The fourth causes Veridia Forge to explode like a newborn star.
For the next eighteen minutes, Calth has no nightside.
3
[mark: 5.46.19]
Ventanus throws the speeder into reverse thrust. The auspex is smashed and useless. He only saw the gun-carriage when he cleared the corner.
The speeder reverses down the slipway with a violence that lurches Ventanus and Selaton forward in their seats. Cannon-fire is already chasing them. Rapid fire from the grav-compensated carriage, a quad-weapon monster, shreds the barns and storeblocks around them. Cargofabs and payload warehouses explode or disintegrate. Rockcrete walls shiver and exhale dust as shots pummel through them. Window ports burst out.
‘Not that way either,’ says Ventanus.
‘Agreed,’ says Selaton. He’s got the autocannon across his knees, and he’s checking the munitions feed. There’s not much left in the hopper.
Ventanus swings left, and they race down a dank rockcrete underpass, zip between two huge aerospace manufactories, and skirt the perimeter of a burning excise facility. There are bodies everywhere. Civilians, Army, and far too many Ultramarines for Ventanus to be even slightly sanguine about. Men are dead with their weapons still sheathed or covered. Men cut down without the opportunity to face their deaths.
Heaps of cobalt-blue armour – limp corpses inside scuffed plate – line the roadways and arterials. Some have been stacked against fences and walls like firewood. Some have been cut open and emptied. A few have been nailed to posts, or against the sheet-metal sides of buildings.
Some appear to have been butchered or… eaten.
Ventanus doesn’t understand this. He presumes they are victims of some explosive weapon type new to the arsenal of the XVII. Theoretical. That’s the best case theoretical. Ventanus hopes it turns out to be the practical too. The theoretical alternatives are too indecent to consider. The Word Bearers are allied with some species of carnivorous xenoform. The Word Bearers are indulging in some ritual cannibalism…
Ventanus doesn’t need much more of a reason to make war to the death against the Word Bearers. The injury they have done to Calth and to the XIII, that is cause enough. Their treachery, that is cause enough. Their relentless, merciless prosecution of attack, beyond any measure of honour, that is enough.
But this desecration, this takes his casus belli to a whole new level. This is not a just war, this is a war crime. It defies and shames the codes and precepts of the Legiones Astartes, codes and precepts set down by the primogenitor Emperor. The Word Bearers have perverted any semblance of the true and legal path of the Imperium, or the moral code of mankind.
Here and there, Ventanus spots signs that have been daubed on walls, presumably in blood. Eight-pointed stars and other devices he is not familiar with, and the sight of which make him uncomfortable.
Over the chug of the speeder’s engine – a chug that is developing a worrying, clattering under-note – Ventanus can hear the rattle of other gun-carriages moving through the nearby streets. They are in the industrial hinterland between the starport proper and the city. Ventanus is desperate to find a route that they can use to break out and head north-west to Erud. His primary concern is re-establishing contact with his company and the other units in the Erud muster. If they’ve come through this intact, or approximately intact, he intends to make them the spearhead of a counter-strike.
A haze washes across the city and the port. It’s smoke, in vast quantities, but it’s also vapour. Steam. A fog swathes the skyline, blanketing the river basin and turning millions of individual fires into soft orange smudges. Ventanus has seen that phenomenon before, when large bodies of water have been flash-evaporated by sustained energy discharge. A dead ocean condenses over the city lowlands.
They turn another corner, and see six Word Bearers advancing down the freight lane ahead of them. The Word Bearers challenge them, and then open fire.
The speeder rocks under the hits as it starts to reverse. Its armour is pretty solid, but Ventanus knows it’s taken quite enough punishment. He glides backwards, hoping to swing-turn on the hardpan in front of a fabricator shed and find another path. More Word Bearers open up on them, firing from an overwalk, and from a girder bridge between two manufactories. A mass-reactive round explodes against the side of the cab, where the roof is already peeled back and torn. The shock lurches Selaton hard.
They’re running out of ways to turn.
