“Oh feth!” Caffran whispered. He started to move forward, but Larkin grabbed him and yanked him back. Gunfire raked the open space, jerking and twitching Guheen’s pathetic corpse. The rocket sack was well out of reach.
The Blood Pact troopers were running in close. E Company met them with a flurry of las. Larkin dropped an officer with a perfect kill shot. But still the small-arms fire rattled in relentlessly.
“I can’t load,” Caffran said. “I can’t stop those tanks.”
“That’s not good,” Larkin agreed casually, thumping home another hot-shot.
“Larks!” Caffran said, keeping his head down. “Aim for the operator. There, man! In the bubble! Kill him!”
Larkin cosied his new rifle up to his cheek, and drew aim on the nearest stalk-tank. Through his scope, he could see the mutated, augmented operator in his liquid cocoon under the arched, mantis tail.
“Larkin!”
“You don’t rush these things,” Larkin said. He exhaled and pulled the trigger. The cocoon burst. The stalk-tank took another few, stuttering steps, and rocked to a halt, dead on its caliper feet.
The Blood Pact wave was almost on them. Caffran dropped his tube launcher and drew his laspistol. He started to fire at the enemy troopers running in. Nearby, Mkillian cried out as a las-round killed him and knocked him back off the rocks.
A torrent of lasfire cut a swathe across the advancing archenemy. They buckled and fell.
“Get up! Up and into them!” someone shouted.
It was Tona Criid, running forward, her weapon on full auto. Beside her came Varl and Bonin. They seemed oblivious to the danger, just running into the zipping fire.
Varl reached the rockline beside Caffran, put one boot up on it to brace himself, and let rip from the hip.
“Having a little trouble?” he asked.
Criid ran forward, shot a Blood Pact trooper in the neck, and scooped up the fallen rocket bag from beside Guheen’s body.
“Catch!” she cried, throwing it to Caffran.
“First-and-Only!” Varl shouted as he unloaded. “First-and-fething-Only!”
Caffran grabbed the bag and began packing a rocket into his tube. “Tona!” he yelled. “We need to—”
“Shut up, I’m working here!” she shouted, ripping rounds through a trio of Blood Pact troops.
One moment you’re alive, the next you’re dead. And what are secrets worth then? Caffran briefly looked at Guheen’s body. All the way from Tanith, then just gone. Just gone, like that.
He latched a fresh rocket into the launcher, primed it with a quick blessing, and raised the weapon onto his shoulder.
Seventy metres behind him, Wilder was confronting Baskevyl, Feygor and Meryn.
“This isn’t the time,” he was saying.
“I think it is,” Baskevyl said. “Luc, I came down here and I happened to repeat my flippant comment about how I wished I could plug that gate. And Feygor said we could.”
“It’s possible,” Feygor said.
“This is crazy talk,” Wilder said.
“No, sir,” said Baskevyl. “Hear the man out.”
“We could blow it,” Feygor said. “If we got sufficient charge in there.”
“And how do you hope to—”
“Mark IX land mines,” Feygor smiled. There were plenty of them on the munition train last time I looked. Packed with compressive diotride D-6. Explosive putty, very nasty. Give me half an hour and a decent trigger mechanism, and I could rig up a device that would bring that whole fething gate down.”
“No,” said Wilder. This is not an option.”
“It really is,” said Rawne, from behind Wilder.
Wilder looked round. “Your adjutant is a demolitions expert now, is he? You don’t mess around with land mines, and you certainly don’t mess around with D-6. If I had an authorised bombardier here, or a tech priest, maybe I’d—”
“Feygor knows this stuff. Always has. And since Gereon—”
Wilder groaned. “Oh, Rawne! Don’t since Gereon me. Not now.”
“I think I will. How do you suppose we conducted our sabotage operations there, Wilder? Did we give up the idea because we didn’t have an authorised bombardier with us? Feygor knows this stuff.”
“I do. I can handle it,” Feygor said.
Wilder hesitated. Up ahead, rockets were slamming into the advancing stalk-tanks.
“So, Feygor builds us a device. Then what?”
