Finally it came through, the encryption distorting the sound. But he knew that voice.
‘–attack successful, but casualties heavy. Enemy forming up for counterattack. Artillery support requested, grid…’ It faded out, then came back as clearly as if Ismail were standing next to him.
‘Grid 483785, Granite One.’
‘Your last acknowledged. Wait out,’ Dietrich snapped, eyes bright in their red-rimmed sockets. ‘Lars, you get that?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Pass it along to the Basilisks. Priority mission.’
‘Priority, aye, sir.’
Dietrich tossed the headpiece back to the vox-bearer, a fierce grin lighting up his face. ‘I knew he would do it. Ismail has the Emperor’s own luck.’
‘Fire mission inbound,’ Lars Dyson said beside him. ‘It’ll be close, sir.’
‘It has to be. They have each other by the belt-buckle down there.’
The roar of artillery rounds, so close over their heads Dietrich could feel the air displaced by them. Earthshaker shells were an awesome spectacle to behold.
He uttered a quick, silent prayer that his commissar had got the coordinates right. Otherwise what was left of his Fifth Company would be obliterated along with the enemy they were fighting, and he could not afford to lose an entire armoured company. Not another one.
He listened in on the net, waiting for the results of the artillery strike. The counterattack had been well planned, but that meant nothing in the fuming chaos of war. No plan survived first contact with the enemy.
Fifteen Leman Russes and a full battalion of the Hanemites. He had thrown over a thousand men into the mix down there, chancing an attack where he thought the enemy was weakest. If successful, then the way to the spaceport itself would be open, and it would be the first gain they had made in days.
Has it only been twelve days, he wondered? Strange, how combat played tricks with one’s perception of time. Minutes and hours dragged out in pain and fear and nervous apprehension, until it seemed impossible to envisage the passage of a single day. It might as well be a decade. The mind and body became so caught up in every moment, every gesture, word, sensation, that seconds passed with infinite slowness. And yet in the midst of it, death arrived like lightning.
How many had died in those twelve days? They could not even begin to count the civilian casualties, though it was certain they ran into the millions. The entire blasted, tortured expanse of Askai stank of the dead, tens of thousands buried under the rubble or sealed and suffocated in shelters.
The citadel was crammed shoulder to shoulder with those who had fled the lower districts, while countless thousands more had found means to cross the blast-walls, scaling them by night. Most, however, had fled over the three Koi bridges, into the wasteland before the mountains. The enemy had let them go, for there was nothing out there but heat and sand and thirst.
Millions dead, but in the midst of that great carnage, Dietrich and his men fought on. They still held the Armaments District, and there were still manufactoria working, turning out the munitions and weapons that kept them all alive.
As the front-line casualties had mounted, so they had been forced to take workers off the production lines, arm them with the weapons they had created, and assemble them into untrained companies, to be thrown into the furnace of the war.
Like twigs tossed on a bonfire. It consumed them with incredible speed.
As for his own command, Dietrich had lost half his vehicles and forty per cent of his men. It was five days now since he had been in touch with Riedling or Veigh in the citadel. The enemy had been jamming transmissions constantly, and when they located the source of any vox traffic they invariably sent in a squadron of fighter-bombers to silence it. The Hell-Talons and ageing Doomfires of the enemy dominated the skies.
They had been bombing the citadel non-stop since the beginning of the battle, concentrating on anything which might look like a communications array. The big guns of the fortress had taken a terrible toll on their aircraft and had broken up several major assaults before they had even fully commenced. But even the deep buried magazines of Askai’s citadel were not inexhaustible, and the larger calibre guns were firing less frequently now that they had begun to ration shells. This had enabled the enemy to close the ring tighter about the walls.
The Armaments District had ammunition in plenty, but was cut off from the citadel by three kilometres of killing-ground.
The wide expanse of the spaceport was key. If Dietrich could make it there, then there was a chance he could reconnect their lines. His dwindling armour would be more effective on those landing pads, with clear fields of fire, and the guns of the citadel could support them, keeping the fighter-bombers off their backs.
If he could break through and establish a new line all the way to the citadel, then they would be fighting united, and they would be able to send supplies up to Riedling and Veigh’s forces. There was a chance then that they could hold out. For a while at least.
It meant stretching his own men perilously thin, and asking them to make savage assaults to retake the ground they had lost at the beginning of the fighting, but if they did not do this, then defeat would come quickly.
If the citadel fell, its guns could be turned on any target in the city, and even the case-hardened structures of the manufactoria would be no defence.
The vox crackled again, but Dietrich ignored it. One of the troopers of his bodyguard leaned close, raising his voice to be heard over the artillery.
‘Sir, I see attack aircraft, a full squadron. This location is compromised. We should get back down to the Baneblade.’
Dietrich nodded. ‘Lead the way, Garner.’
‘With respect, sir, you must go first.’
Garner was right, and when that happened there was no arguing with him. Dietrich scuttled across the rooftop with his vox-bearer in tow, while the three remaining bodyguards raised their lasguns and scanned the western sky.
The shriek of labouring afterburners, and then the whistle of old-style dropped munitions. The Doomfires came in a wide arrow, five of them roaring so low that Dietrich could see the black and yellow bars on their cowling.
Garner unceremoniously shoved him down the wrecked stone stairs and the general managed to turn the fall into a roll, his body-armour taking the blows. He was aware of a great concussion that staggered his lungs and pummelled the dust in the lower rooms into ghostly waves.
Then a wall of heat, and the boom of the explosions. His companions tumbled down the stairs much as he had, until they all lay in a heap at the bottom.
‘Keep moving,’ Garner gasped, coughing. ‘They may come round for another pass.’
They scrambled to their feet and made their way out into the street, looking to right and left like pedestrians watching for swift-moving traffic. Then one by one they dashed across the open space, while the heat of the nearby detonations crisped their eyebrows and made their eyes water.
There were screams at the end of the street, not of pain, but triumph. A cloud of dark figures rose up out of the rubble and charged forward, firing lasguns from the hip. They were cadaverous, bald, bright-eyed, and they looked utterly insane.
‘Cultists!’ Dietrich yelled, and drew his laspistol. He felled two before the rest of his men lowered their weapons and swept the street with laser fire.
The cultists shrieked and pelted forward as though utterly mindless of their own survival. The las-bolts knocked them down like black skittles.
Dietrich, filled with a sudden fury, triggered the twin blades in his gauntlet and gutted the last one standing, feeling the thing’s heart beating through his blades as he skewered it. The cultist tried to bite his face, then slumped, teeth still gnashing feebly, and slid off the good Imperial steel to the ground.
‘Infiltrators,’ Garner said, and he kicked the corpse with sudden venom. ‘You should have let me take that last one, general.’