Ventanus reverses faster. He runs down two Word Bearers who emerge behind them. Their crimson-armoured forms are slung out from the repulsors at the speeder’s plated back end and fall, bouncing and clattering across the rockcrete.
But he can’t simply run down the gun-carriage that’s rolling out, facing their back end. It’s twice their size, twice their mass, and it starts traversing its quad-guns to target them.
‘Go!’ Selaton shouts. ‘Go! Through them!’
Ventanus kicks the speeder forward again, cranking thrust. He knocks down one of the Word Bearers they have already smashed aside once. The brute was regaining his footing. The right front wing catches him hard, folds him around the reinforced fender, and tosses him sidelong. He tumbles, and lands in a way that speaks of a severed spinal cord.
Selaton rises in his seat, bracing the autocannon against the sill of the screen. They’re heading directly for the Word Bearers squad that cut them off in the freight lane. They’re also running right through the hail of fire chopping down from the overwalk and girder bridge. Shells slam into the ground around them, pluming fire and grit. Others thump the bodywork like piledrivers.
Selaton kicks off with the cannon. He gets a good angle, given the improvised circumstances, and stitches a line of shots along the girder bridge, ripping handrail spars and shredding the metal balustrade. He knocks two of the enemy shooters off their feet, and then licks across a third. Ventanus sees a helmet explode like a red paint flare. The casualty rocks backwards off the bridge and hits the ground a second after they’ve passed underneath.
Selaton drops his angle and guns down one of the ground troops. The rotating cannon chews the figure up, shredding him like a sack of meat and metal chaff. The others stand their ground, firing straight at them. Ventanus, his grip unflinching, sees a mass-reactive round pass through the cabin between his head and Selaton’s and exit through the back port-slot.
He knocks one Word Bearer down, throwing him over the racing speeder. Then he hits another and catches him on the speeder’s plated fender, upper body spread across the nose, legs caught under the machine. A huge wake of sparks kicks out from the underside of the speeder as it carries the road kill along, abrading the heels and calves of the pinned Word Bearer’s heavy Mark III battle plate. There is a terrible noise of squealing and scraping. Ventanus can’t dislodge the man.
A wall collapses into the freight lane ahead of them, and a crimson Land Raider lumbers into the open, its hull tipping up and over the rubble of the demolished structure. It swings around, weapon mounts lining up.
Ventanus peels left. There’s no other practical. He rams the sheet metal wall of a warehouse unit and blows clean through it to escape the Land Raider’s hail of fire. The Word Bearer pinned to their front end takes the force of the impact. If he wasn’t dead already, he is now.
But so is the speeder. The impact has killed the drive reactor. It starts coughing and rasping, leaking smoke from its vents. The speeder coasts to a halt in the darkness of the warehouse.
Ventanus and Selaton dismount. Selaton has the autocannon and the last of the ammo hoppers. Ventanus gets the standard, and then pauses and goes back to prise the boltgun out of the dead grip of the Word Bearer now all but fused into the mangled nose. There’s very little of him intact from the waist down. There’s a smell of superheated metal, of friction, of cooked bone marrow.
The first of the Word Bearers force their way in through the gap the speeder created. Selaton rakes them, cutting two down and sewing more holes in the wall for the light
to shine in.
His hopper is spent. He ditches the cannon and pulls his boltgun.
They start retreating across the jumbled floor space of the warehouse, trading shots with the Word Bearers who are breaching their way in through the gap. Bolter shells spit to and fro. Ventanus scores a hit, but he can’t be sure if it’s a clean kill. Sheer weight of numbers is stacked against them.
He keeps expecting a wall to cave in and the Land Raider to storm the barn, hunting for them. He can hear it outside, rumbling and revving.
Suddenly, there’s a staggering explosion outside. A brilliant light-flash pushes into the warehouse for a second, through every slit and bullet hole and window. The buildings shake, and whizzing pieces of superhot machine parts and plating debris punch through the wallskin.
Ventanus and Selaton pick themselves up. The Word Bearers who have forced entry after them are getting up too. They attempt to re-lock target finders on the fleeing Ultramarines, but they are bewildered. What was the blast? Did something just kill the Land Raider?
