresh rockets into the load-cylinders of the massive weapon.
“Clear!” bawled Bragg as he sent a missile directly at the tower head. It blew the left-hand flamer mount clean off and ignited a huge fireball of venting prometheum. But the armoured delivery section remained unscathed.
“Wait, wait…” hissed Rawne. The skin on the left-hand side of his face was blackened and scorched by the flamer wash. If he lived till morning, he’d have what the Guard called a “flamer-tan.”
“For what?” barked Feygor. “Another moment and that hatch’ll open. Then the bastards will be all over us!”
“For half a moment, then. We can’t make a dent on this thing, so we wait for that hatch.”
The remaining flamer point raked back and forth, its white-hot fires beginning to blister the stone. Then it cut off and drips of fluid fire pooled out of its blackened snout. The grenade throwers stopped whirring.
The storm hatch opened with a shriek. For a scant second, the wall defenders saw the first of the ochre-armoured Zoican troops waiting to deploy out into Vervunhive.
Bragg fired three missiles, one of which went wide. The remaining pair disappeared into the hatchway. The tower-top blew out from within. Secondary explosions rippled down the tower structure and ablaze from inside, it toppled and crumpled with a tearing, metallic wail.
The defenders cheered wildly.
“Move back in! Cover the wall!” urged Rawne.
Six more siege engines had crawled forward towards the Curtain Wall in the time it had taken Rawne to repel the first.
Relentless fire from missile batteries had taken one apart before it could deploy, just short of the Sondar Gate. Another reached the Curtain Wall intact but positioned itself in front of an Earthshaker heavy battery in the Wall side. The massive, long-range cannons blew it apart point-blank, though the crews were fried by the flaming backwash that rushed into their silos.
A third reached Sondar Gate and deployed successfully, rising and clamping to the gatehouse top and then torching everything and everyone on the emplacement before opening its hatch and disgorging wave after wave of Zoican heavy troopers. The Vervun Primary forces were annihilated by this assault, but Volpone units from the neighbouring ramparts, under the command of Colonel Corday, scissored in to meet the invasion.
Some of the fiercest fighting of the First Storm took place then, with twenty units of Volpone Bluebloods, including a detachment of the elite 10th Brigade under Major Culcis, undertaking a near hand-to-hand battlement fight with thousands of Zoican storm troops. The regular Bluebloods wore the grey and gold body armour of their regiment, with the distinctive low-brimmed bowl helmets. The elite 10th had carapace armour, matt-black hellguns and bright indigo eagle studs pinned into their armaplas collar sections. Culcis, who had won himself a valour medal on Vandamaar, was young for a member of the tenth elite, but his superiors had rightly noticed his command qualities. Despite seventy per cent losses, he held Sondar Gate through nothing more than tactical surety and brute determination.
The top of Sondar Gate and the walls adjacent were thick with corpses. Culcis and his immediate inferior, Sergeant Mantes of the regular Volpone, tried to disable the siege engine with tank mines. Mantes died in the attempt, but the mines blew the support claws off the tower and it collapsed soon after under its own weight. Culcis, who had lost a hand in the detonation of the mines, reformed his forces and slaughtered all the remaining Zoicans who had made the wall-top. For the first of what would be three serious attempts, Sondar Gate resisted the enemy.
The fourth siege engine reached the Wall east of Sondar Gate, midway along the stretch that curved round to Veyveyr. Here Roane Deepers were in position, hard-nosed shock troops in tan fatigues and netted helmets. General Nash was in command in person and he mobilised the wall batteries to target the tower neck as it extended up towards them. The ripples of missiles didn’t destroy it, but they damaged some internal mechanism and the tower jammed at half-mast, unable to reach the Wall top and engage. It raked upwards with its flamers and grenades spitefully, and Nash lost more than forty men. But it could not press its assault and remained hunched outside the Curtain Wall, broken and derelict, for the remainder of the war.
The other two siege engines assaulted Hass West Fort.
Gaunt saw then coming, slow and inexorable, and drew up his heavy weapons. He’d seen the system of assault through his scope watching Rawne’s position, and he didn’t want it duplicated here.
Under his voxed commands, the wall batteries strafed the nearest engine heavily and succeeded in blowing it apart. The upper section of the tower, beginning to telescope, snapped off to the left in a fireball, destroying the base unit as it collapsed.
But despite Gaunt’s efforts, the second siege engine reached the western portions of the ramparts and engaged its clamps. The tower hoisted into position.
Gaunt ordered his men back from t
he surrounding area as the flamers retched and blasted and the grenades rained.
In cover next to him, Captain Daur pulled off his sling.
“Your arm?”
“Stuff that, commissar! Give me a gun!”
Gaunt handed the Vervun captain his bolt pistol and then cycled his chainsword. “Prepare yourself, Daur. This is as bad as it ever gets.”
Zoican troops spilled out of the tower top, thousands of them. They were met by the Ghosts and the Vervun Primary. Another infamous episode of the First Storm began.
Just before Gaunt’s positions destroyed the first of the two engines, other Zoican death machines clanked out of the outhab wastes and assaulted the walls: a half-dozen tank-like vehicles, quickly dubbed the “flat-crabs” by the Vervun troopers because of their resemblance to the edible crustaceans farmed in the Hass Estuary. They were the size of four or five tanks together, covered in a shell-like carapace of overlapped armour like huge beetles or horseshoe molluscs. A single, super-heavy weapon extended up from their dorsal mounts and they drummed the Wall with fast-cycle fire that shattered masonry and adamantine blocks.
The flat-crabs were siege-crackers, massive weapons designed to break open even the strongest fortifications. Two of them, with dorsal mounts slung to face forward and armed with massive rams, assaulted the gates at Hass West and Sondar. As they advanced, regular tanks, tiny by comparison, moved in beside them. The tidal wave of ochre-clad troops was undiminished.
Then it was the turn of the spiders, the largest and most fearsome of the Zoican siege weapons. A hundred metres long from nose to tail and propelled by eight vast, clawed cartwheels set on cantilever arms extending from the main bodies of their armoured structures, the spiders ground out of the smoke and rumbled towards the Wall. Gun and rocket batteries on their backs blazed up at the defences of Vervunhive.
When they reached the Curtain Wall, the spiders didn’t stop. The wheel claws dug into the ceramite and raised the death machines up the face of the defence, climbing like insects up the sheer face of the massive Wall. Of all the siege engines deployed at Vervunhive, the Zoican spiders came closer to taking the hive than anything else that night. There were five of them. One was destroyed by the Wall guns as it advanced. Another was immobilised by rocket fire twenty metres short of the Wall and then set on fire by further salvos.