Kerne’s face tightened in a slight smile, though it was hard to read his features with the bright streaked sky behind him. He was in shadow.
‘We must hope that Massaron got word off to Phobian before he was destroyed. One of the ships may have made it away. In any case, we have two tasks before us now. We must warn the Chapter of what has transpired here, and we must prepare ourselves for defence.
‘Brother Kass, you must be able to do something which can get around this jamming.’
The Librarian bowed slightly. ‘I will do my best, brother-captain. But I am no astropath. And the passage of psychic emanations through the warp at present–’
‘Just do it, brother. The Punishers, if they take this world, will make it into a base, from which they will seek to conquer the rest of the sector, system by system. That is why they chose Ras Hanem – there are enough raw materials on this planet to resource an entire crusade.
‘The longer we deny them possession of those resources, the more time the Chapter has to come up with a riposte. But the Chapter has to know what we face here.’
‘We need to know what we face here,’ Dietrich rasped.
‘The same as you faced before, general,’ Fornix said with sour humour. ‘Only more so.’
‘But now there is a full company of the Adeptus Astartes fighting at your shoulder,’ Malchai told Dietrich. ‘You should be proud, general, to stand here in such company.’
‘I am proud,’ Dietrich retorted. ‘Proud of my men, who did the impossible once. Now they are being asked to do it again.’
‘They will obey orders,’ Von Arnim said crisply. ‘That is all we ask of them. It is all we ask of ourselves.’
‘Well said, commissar,’ Malchai said, with something approaching approval.
‘The Chapter Master will not forsake us,’ Fornix said. ‘And he will have planned for such a contingency.’ He looked at Kerne, but the captain’s face was unreadable.
‘We will hold,’ Jonah Kerne said quietly. ‘We will hold here until we are relieved or until we are all dead. Is that clear?’
They raised their faces to him – his brothers were unmoved. Fear did not come into their mental make-up. Fornix looked positively light-hearted. Kass was less ebullient. The young Librarian was the only psyker on the planet that they knew of, and he could sense currents and portents that passed the rest of them by.
But he nodded at his captain. He looked preoccupied, like a man with much on his mind, but he was a Dark Hunter, the most stubborn of all the Adeptus Astartes. There was no need to suspect his resolve.
Dietrich was resigned and angry. He had brought his command through weeks of hell, to what he thought was victory, only to have that victory slip out of his fist. But he would fight. Like Massaron, Kerne thought, this general of armour did not know how to do anything else.
And the commissar, Von Arnim – he held within him no reservations whatsoever. His narrow, white face looked carved out of marble. In some ways, he reminded Kerne of Jord Malchai. The commissar and the Reclusiarch had both expunged all doubt from their souls. For a brief instant, Kerne almost envied them their blind certainty.
And yet, there was another kind of faith and certainty too. It had to do with one’s place in the scale and portent of things. Strangely, Jonah Kerne felt a kind of unfettered relief within him. The news was bad – it would no doubt become worse. But he did not care. He was here, in this place with his brothers, about to do what all his long life he had been trained and bred to do. What could be wrong with that?
Better this, than to sit upon Phobian in the dark and the snow, listening to wars and rumours of wars pass me by, he thought.
He felt oddly light-hearted. If this be my last fight, then I will make it one worthy of memory.
He looked at his first sergeant. Fornix met his eyes and Kerne knew that they were wholly in agreement. They had always understood each other at times like this.
‘Whatever happens here in the days to come,’ Kerne said, ‘we will make the Imperium remember us.’
It rained that night, an unseasonal event that made the natives of the planet stare wonderingly at the sky.
The last bright contrails of the Ogadai’s wreckage were fading, fattening out into wide ribbons lit up by the red light of the sunset, so that it seemed all the sky was aflame. And they in turn seemed to catch hold of what moisture there was in the atmosphere, so that the cloud thickened about them, and boiled up in toiling thunderheads, slate grey and purple, flickering with lightning.
The thunder echoed about the ruined streets of Askai, and the rain hammered down out of it, settling the dust and rehydrating it into mustard-coloured mud.
And all through the night, the defenders of Askai worked in the rain, building booby-trapped barricades, excavating trenches, constructing strongpoints in the rubble, shifting munitions by the scores of tons.
The Dark Hunters were issued with cameleoline paint, and this they slathered over their armour, covering the midnight-blue livery of the Chapter and even the white axe that was their badge. The synthetic polymers in the paint bonded with the outer alloys of the power armour and took on colour from anything they touched or that surrounded them.
The giant warriors could now stand quite still in the broken cityscape and fade into the rubble, almost to invisibility in the right light.
It was a tactic that the Dark Hunters had utilised often down the years. In fact, there was a legend which held that it was how the Chapter had got its name; a predilection among certain companies of the White Scars Legion for stealth over the fast-flowing tactics of their brethren had seen these Adeptus Astartes peeled off into their own disparate organisation for special missions.
They had fought on joint operations with the Raven Guard Legion, and on their return, the tactics these White Scars had learned from their brethren had become part of the battle-code of their company.
And when the Heresy was over and the time had come for the great Legions to be broken up, the warriors of this singular company had held together, eventually recognised as a full Chapter in their own right.
But that was mere legend.
Kerne’s preoccupations were with the space he had to defend on the ground, and the time he had to prepare it.
Dietrich’s methods had proved sound in the initial invasion, and the Hunters would utilise his defences, build upon them, and strive to hold the same ground the Guard general had clung onto before their arrival, for the same reasons.
But there were certain changes.
The massive walls of the city, with their six gates, would not be abandoned as easily as in the first conflict. Squads of Space Marines and Haradai would be stationed at each gate, to make sure that the enemy did not capture them without warning.
Kerne did not hope to hold the circuit of the walls for long – they were simply too extensive for that – but if the invader wished to bring armour into the city, it would have to come through a gate, and that was something which had to be postponed for as long as possible.
The spaceport was too vulnerable, and the Thunderhawks could not be defended if they were lined up on the sole working launch-pad, so Kerne had the craft dragged into the citadel itself. Once inside, they were brought up through the bowels of the fortress on the great munitions elevators, stripped down, wings folded, and set in place in cleared-out gun-caverns which opened onto the sides of the man-made mountain. Here the craft were prepped for flight once more.
They could be launched only once from these armoured caverns, for there was no way that even Space Marine pilots would be able to fly back inside openings so narrow their wings had only a half-metre clearance on either side. But they would be protected behind the blast-doors until they were needed. They were a last reserve, and if it came to that, a last means of escape from Askai.