Above Askai, a light show of immense proportions erupted, and in the midst of it the black shapes plummeted down with the red fire of afterburners slowing their fall.
The first drop pods fell on the open landing pads of the city’s spaceport, slamming to earth in fountains of sand and earth and pulverised rockcrete.
Even as they impacted, they were brought under a torrent of lasgun fire from the Hanemite defenders. Two full regiments manned the spaceport defences, while above it the great guns of the citadel began to boom out also, their concussion creating vast, tumbling smoke-rings in the settling dust.
A dozen drop pods were blown to shrapnel before their ramps even opened.
But more followed.
All over the city the clumsy craft fell to earth, some landing upright, others blasted on their side, yet more detonating in the air high above, their contents tumbling out like seeds from a pod.
And down with them swooped squadrons and wings of angular fighters and ground-support craft, spewing fire. They were painted in black and scarlet and wasp-yellow, and they strafed the crowds who were still milling in the streets of Askai, blowing hundreds of people to fragments of steaming meat with every pass.
Thousands more suffocated in the press of humanity as the mobs tried to get under cover, to run away, to seek something approaching safety. In Sol Square four drop pods landed, and as the ramps came down the crowds recoiled from them as one would from an open flame.
And out of the drop pods poured creatures from a nightmare.
Part Two
Darkness Follows
EIGHT
Diebus Duodecimus
Rajek sighted down the barrel of his lasgun. He still could not quite believe what was in his sights.
‘Easy,’ he said. ‘Easy – wait until I open up.’
The rest of his squad lay on the jagged rubble, their uniforms all long since abraded to rags and coated with the mustard-coloured dust of Askai’s ruins.
‘Aim for the eyes.’ We miss, and we’re all dead, he thought.
His target was giving orders. Even from here, two hundred metres away, he could hear the harsh enhanced voice. Low Gothic, but with archaisms all through it. No one on Ras Hanem had spoken such a dialect in centuries.
His target was better than two metres tall, and it was difficult to keep one’s eyes upon it, because of the sheer terror it engendered.
A man perhaps. Or once it had been born a man. Now it was a towering monstrosity, an armoured giant which had encased itself in the dessicated flesh and splintered bones of its vanquished foes. Black, red and garish yellow paint had been slashed across it, and it was bedecked with spikes and chains. Symbols that made Rajek’s flesh crawl were etched upon the armour, most mercifully half hidden by the charnel-house embellishments.
But the face. It was that which was most unsettling. Black eyes, without cornea or pupil, eyes like holes opening onto a depthless abyss. And the white flesh of the face in which they were embedded was scarred and gouged and painted even as the armour was. The mouth was a bloody gash full of splintered fangs which clashed as the creature spoke, slicing its own lips and spattering dark blood like spittle.
It hurt to look upon it. But Rajek’s aim was steady. He had seen worse things in the last fortnight.
He drew a breath, uttering a silent prayer, and squeezed the lasgun’s trigger with infinite gentleness.
Out streaked the bolt of hot energy. It took his target in the left temple. Rajek saw the burned meat of the face flayed open in a black flower.
His comrades opened up a split second later, six more las-bolts lancing out. Two were on target, striking the enemy in the face and searing the meat from the skull. But the giant was already in movement, uttering a terrible gargled roar, the cooked tongue burned black in the fang-maw of its mouth. It pointed, and raised its gobbet-choked chainsword, then fell to its knees.
The air was full of fire, and all about them the mounded rubble erupted as bolter-rounds struck home in fountains of earth and broken stone.
Rajek rolled away. One of his men was blown clear in half and his torso and legs tumbled in different directions like two halves of a discarded doll. Another took a round through the shoulder, his body-armour broken open like baked clay as the adamantium-tipped bullet ripped off his arm.
The rest ran, weaving and ducking, stumbling.
The wounded were left behind.
After the things they had all seen in the first week, they knew better than to be captured while still breathing.
In the second week, orders had come down from the High Command for all immobile wounded to kill themselves, and personal frags had been issued to every man, not to be used until that end was near.
Do not let them take you alive.
The things the enemy did to human flesh were an abomination too great to be contemplated by the sane.
Behind the fleeing troopers a series of massive figures mounted the rubble that had shielded the ambush, and Rajek heard laughter, horribly distinct, crawling like maggots across his brain. He unclipped a grenade from his belt, thumbed the ring, and tossed it over his shoulder as he ran, hardly aware of what he was doing.
One day soon it will be the last one. I will eat fire like the others have before me.
Two more seconds, somehow still running through the storm of bolter rounds, and he dived into a shell-hole, his lasgun coming up to split his lip open as he fell. The grenade went off with a dull crump, and a shower of metallic rattles. The horrible laughter stopped.
He wiped his lip, not knowing that he was shouting wordlessly at the top of his lungs, and then fired another series of bright bursts into the cloud of dust behind him. Then he looked round, breath heaving. Two of the others were still with him, wide-eyed, bloody-faced, but mobile.
‘Come on,’ was all he could say, his throat as dry and sore as if he had been swallowing gravel.
They picked themselves up and ran again.
The infantry were streaming back, as had been planned. But there were so few of them. Commissar Van Arnim leaned on the rim of the hatch and bared his teeth in a moment of helpless anger. Under him, the Leman Russ vibrated like some monstrous beast on a leash. The heat was baking him in his leather coat, his eyes stinging with sweat, but he scarcely felt it. He raised the vox-caster to his thin-lipped mouth.
‘Fifth, stand by for my word.’
He looked to left and right. In the half-ruined buildings and rubbled mounds a line of tanks was waiting, so well hidden that even he could not see them all. They had been backed into broken houses, covered with cameleoline tarps and piled high with shovelled rubbish to keep them from the attention of the fighter-bombers. Behind them, what was left of a full battalion of the Hanemite Guard was in support, crouched in the ruins.
One of the retreating troopers to his front stopped at Von Arnim’s tank, and thumped it with his fist. ‘They’re coming, sir – no vehicles. Heavy infantry, at least a company!’
‘Good work, Sergeant Rajek,’ Von Arnim said. ‘Get to the rear and regroup. Your men will be in reserve.’
Rajek, panting, looked round at the ragged remnants that were running through the line of camouflaged tanks. No more than fifteen or twenty men out of the company that had gone forward an hour ago.
‘Yes, sir.’ He moved off again.
Von Arnim ducked down into the hatch, blinking at the semi-darkness inside the tank. It was hot and airless as an oven inside, but this was no time to open the hatches for a breeze. He pinched the sweat from the end of his nose and spoke to the signals trooper whose face was bathed in blue light.