Searing plasma beams chop the gloom and slice them apart as they turn. The beams – scintillating green – fuse through and through blast holes in their armour and pop their helmets like balloons.
Ventanus and Selaton back into cover, weapons ready.
Lugging their powerful, close-quarter plasma blasters, skitarii of the Mechanicum flood into the building. Without compromise, they finish off any of the Word Bearers not cleanly killed.
There are dozens of the fearsome Mechanicum fighters.
‘Warriors of the XIII,’ one of them broadcasts in loudhailer mode. ‘Make yourself known to us. Hurry, time is against us.’
Ventanus gets up, raising the battered standard.
‘Remus Ventanus, 4th Company,’ he announces.
The skitarii commander comes to face him. He’s a big veteran, scarred and ugly, gaudy in his aposematistic wargear. One of the red eyeslits in his copper visor is flickering.
‘Arook Serotid, Skitarii Kalkas Cohort,’ he replies. His voice is slightly halting, as if he is not practised at talking. ‘We realised from the Word Bearers activity there had to be XIII strengths in the vicinity. Just the two of you?’
‘Yes. We thank you for your intervention.’
‘It will count as nothing if we remain here much longer, captain,’ replies Arook. ‘We have the firepower to assault a small squad, a vehicle or two. But power reserves are limited, and we cannot take on the mass of the enemy forces.’
‘Can you get us out of here?’ asks Ventanus.
‘We can get you to our senior magos,’ says Arook. ‘It is hoped we can begin to coordinate our resistance.’
Ventanus nods. The skitarii lead the way to the closest exit point.
Arook notes the standard that Ventanus is carrying.
‘That is bulky,’ he says. ‘There is no need to bring it.’
‘There really is,’ says Selaton.
[mark: 6.12.33]
She uses her fleshvoice.
‘I am Meer Edv Tawren,’ she says. ‘I hold the rank of magos. I am the acting Server of Instrumentation for Calth/Numinus.’
‘There doesn’t appear to be much left to instrument,’ says Ventanus.
‘True enough,’ replies Tawren. ‘This is a hateful day. Both of our institutions have lost grievously–’
‘The Imperium has lost grievously,’ says Ventanus. ‘Indeed, something more awful than that has occurred. For reasons I cannot even make a theoretical about, the Word Bearers have turned on us. They have unleashed open war on Calth, on the XIII, on the Five Hundred Worlds of Ultramar, and on the Imperium of Mankind.’
She nods. She is tall and solemn. Her ceremonial robes of office are dirty and torn, and they are stiff with bloodstains. In the last few hours, someone has died while being cradled in her arms.
They are standing in a sub-ground cistern several hundred metres north of the main Numinus arterial. It is a dank cavern, a storm drain for the river system. Arook has suggested that the density of rockcrete above their heads can deter the detection systems the Word Bearers are using.
‘My direct superior is dead,’ says Tawren. ‘We escaped from the Watchtower at the time of the ship impact, but it was too late for him. Responsibility for command and coordination falls to me.’
‘What resources do you have?’ asks Ventanus.
‘I have a force of about three hundred skitarii, with portable weapons and some light support,’ she replies, ‘and that number is growing as we contact other survivor groups. We have no manifold capacity, no noosphere, and absolutely no operational control of the data-engines or the Veridian system weapons grid.’
‘None at all?’
She shakes her head.
‘This is due to scrapcode infection that immediately preceded the start of hostilities. We believe that the XVII Legion deliberately introduced a scrapcode plague into the Calth noospherics prior to attack in order to destabilise then cripple the Mechanicum’s capability.’
‘Since when does a Legion technologically outflank the Mechanicum, magos?’ Ventanus asks.
‘Since today, captain.’
‘So… this scrapcode, it was new to you?’
‘It was like nothing we had ever encountered before. Not just the coding language. The very basis of it. We are still not entirely sure what it is or how it operates.’
‘Further evidence that this was planned and orchestrated well in advance,’ says Selaton.
No one speaks. For a moment, the only sound is dirty water plinking down from the overflow chutes.
