Some were crushed underfoot, others fell to raking claws or sprays of shot. Corrod was in the thick of it, tearing his way forwards. He had known since setting out that many of his kind would not return from the mission. One did not enter the heartland of the enemy and expect to survive unscathed. The holy work was all that mattered. The orders of the voice. The Qimurah could be remade. New and worthy sons could be blessed and reworked to replace the fallen. They would all share the same, eternal purpose: to prevail, even to the last of them.
And they would prevail. They would break all opposition and bear the keys of victory to his side, and lay them at his feet. Even if they were reduced to just a handful. To just one.
Never had so many of the Qimurah been deployed together, and never had so many perished in the same action. It was a mark of honour. A mark of trust. Their very losses, unthinkable in extent, proved the magnitude of their task. Victory, no more, no less. Ultimate victory in the Sabbat War. A few metres of filthy ground in a rockcrete channel. A few outclassed enemy soldiers in their path.
That was all that stood in the Anarch’s way.
A few metres. A few bags of human meat. The Qimurah could conquer that. The Imperials had fought well. Where they lacked strength, they had compensated with wit and diligence. They had executed to effect. They had shown courage and resolve, and tactical skill.
And now they would die because their unworked bodies were too fragile to sustain the effort, their weapons too weak. At the last moment, which was always the only moment that truly mattered, their strength could not match their determination.
He could see the looming mouth of the duct behind them.
‘Flamer!’ Obel yelled into the carnage. The .20 was overrun. Everything was just smoke and blood and jarring impacts and crashing bodies.
Lubba stood his ground, and sent a lance of sucking, roaring white heat into the first of the Qimurah, searing flesh from bone. The superheated stream annihilated one entirely, scattering fused and burning fragments of bone. Another managed to stagger a few steps, skinless and ablaze, before falling.
Criid and Obel tossed their rifles aside and pulled the adept wardens’ staves out of their shoulder packs. They stood their ground and fired.
The air distorted as grav-pulses blasted from the ends of the staves. The next two Qimurah fell back, their skulls crushed like eggs. Criid and Obel tried to fire again, but the Mechanicus weapons took a moment to cycle.
And there were no more moments.
‘Lunny!’ Criid yelled.
‘Charges now!’ Obel roared.
On the ledge, Larkin heard Obel’s distant order as he scrambled back from the gate. A Qimurah bounded over it, dropping onto him. For a second, he locked eyes with the thing’s neon gaze. Then he met it with his silver.
The Qimurah landed and impaled itself on the Tanith blade locked to the end of Larkin’s long-las.
It writhed, pulling on the long gun, threatening to wrench it out of the old marksman’s hands or roll them both off the ledge.
Larkin pulled the trigger. The hot shot blew the Qimurah in half and hurled the sectioned creature off his blade. Another Qimurah came over the gate gears behind it. Larkin reached for his reload bag, but quick as he was, there wasn’t going to be enough time.
Hands grabbed him from behind and shoved him down onto his face. Wes Maggs was kneeling on his back, hosing rapid fire at the oncoming Qimurah. Trooper Galashia was behind him, lighting it up over Maggs’ head. The combined fire swatted the Qimurah off the ledge. It plunged towards the channel below just as the Ghosts’ explosives began to go off.
Tube charges and grenades were the only things they had left. The dwindling line of Ghosts was being crushed back into the mouth of the gallery. At Obel’s order, they had frantically hurled their tube charges and whatever grenades they were carrying.
The staggered blasts lit up along the Ghosts’ end of the chamber, filling the artificial ravine with a sudden forest of explosions. It was a desperate choice. A final choice. Many of the Qimurah were blown apart instantly, but the blast pressure was trapped and channelled. The rockcrete ravine cupped and focused the over-shock and drove it up and out.
The Ghosts defending the duct mouth were hurled off their feet by the hammering wave, rolling and tumbling, deaf, dazed and blind.
The over-pressure scorched up the revetments too. It swept Maggs off the ledge. Larkin and Galashia managed to grab him before he fell, and clung on desperately as he tried to drag himself up again, his feet swinging over the drop.
Smoke and flames boiled down the gulley, dense and caustic. Criid tried to rise. She saw a Qimurah almost on her, and fired her stave. The gravity round hammered him back into the revetment wall and split his torso like a ripe ploin. The Qimurah had a guard-issue satchel over one shoulder. It slumped along with his corpse into the filth of the channel bed.
Corrod saw Ulraw die.
‘Take it up! Take it up!’ he yelled.
He saw Drehek stumble out of the swirling, spark-filled smoke, casting aside an Imperial he’d just gutted with his claws. Drehek saw the fallen treasure, and ran for it. He pulled it off Ulraw’s corpse and turned. A javelin of white-hot fire raked him and torched him. The Qimurah and the satchel collapsed in a consuming ball of flame.
Corrod howled. There was no time to go back. No time to recover what was lost. He still had four of the stones.
He threw himself on, the duct ahead.
An Imperial blocked his path. He smashed the man aside, snapping his neck and removing half of his face.
Zhukova, deafened by the bombs, saw the monster kill Gansky. She fired full auto, cutting Corrod off his feet with a hail of las. Corrod rose, his skin blistered and smouldering. She hit him with another burst. He fell, then came at her.
She hit him again, and saw neon blood spurt and spatter.
He was centimetres from her when his head wrenched sideways. The side of his skull caved in and burst.
Corrod fell.
Lunny Obel lowered the stave.
‘These fethers just don’t know when to die, do they?’ he asked.
A hunched, stumbling figure slammed into Obel from behind and knocked him aside. Hacklaw, wounded and disfigured and perhaps the last Qimurah left alive, was still going. His claws tore the musette bag from his damogaur’s corpse.
Clutching it to his chest, he plunged on into the duct.
Chiria offered Kolosim the detonator casually, the way a trooper might offer a comrade a pack of lho-sticks.
‘You wired it,’ Ferdy Kolosim replied. ‘You do the honours.’
Chiria shrugged. The scars on her face crinkled with a grin of relish.
‘Ghosts, Ghosts,’ she said into her bead. ‘Stand by for det. Brace and ease.’
It had just begun to rain again. Fine sheets of drizzle washed across the approach to EM 14. The Ghosts huddled in the darkness, braced, and opened their mouths to prevent burst eardrums.
Chiria flipped off the switch-guard and pressed the detonator stud.
There was a light-flash, and then a shock that they all felt in their lungs and bones.
Then a boom split the night in half.