“We get it into the gateway,” Meryn said. “Sneak it in.”
“What else?” Wilder asked.
“Someone has to carry the device,” Feygor said. “It’ll be heavy. Really heavy. I’d need someone strong.”
There was a clatter of metal tanks hitting the ground. “I’m up for that,” Brostin said, coming forward. He had let his flamer set slide off his broad shoulders.
“Bask?”
“I think this could work, Luc,” Baskevyl said.
“Get to it, Feygor,” Wilder said.
“I’ll assemble a strike team to—” Rawne said.
Meryn cut Rawne off. “I’ll assemble a strike team to get the device in place. This is an E Company initiative. Last I heard, I was still in charge of that.”
Rawne nodded.
“Then it’ll be me leading that team,” Meryn said.
“No question, captain,” Wilder replied. Meryn hurried away.
Wilder realised that Rawne was looking at him. “What?”
“You have to understand about the gateways, Wilder. The enemy isn’t coming through from the next compartment. It’s simply coming out of the gate. It’s warping out of that archway.”
Wilder shrugged. “Whatever, Rawne. But if we plug that gate, the result’s the same, right?”
Rawne nodded. “I think so.”
As Meryn strode off, Banda caught his sleeve.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
“Getting it done, Jessi,” he said.
“I heard you overrule Rawne just then. Are you trying to prove something?”
He looked at her. “What if I am?”
“If you are, try not to make me miss you when you’re gone,” Banda said.
Half an hour turned into an hour and a half. The enemy continued to emerge from the gate. Each time it did, sighing winds from another world gusted out across the compartment.
“Feygor?” Wilder called over the microbeads.
“It’s ready. A real job. Coming in now.”
“Bask!” Wilder yelled. “Full spread across the gate mouth! Obel? Domor? Varaine? Company fire for support!”
Near the mid-point of the Eighty-First First line, Novobazky had managed to rally I Company. They had taken up position in and around a long island of thorny scrub, which gave them a good angle on the gate. “Fire for support!” Novobazky shouted. He could see an alarming number of crimson figures in amongst the broken granite seventy metres ahead. Stray tracer shells sailed by, high overhead, like lost birds.
“Commissar!”
Novobazky turned to see Hark running up.
“We’re going to need to rise and push,” Hark told him. “Sitting here and firing isn’t going to cut it. You can’t see it from this angle, but there’s a mass of hostiles around behind that outcrop. This company needs to come forward to that line and lay down a field of fire, or the bastards are going to cut right down our centreline.”
Novobazky nodded, and relayed instructions to the section leaders. Then he remembered the plasma pistol, and offered it to Hark.
“Yours.”
“Keep it,” said Hark.
“Thank you. It served us well,” Novobazky said.
“It’s about to again,” Hark said sourly. “I understand you met Gaunt.”
Novobazky nodded. “Briefly. He seemed to me to be an admirable man.”
“I’m glad you think so,” Hark nodded. “I always believed that was the case.”
The combined companies of the Eighty-First First were now hosing the gate
mouth with fire.
“Company up to address!” Novobazky yelled. “Advance and fire at will!”
Meryn’s strike team, twenty-strong, ran forward, cutting through the Blood Pact resistance on the east side of the gate. Meryn had chosen the east side because it was particularly cluttered with loose rock and fat slabs of stone that had fallen from the walls over the centuries. There was plenty of cover, and for the most part they would be shielded from the main Blood Pact retinues.
It was still murderous. Wildfire sizzled between the rocks, and every few metres, hostile troops would suddenly appear from behind boulders. In the first fifteen minutes, two of the Tanith fell, then three of the Belladon Meryn had selected from E Company.
“Come on! Come on!” Meryn yelled out They had a brief window of opportunity, all the while the heavy fire from the Eighty-First First line was driving the archenemy backwards towards the end wall of the compartment.
Meryn ran ahead, firing short bursts around the rocks. Behind him came Brostin, struggling under the weight of Feygor’s jury-rigged device.
“Keep up!” Feygor shouted, lugging the detonator pack.
