Malchai sawed a hand to one side, a gesture of refusal. ‘It is yours now, Jonah. May it bring you some of the faith and valour of Amadai himself.’
It was a princely gift. A gesture of truce between them, perhaps. Jonah Kerne nodded. There was no need to say more.
Night had fallen when the first landings began. There was no preparatory bombardment, but the clear star-spattered sky above Askai came suddenly to life with new constellations, dozens of afterburners firing in low orbit, and then the fiery contrails of craft making re-entry to the atmosphere.
As these invaders became clear on the augur systems of the defences, so the defenders puzzled themselves trying to fathom what exactly they were. Elijah Kass, who knew his history, was able to identify them.
‘Stormbirds,’ he told Jonah Kerne. ‘I did not think such craft still existed in the galaxy – the model is tens of thousands of years old. It was used during the Great Heresy.’
‘What do they carry?’ Kerne asked the Librarian.
‘A full company of Adeptus Astartes in each one, or the equivalent.’
They were standing in the command centre at the heart of the citadel. Scores of human technicians were already linking the augur-readings into the firing resolutions of the big guns.
Kerne turned to General Dietrich, who stood beside him.
‘General, when you are ready, I believe you may open fire.’
‘My lord,’ Dietrich growled, ‘it will be a pleasure.’
He spoke into the vox-receiver. ‘All batteries, engage targets at will. Fire for effect.’
Askai was lit up. From the gun-caverns of the citadel and hidden positions on the ground the fire leapt up into the night sky in skeins and streams of light. The enemy squadrons came out of orbit to be met with a hail of kinetic and energy weaponry.
The defenders looked up to watch a sea of flame erupt above them, turning night into day, the stuttered flashes of the explosions merging into one, the roar of the barrage a stunning thunder, something which could be felt deep in the chest, vibrating flesh and bone and shaking dust into the air in a pale haze.
They were on target. The first flight of enemy ships was smashed into oblivion, six of the huge craft impacted by missile and plasma beam, to be knocked into spinning fragments.
But more were coming. And now that the batteries had revealed themselves, others were peeling off to launch their own payloads in counter-battery fire.
A duel began. Stormbirds heavy with ordnance came lancing out of the upper atmosphere in near vertical trajectories, to drop heavy clusters of old-fashioned iron bombs on gun-batteries that had given away their positions. As they pulled up – and many did not, but hurtled to the ground in vast explosions – they launched missiles and sprayed out fans of flares and smoke to confuse the targeting arrays below.
The ground rippled in a staggered, shattering welter of destruction. But Kerne’s people had dug in deep, and while several of the gun crews were knocked out, most continued to fire as the Stormbird bombers hauled their huge hulls up into the sky again. Fire followed them relentlessly. The blossoming smoke was lit up by it so that it seemed a storm was hovering directly over the city, lit up by red and yellow and green lightning.
Out of this thundercloud the troop-carriers arrived. Close on the tail of the bombers, they came shrieking down at high speed, deployed thrusters at the last possible moment, and slammed into the rubble and broken stone of the city below them like slab-sided meteors hurled to earth. They dropped their ramps, and mobs of huge armoured figures boiled out of them like a tide of giant cockroaches, barbed, lit with hellish eyes, roaring.
The Stormbirds kept coming. They lost one in three of their number, but never hesitated. Many careered through the sky, half shot-to-pieces, then belly-flopped in the midst of the city and were broken open like tin cans.
Incredibly, after these crashes, dozens of their occupants still crawled forth, and began fighting with whatever and whoever they found around them.
Perhaps five thousand Punisher troops were landed in that first wave. They fanned out, and began making for the gates in the surrounding blast-walls of Askai – the invincible adamantium gates which stood intact after all the months of warfare, and which had not been opened since the beginning of it all.
The Punishers assaulted the bunkers and strongpoints which guarded the gates from within the city, and began chewing them up, pouring over the terrified Hanemite Guard who manned them.
These unfortunates, the living and the dead, were dismembered, and the Punishers took their limbs and heads and gnawed on them, laughing, then daubed their black and yellow armour with the blood. They clambered over the locking mechanisms of the gates like lice seeking warmth, and began to hammer here and there in a bid to open them, ignoring the volleys of lasgun fire that sizzled in the air around them.
At the main western gate a group of six shadows, bulky but swift, flowed along the ruined street towards the gatehouse where dozens of the enemy stood, garbling amongst themselves, shooting at the sky, and bickering over the remains of the dead defenders like dogs quarrelling over meat.
It was Finn March and what remained of Primus. The wounded battle-brothers of his squad who had remained on the Ogadai for treatment were all gone along with that ancient ship, and it had seared his cold and bitter hearts to think of his brothers dying in such a hopeless, useless fashion. Now he meant to avenge their names.
The vox was cracking and slurring like a badly received wireless station, but March spoke anyway.
‘Captain, Primus at western gate. They are trying to open it. Will engage as ordered.’
No answer. It mattered not.
March did not need to look at his brothers. They fanned out around him in their cameleoline-daubed armour, as much a part of the darkened street as the corpses and the broken stone. Whatever noise they made was lost in the fighting which now was flooding the city.
‘Brother Terciel, go right and cover,’ March said. Terciel was from Novus Company, and carried a heavy bolter. Without reply he darted sideways and rested the weapon on an outcrop of rockcrete. He lifted the ammo belt, checked that all was in order and then said: ‘Ready.’
‘Fire after me. Targets left to right. Three-round bursts for the first two, then empty your magazines. Terciel, pick up fire as we reload.’
They crouched in the ruins, watching with dark hatred the cavorting, blood-painted ranks of their enemies ahead, only some hundred and fifty metres away.
Finn March picked his targets, blinking on them one by one so that they queued up in his targeting software. He aligned his bolter casually, and said not a word before opening fire.
At that range, even power armour could not withstand the heavy self-propelled bolter rounds, and the wargear of the enemy was not well maintained. March’s first burst blew off the head of a Punisher sergeant. His second opened up the intestines of another, the guts pouring black and steaming down the thing’s thighs as his belly-plate was blown open in jagged shards.
Then the rest of the squad came into line with their bolters. They did not speak. They did not utter a battle-cry. They chose their targets and obliterated them with serene detachment, as though it were an exercise on the range.
Terciel on the heavy bolter took up the fight as his brothers began to change magazines. The big weapon jumped against his shoulder as he hosed down the enemy, tracer spitting in bright fiery arcs across the street, bouncing off rockcrete and rocketing into the air, skittering along the ground like stones spun across water.
At least a dozen Punishers had gone down in the first instance, and more had collapsed as they took rounds in arms and legs. These were crawling, yowling like fiends until another round was sent through their brain.