Leaning against the wall for support, the Warsmith came down the embrasure steps.
‘Tarrasch!’ Dantioch called. From the soot and smaze came sudden movement.
‘Sir,’ came the Iron Palatine’s reply. The explosion had knocked the Iron Warrior senseless into a wall. His words were shaky but the Space Marine was alive.
‘It’s over. We are compromised. Enemy forces imminent. Get the living to their feet.’
‘Yes, my lord.’
As Tarrasch stumbled through the carnage, searching for survivors, Dantioch ran his gauntlets along the wall. The Warsmith began to knock experimentally against the stone as he slouched along its expanse. Satisfied, the Warsmith stopped and turned on the hulking Dreadnought that still stood sentinel in the middle of the blockhouse, autocannons at the ready.
‘Vastopol, are you still with us, my friend?’ the Warsmith asked.
In answer the Dreadnought just burned. The explosions had done little to the machine but scorch its adamantium and set fire to the scrolls, banners and decorative flourishes that adorned the bulky form.
‘Don’t be like that,’ Dantioch said. ‘It’s over. We could fight to the last man but what would that achieve?’
Still the Dreadnought stood immobile.
‘This isn’t Gholghis,’ Dantioch told his battle-brother. ‘It is the prerogative of the Warsmith when to war and when not to. We are beaten here. It is time to take the war elsewhere. Now get over here and help me; you may still have a story to tell.’
As the Venerable Vastopol dragged its mangled and sparking leg across the bodies of the blockhouse floor, Tarrasch worked his way through the dead and dying. The Angeloi were all dead, as were the remaining Sons of Dantioch. The raging inferno had done for both and only a handful of Legiones Astartes, protected from the worst of the explosion by their battle-plate, had survived the catastrophic accident.
‘Enemy advancing!’ Tarrasch called from the gauntlet entrance.
‘Come on, come on!’ Dantioch urged Space Marines emerging from the smoke and destruction.
Tauro Nicodemus was suddenly beside him: his immaculate armour soot-stained and blood-spattered.
‘I thought this was the fallback position,’ the Tetrarch said. The Ultramarine had accepted that he was to die there, taking as many traitor lives with him as he was able.
‘Game’s not over,’ Dantioch said. ‘Gather your weapons.’
‘Where are we going?’
‘Through this wall.’
Dantioch knocked on a section of the blockhouse wall. A deliberate, architectural weak point. ‘Vastopol.’
The Dreadnought limped at the wall, crashing through the masonry with one of its chunky shoulders. Rock and dust fell about the war machine. Extracting itself from the ragged aperture, Vastopol stood back to admit the surviving Legiones Astartes: the Warsmith, the Iron Palatine, Brother-Sergeant Ingoldt, Brothers Toledo and Baubistra, the Ultramarine Nicodemus and Chaplain Zhnev. Beyond a broad set of steep, rocky stairs extended, running parallel with the wall and reaching up into the Schadenhold’s cavernous ceiling foundations. With the Legiones Astartes striding up ahead, the Venerable Vastopol negotiated the steps with difficulty, its mangled leg a handicap on the shambling ascent.
The stairwell rumbled and shook.
‘What was that?’ Tarrasch called. For a moment nobody answered in the darkness. Then a quake rolled through the stone about them. The steps shook under their feet and fractures split the stairwell’s rough roof and walls.
‘It’s the Omnia Victrum,’ Dantioch said. ‘Krendl finally has his Titans in position.’ The Warsmith tried to picture the acid-scarred colossi outside, the remaining war machines of the Legio Argentum. The Omnia Victrumwas an Imperator-class Titan. A mountain of rust-eaten armour, striding across the cavern like a vengeful god. At its sides it mounted weaponry of titanic proportion: monstrous instruments of destruction, capable of razing cities and felling enemy god-machines. Upon its hunched back sat a small city of its own: a Titanscape of corroded steeples, towers and platforms. A base of operations and a mobile barracks of waiting reinforcements.
‘She’s softening up the south face of the Schadenhold with her cannons and turbolasers before landing troops.’ The Imperator was huge and certainly tall enough to stand beside and beneath the Iron Warrior citadel. It could disgorge a siege-ending horde of traitor Iron Warriors and reinforcement foot contingents of the Bi-Nyssal Equerries. As fresh blood rampaged through the south section of the Schadenhold, joining Krendl and his depleted forces in the north, loyalist Iron Warrior resistance would be overrun and crushed. Even Dantioch’s ingenious blockhouse fallbacks would not be able to save the Schadenholders from the wall-to-wall carnage that was to come.
Tremors swept through the stairwell once more, knocking several Space Marines from their footing. Dantioch fell into Tarrasch, who steadied his Warsmith, but most were staring at the ceiling. Rock and dust rained down on the Iron Warriors and the walls trembled.
‘The passage is collapsing,’ Nicodemus called, holding his storm shield above him.
‘The structure will hold,’ Dantioch assured them. They were in the cavern ceiling foundations of the Schadenhold. The Omnia Victrum’s artillery assault was pummelling the citadel into submission, shaking the fortress to its rocky core. From the bottom of the stairwell came the fresh chatter of weaponry. Bolters and lascarbines, clutched by the traitor Legiones Astartes and Nadir-Maru 4th Juntarians. The enemy that had flooded the empty blockhouse had followed them through the hole in the wall. Firepower came up the stairs at the loyalists with Krendl’s besiegers climbing behind. ‘Come on!’ Dantioch shouted and continued his ascent.
‘Warsmith,’ he heard Tarrasch call and upon turning found his Iron Palatine skidding back down the steps towards the Venerable Vastopol. Although the south wall had held, it had partially collapsed, creating a bottleneck through which the Dreadnought’s broad bulk could not pass. With his armoured shoulders askew but braced between the walls of the stairwell, the war machine was trapped: held fast by the rock and unable to find footing with his mangled leg.
Enemy fire hammered into the Dreadnought’s armoured back. Brother-Sergeant Ingoldt and the Iron Palatine grabbed the war machine’s limbs and heaved at the metal monster. With the intensity of firepower beyond growing and casting the Venerable Vastopol in silhouette, the Iron Warriors fought to free their comrade. The Dreadnought’s vox-speakers trembled with the groans of the warrior inside, as the relentless streams of las-fire and bolt-rounds shredded Vastopol’s rear plating.
Baubistra and Chaplain Zhnev ran down the steps at the war machine. Brother Baubistra leapt onto the front of the sarcophagus body section and clambered up the chunky weaponry. Between the top of the Dreadnought’s mighty shoulders and the stairwell roof, Baubistra found a gap for his bolter and began answering back with ammo-conserving blasts. Zhnev came straight at Vastopol’s midriff, slamming his battle-plate into the Dreadnought in the hope that his assault might dislodge the war machine. The Chaplain failed. The Venerable Vastopol had become the immovable object. Only the unstoppable force of Krendl’s traitor troops would remove him and until then, the Iron Warrior Dreadnought became a wall of adamantium and ceramite dividing the two.
Tarrasch heard a familiar whine.
‘Missile launcher!’ he called.
A rocket slammed into the back of the Dreadnought, knocking Baubistra from his perch and drawing from the Venerable Vastopol a vox-roar of agony and anguish. Two more followed, ravaging the armoured shell of the beast. Vastopol’s groans were constant now and the Iron Warrior’s hulking, metal body was failing about him. Dantioch stomped down the steps towards the Dreadnought.
‘Get him out,’ the Warsmith ordered.
‘He’ll die,’ Zhnev replied over the boom of battle beyond.