“Feth it, Murt, you try carrying this!” Brostin growled back.
Shells slammed in around them. The air stank of scorching lasfire.
Meryn reached the crest of rock in front of the gate. A las-round smacked into his head, and he fell.
Vision blurred and in pain, he reached up and found a wet gash across his scalp. Almost a kill shot.
“Advance!” he yelled.
The archenemy had spread wide, out of the gate. Growling armour was now advancing towards Callide’s position, and sweeping east towards the Hauberkan line. The gate itself was empty, vacant like the cavity of a skull.
Brostin staggered into the vast black mouth of the gate.
“How deep?” he yelled back, his voice echoing.
“Into the throat of it!” Meryn shouted. Shots were winging up from the Blood Pact in the lower basin. They had suddenly realised that a recon force had sneaked around behind them. Cager fell, dead. Mkella toppled over, his chest torn apart.
“Quickly now!” Meryn yelled. His head hurt.
A las-round hit Meryn in the arm, and exploded his bicep in a shower of bloody meat.
Feygor grabbed him and kept him upright. “Run!” Feygor said.
“But—”
“Just fething run, Meryn!” Feygor screamed. “Brostin’s set the charge.”
Brostin came running back out of the gateway. Lasfire hit him. He fell, and then got up again, blood streaming from multiple wounds.
“Set and down!” he shouted. Two more members of Meryn’s strike team were hit and killed.
“Go! Go on!” Feygor yelled, setting down the makeshift detonator pack. Meryn began to sprint, las-rounds whistling after him.
“Open wide,” Feygor said, slamming down the plunger.
For a second, nothing seemed to happen. The force of the blast was so severe, its noise and violence were off the scale of human senses. There was a solid, heavy slam, like an immense weight had hit the earth, then a gigantic, volcanic shower of mud and rock and smoke sprayed out of the gate mouth.
Feygor began to laugh. He threw aside the detonator pack and rose to his feet.
A las-round smacked into his chest. He fell down onto his knees, gurgling and coughing blood.
“Murt! Murt!” Brostin cried out as he reached him.
Murt Feygor murmured something, and slumped onto the ground.
Brostin scooped his limp body up and began to run.
“See that?” Baskevyl cried out. “They did it!”
Wilder waited. He watched the huge, dense cone of smoke rise from the fireball engulfing the gate. He thought he might almost be ready to start smiling.
He felt the cool breeze of a pressure change sweep across him, as if a door had opened somewhere, letting in the cold. The smoke billowed and the flames seethed away as chilly air fanned through them. A line of crimson battle tanks, rusted and heavy, began to roll out of the sixth compartment gate, spilling the debris and dying flames in front of them.
They hadn’t done it. Not even slightly.
TWENTY-SEVEN
18.11 hrs, 199.776.M41
Fifth Compartment
Sparshad Mons, Ancreon Sextus
The traitor hosts of the damned and the insane vomited out of the gate mouth in a swollen tide. It seemed to the men on the ground as if the warp itself had torn open and scattered its contents forth. The charging formations of war machines and troops, of mobile guns and fluttering banners, made everything that they had faced so far seem trivial and slight. The forces they had struggled and fought with over the last few days had been just an advance guard.
Night was falling, but the black filth coiling out of the sixth compartment gate around the arriving hostiles reached upwards and accelerated the descent of darkness. The arcane door had opened so wide this time, weather swept through with it from the climate systems of whatever fell world these creatures had embarked from. Not just cold winds, but fog and moisture. Lightning discharge crackled around the tops of the compartment walls, and covered the stone face of the Mons’ towering heart like luminous ivy. Ice rain began to fall, hissing into the fires.
The Kolstec forces took immediate heavy losses and fell back in a desperate, scrabbling retreat. Then fire fell upon the Eighty-First First too. Callide and almost his entire company were cut down and destroyed. Hundreds of bodies in black battledress lay amongst the burning scrub.