‘What is your intention at this point?’ Ventanus asks.
Tawren looks at him.
‘I will use every means at my disposal to regain control of the data-engines. To oust the enemy from our systems and retake the noosphere.’
‘The weapons grid would certainly be a considerable asset,’ says Ventanus. ‘Not to say a crucial one. I fear the XIII has been worse than decimated. I fear for the fleet too.’
‘We have very little in terms of accurate projections,’ says Arook, ‘but at least fifty per cent of the fleet assembly and the ground forces appear to be lost.’
Ventanus tries to focus. He tries to get into theoretical so that he can assist the strategy planning. He tries not to dwell on the practical that over one hundred thousand Ultramarines may already be dead. Dead in just a few hours. It is the greatest Legion loss in history, by an appreciable margin.
‘How do you contact them?’ Selaton asks, suddenly.
‘I beg your pardon?’ replies Tawren.
‘You said the skitarii numbers are increasing as you contact other survivor groups. How do you contact them? There is no vox.’
‘True, but the skitarii have a dedicated emergency manifold, a crisis back-up,’ says Tawren. ‘Arook has switched to the reinforced, military code system of his brigade. The range is limited, but secure.’
‘You have limited secure comms?’ asks Ventanus.
She nods.
‘I need to contact Legion Command,’ he says.
‘Not possible,’ replies Arook. ‘We have no orbital links.’
‘Then I need to contact my company,’ Ventanus counters. ‘There are skitarii units stationed with the Mechanicum support at the Erud muster. I need to contact them.’
‘Erud Station?’ Arook echoes. He glares his red eyes at the server. One of them flickers on and off, sporadically.
‘Of course,’ she says.
Ventanus slots open the cuff of his armour, and lights up a small hololithic chart. He scans the terrain, zipping back and forth. Selaton looks over his shoulder.
‘Theoretical,’ says Ventanus. ‘If we can get the muster moving, we could coordinate a rendezvous. Somewhere here. On the Plains of Dera. Zetaya, perhaps.’
‘It’s defensible, but open to the west,’ Selaton points out. ‘Lernaea might be a better choice.’
‘They’d be too exposed crossing the valley floor,’ says Ventanus. He alt
ers the projection.
‘What about Melatis? It’s got a good position, and it’s agricultural. With fortune on our side, it won’t have been hit in the first strike. Not an important enough asset.’
‘Fortune does not seem to have been on our side much so far today, captain,’ says Selaton.
‘What are you talking about, Kiuz?’ Ventanus snaps. ‘We’re here, aren’t we?’
He turns to Arook and Tawren.
‘When you establish contact, I can give you an authority code to identify me. Try to find out who you’re talking to. Ideally, Captain Sydance or Captain Yaulus. I need them to advance any units they have to Melatis on the plains. I’ll meet them there.’
‘You intend to go overland to Melatis?’ asks Tawren.
‘Yes,’ says Ventanus simply.
‘It is probably an over-ambitious goal,’ she says gently.
‘Severe bombing north of the river,’ says Arook. ‘They’ve taken out the highway. The enemy is also massing engines along the Neride Wall.’
‘Titans?’ asks Ventanus.
Arook hesitates.
‘It shocks me too, sir,’ he says stiffly. ‘I have no idea how any Mechanicum engine could have been so miserably corrupted. Loyalty and devotion seem to be in short supply at this hour.’
‘Leptius Numinus,’ says Tawren.
They all look at her.
‘The old gubernatorial palace, on the plains,’ she explains. ‘It was high on my list of potential destinations. The palace has a non-active but functional data-engine, as well as a high-cast vox array. Neither are operational when the governor is not in residence, but they are maintained. I was hoping that, because both systems were off-line, they might have been spared scrapcode infection and electromagnetic damage.’
‘We could contact the fleet?’ asks Ventanus.
‘If we could make them work,’ she agrees, ‘we could contact the fleet.’
‘We’ve already identified Leptius Numinus as one of the most viable options,’ says Arook. ‘As an added advantage, the sub-ground network will make passage there easier than to any open target on the plains.’