He took the Fury in a high, beautiful arc that snaked above the incoming wave of enemy fighters, and heard the sizzle and crash as las-beams streaked along the hull. The navigator blew the last of the countermeasures, and as Kadare brought the ship round again, swooping like a falcon of Old Earth, he saw below him the clustered formation of the main enemy line of battle. Light cruisers and clouds of interceptors and gunships, twinkling like a new constellation below him.
The bulkheads groaned, but the faithful ship held together. A barrage of plasma and laser fire came up to meet them. Jon Kadare uttered a wordless battle-cry as he slammed down the yoke and took his ship streaking into the midst of the enemy formation like a burning comet. He heard his navigator scream behind him as the rear of the ship was shot away, and the world wheeled with inhuman speed as the Fury spun out of control, a burning star, a falling meteor.
His vision went white for a glorious, blinding instant, and then there was only darkness.
Far below, in the confining heat of the bunker on Ras Hanem, a silence fell, broken only by the crackle of static from the vox-monitors. General Dietrich, Commissar Von Arnim and Marshal Veigh stood as the meaningless blue flicker of the screens before them went on and on, blank and empty. There were over a hundred men in the control room, and not one of them uttered a word for what seemed an unbearable length of time.
It was Von Arnim who ended it. He doffed his peaked cap and bowed his head a moment. ‘Thus do brave men die,’ he said in a low voice.
Dietrich cleared his throat. He leaned on the back of the air-controller’s chair in front of him and stared intently at the screen.
‘Contact the orbital batteries. What is the time to intercept?’
‘I… sir, I–’ The young soldier’s hand flew over the keys of his console.
‘Calm down, son. This is just the beginning. Time to intercept.’
‘Sir, on their current course and speed, the enemy will be in range of Battery Chrosos in eleven minutes.’
‘Let them know, if they don’t already.’
‘Aye, sir.’
‘We have one more wing, en route from the far side of the planet as we speak,’ Marshal Veigh said stiffly.
‘Call them back. No point sending out more to die like that. We’ll save them for the landings.’
Veigh nodded. He wiped sweat from his face.
‘They’re coming straight for Askai,’ Von Arnim said, replacing his cap.
‘It would seem so, Ismail. They mean to strike at the heart of the defence straight away. Alert the anti-air defences. There will be drop-troops arriving soon. We’ll hammer them as they land.’
Dietrich turned to Marshal Veigh. ‘I must go to my regiment.’
‘You must?’ Veigh seemed alarmed by the prospect. ‘General, surely you can command from here. It would be safer.’
‘My place is with my men. My Baneblade is fully equipped with vox transmitters on all frequencies.’
‘What can tanks do in the midst of a city?’ Veigh said, raising one hand.
It was Von Arnim who snapped back at him. ‘More than you know, marshal. Gather your thoughts, and improve your attitude. This thing has only just begun.’
The marshal coloured, and seemed to grow taller, the stoop leaving his gaunt frame.
‘You will not find me wanting in resolution, commissar.’
‘I know we won’t,’ Dietrich said, taking Veigh’s hand in an iron grip and forestalling Von Arnim’s retort. ‘Ismail, time we were on our way.’
The sirens were wailing across the city as the speeder swooped low over the packed streets, and crammed masses of people were pulsing this way and that as thick as fish in shoal. Barricades had been set up at all the major intersections and there were sandbagged redoubts on every corner, manned by nervous reservists with lasguns and not much else.
On the rooftops of the tallest hives and warehouses, multi-laser batteries poked their barrels at the yellow sky, and lines of vehicles sat in massive jams. First there had been an influx of refugees, then panic had gone the other way and millions had decamped to the countryside. They were unsure if they wanted to go or stay, but it was of no matter, because the adamantium gates of Askai had been closed.
Whoever was in the city now would remain within it, for good or ill.
‘We should have sent them down into the mines,’ Von Arnim said, looking down at the crowds below. There were half a million in Sol Square alone, all praying at a massive open-air service which invoked the aid of the Emperor and his legions.
‘Can you imagine the panic if a single Chaos warband got down there, five kilometres deep with every passageway and shaft jammed with civilians?’ Dietrich asked. ‘No. Better they die up here in the light.’
‘I was not thinking of them, Pavul, but of us. Our tanks are little more than immobile pill-boxes in this mob. It is no place for armour.’
‘Agreed, but there it is – we must make the best of it. You take the 387th out of Askai and it’s like taking out the spine of the defence.’
Von Arnim was scowling, his face as lined as a walnut. ‘Wait until the first shells come howling down from orbit.’
‘I’m hoping they won’t. I’m hoping they want the manufactoria intact. It’s why they desire this world in the first place. We’ll bog them down in the streets and make them bleed, Ismail.’
‘By the Throne, we will,’ the commissar replied, and his face lightened somewhat.
Dietrich had set up the headquarters of the 387th Armoured in the Armaments District. Outside the citadel, the buildings here were the most easily defended in the city. They had been built by Imperial engineers back when the first deep mines had been sunk upon the planet, and they had been built to last. Massive cyclopean blocks of stone, each the size of a hab, were layered in lines and permacreted into a single, fused mass. These walls reared up some fifty metres, and enclosed a bewildering layout of buildings and marshalling yards, all built in the same extravagant manner. Even the roofs were of bonded stone, and Dietrich reckoned some of them could withstand a direct hit from a Basilisk shell.
The Armaments District had its own water supplies, power generators and comms lines, and was thus a self-contained enclave within the city, even as the citadel itself was. More than that, in the district, the factories were still running, and half a million workers continued to toil at the assembly lines, turning out munitions and other armaments in vast quantities. This was the only place on the planet where Dietrich could hope to have his vehicles repaired and his magazines restocked in short order. It was also the entryway for the subterranean routes which led to the mines.
The citadel might tower over the city, and look both awe-inspiring and threatening, but the squat, brutally strong warehouses of the manufactoria were the key objective on the entire planet, and Dietrich’s men had laboured for days to make them impregnable, aided by a full division of the Hanemite guard which Veigh had stationed there, and thirty thousand civilian volunteers, all of whom were now armed from the factoria production lines.
The walls of Askai, tall and imposing though they might be, were over two hundred kilometres long. Not with a hundred thousand men could Dietrich have defended them. They had therefore been left to a skeleton defence force of militia and another Hanemite division – the governor had insisted.
No, it was inside the walls of Askai that the real bloodletting would take place.
‘I hope Cypra Mundi reacts quickly for once,’ Dietrich said as the transport came in to land in a cloud of yellow dust. ‘Otherwise…’ He let it lie. Ismail knew as well as he what it meant. The commissar met his eyes and simply nodded.
‘It is for this that we are soldiers, Pavul.’
Dietrich nodded. ‘By His Word.’