Wilder drew the Eighty-First First back, through the rain, through the belts of scraggy woodland and outcropping granite. The temptation was to flee, but that would hasten yet greater disaster. The archenemy had to be slowed. They had to be harried and delayed. The Kolstec, half-breaking to the west, seemed unable to accomplish this, but the remnants of the Hauberkan treads were still operating in support of the Eighty-First First.
The sound of gunfire was constant and deafening. Wilder caught up with Keshlan at a dry watercourse.
“Signal DeBray!” Wilder yelled above the noise. “Tell him the retiring line has got to move faster! As fast as it can. Tell him they’ve got to get out of the compartment! Tell him all hell is coming after them!”
Half a kilometre back, in a stretch of burning woodland, Rawne, Kolea and Baskevyl had established decent bounding cover between the men they brought with them. Two sections would sustain fire while the third fell back. It worked against the foot troops and the ranks of grotesque mutants that poured into the tree-line. But there were tanks coming, heavy Brigands by the sound of their engines, perhaps something even bigger, and the sections had no rockets left.
Rawne saw men move past him in the smoke, stragglers trying to rejoin the retreat. Many were badly hurt.
He saw Meryn, covered in blood, helped along by two Belladon troopers.
He saw Brostin, trotting as fast as he could, a limp figure in his arms.
“Brostin!” Rawne ran to him. The flame-trooper was smeared in blood. He’d been hit himself several times. Feygor was just a loose bundle, blood soaking his tunic.
“Put him down,” Rawne said.
“I can carry him. I’ve got to get him to a medic. I’ve got to get him to Dorden. He’ll patch him up.”
Rawne put his hand against Feygor’s neck. It was impossible to tell if there was a pulse left, or any sign of respiration. Even if Feygor was still alive, he wouldn’t be by the time Brostin had carried him back down the compartment.
“Put him down,” Rawne repeated.
“No!” Brostin was agitated by the idea. “We didn’t come all the way through fething Gereon to wind up dying in a place like this! I can carry him!” he moved on, blundering through the smoking trees. “I can carry him!”
Wilder reached an area of rising, open ground, and tried to take his bearings. To the east, at least four companies of the Eighty-First First, along with some Hauberkan armour, was cutting along the scrublands, moving ste
adily south. Directly behind him, Daur’s company and parts of Obel’s, along with an assortment of men from Kolosim and Varaine’s commands, were caught in a brutal firefight with the leading edge of the Blood Pact units.
Wilder realised the western flank of the breakaway was yawning dangerously. If the enemy overlapped, they’d catch Daur, Obel and the others quickly and simply. What had happened to his formation?
He looked around again, calling A Company up around him into a firing line. His throat was sore from smoke. The rain was getting heavier, and the ground was turning to mire. To the south of him, the ground shelved away and rose into a significant hill. With a little surprise, Wilder realised it was Hill 56, the very site they’d been assigned to at the start of this punishing and pointless expedition. If he could retain cohesion long enough to get a force onto its back, he’d have a commanding field of fire right across the scrub. To the west of the hill, the main trackway ran wide. It was choked with a portion of the fleeing Kolstec units. He saw, to his dismay, that in the mayhem, both Domor’s and Sabrese’s companies had fallen back too far, right onto the track. That was where the gap had formed.
“Keshlan!” he yelled. “Get me Sabrese, quickly! We’ve got to get him to move up a little.”
The vox-officer obeyed, but he looked dubious. The distance was significant. Persuading those men to turn back into the teeth of the enemy advance was going to be a tall order. Fierce shelling and heavy weapons fire was coming out of the ruined scrub to the left. Even the most loyal soldiers would falter from an effort like that.
A curious thing began to happen. Keshlan had yet to secure a clear channel, but Sabrese and Domor’s men were beginning to move back anyway. They were advancing into the fight, covering the trackway. The gap was actually starting to close.
“Link up with those men!” Wilder shouted to A Company. “Across the slope! Give them covering fire as they close up!”
Blood Pact and mutant troopers swarmed out of the scrub, but the supporting companies drove them back again with a blistering rate of shots. Wilder could hear shouts coming from Domor’s men, and Sabrese’s too. Battle cries. Passionate, almost eager.