Fornix leapt forward and clawed one of the eldar to pieces with his power fist, then shot the other in the neck with his bolt pistol. He leapt back again as a wraithlord lowered its arm and blasted out another stream of promethium. It missed him, but caught Brother Pendar full-on, and the Space Marine became a walking fireball. His tortured voice came over the vox.
‘Back, brothers. I will take it with me.’
He stumbled forward, deliberately entangling himself in the legs of the wraithlord. As it bent to seize him a series of explosions went off – the Space Marine had been holding a whole fistful of grenades – and the wraithlord was blown clear off its feet. It began to right itself in that sea of flame, but as it did, Fornix ran forward, set one foot on its head and plunged the power fist deep into the armoured skull. There was a flash of blue discharge, and its struggles ended.
The chamber was an inferno, and in it the last, crippled wraithlord struggled to crawl towards the remaining Dark Hunters. Brother Gad emptied an entire magazine into its head, and at last it went still.
Fornix came out of the flames, burning, supporting Brother Heinos. He and Gad rolled the Techmarine in the dust to put out the flames and then did the same themselves. The fire had shorted out some systems and eaten into the ceramite plating of their armour. Inside Fornix’s helm, he could smell burning rubber and flesh. He felt the pain flaring at a dozen spots on his body, but blanked it out.
‘Just us three?’ he asked, breathing heavily.
‘I have it, first sergeant,’ Heinos said. He opened his servo-arm and they saw that the Infinity Circuit was cradled there, untouched by flame or violence, inviolate and disturbingly beautiful. Fornix dragged his eyes away from the seductive rippling patterns within the device.
‘Can you walk?’
The Techmarine levered himself to a sitting position. Smoke rose from the joints of his armour, and the ceramite looked as though something had eaten it away in long thin stripes. A rash of shuriken wafers were protruding from the metal, their edges still glowing red hot.
‘I can walk. I must. Without me, you will not reach the surface again.’
Fornix looked back at the roaring oven the Circuit chamber had become. Its stones were creaking in the heat. The eldar were black, mummified shapes scattered across the floor, and the armour of his dead brethren was lit from within as the flames consumed their bodies.
‘Let us leave this xenos filth, brothers. Our dead we will bear off in memory. There is nothing more to be done down here.’
TWENTY-ONE
Servo an Sacramentum
The lines were contracting, eaten away inexorably hour upon hour, day on day. And those who defended the line grew ever fewer.
‘You’re sure the message got through?’ Kerne demanded.
The eldar farseer crouched beside him in the shell-hole and rubbed at the blood which had dried on the blade of her spear.
‘Thirty-six hours ago, by this world’s reckoning,’ Te Mirah said. ‘It was acknowledged by a powerful psyker of your kind. He had a name…’ she thought upon it. ‘Grey? No, Graes.’
‘Graes Vennan?’
‘Yes, that was it. He did not welcome our attempts to communicate – we had to try three times, using the words you gave us, before he would accept that we were not bent on mischief.’
‘And the return message?’
‘Two words – Umbra Sumus.’ Te Mirah cocked her head to one side in puzzlement. ‘I take it they mean something to you?’
‘You could say that,’ Kerne said, and he smiled inside his helm.
‘Captain, it will be some time before your people can come to your relief – even with a fair passage through the warp.’
‘We are talking weeks, not days. I know that. But you have fulfilled your half of the bargain, this I acknowledge.’
‘It remains to be seen if it is possible to complete the transaction.’
‘It has been two days since our people entered the mines. That is not yet indicative of either success or failure.’
‘Agreed. And the Circuit is still in existence. I can feel it – though it is faint now, the music. As though it is being constrained in some way.’
Te Mirah did not voice her other concern. The mind of Ainoc was shrouded from her now – the warlock’s psychic imprint had dimmed with the passage underground, which was to be expected, but now there was no sense of him at all, and this disquieted her.
If these mon-keigh meant to play her in the same way she had played them, well then things would take a very unpleasant turn indeed.
She came back to the present. In her mind she felt the presence of her people, fighting in the smoking ruins ahead. Callinall was dug in there with her rangers, picking off the enemy while the guardian warriors laid down a withering stream of shuriken fire.
To their left, a company of the human militia were fighting, their lines centred on three heavy-weapons positions, and to the right was a squad of the Adeptus Astartes, barely to be seen despite their bulk. They fired and then moved and then fired again, keeping the enemy assault off balance.
Te Mirah had seen the Adeptus Astartes fight before, on other worlds and in other centuries, but she had never seen tactics such as those these Dark Hunters utilised. They were familiar to her – the Space Marines kept moving, then struck from carefully chosen concealed positions, before moving again. And they relied on their camouflage as much as on their armour. These were tactics that an eldar autarch could appreciate, and their proponents fascinated her despite herself.
‘I never thought you would agree,’ she found herself saying to Jonah Kerne. Honesty is becoming a habit with me, she thought even as the words left her mouth.
‘To our bargain? I knew if I did not that I would be consigning my brothers in Mortai to defeat, and this world to destruction,’ Kerne said.
‘Your skull-faced colleague does not see it that way.’
‘Brother Malchai is a Reclusiarch, a guardian of faith and orthodoxy. It is his mission to keep my brethren pure and untainted.’
‘He would rather see them dead than cooperating with xenos – he has said as much.’
‘Yes. But I am the force commander here. It is my word which is spoken last. My decision stands.’
‘Captain, I sense that even if you prevail upon this planet, and emerge somehow victorious from this tide of blood, the bargain you have made with me will come back to haunt you.’
‘I don’t doubt it,’ Jonah Kerne said simply. ‘But if it means Mortai survives, then I will count it worth the trouble.’
Elijah Kass joined them, his blue armour smeared with filth. Both he and Brother Malchai had thus far refused to don the cameleoline paint, and the Librarian stood out against the dun browns and greys of the battlefield.
‘Another armoured column is forming up to the south,’ he said, staring at Te Mirah in some distaste. ‘General Dietrich is mustering his remaining tanks to meet it, but he wants heavy-weapons support.’
Kerne blinked on the tactical readouts within his helmet. ‘Quincus squad, establish a blocking position three hundred metres to your north-west. Dig in the meltaguns and prepare to support the Guard. Acknowledge.’
‘I hear you, captain.’ That was Brother-Sergeant Kagan. His squad was down to six battle-brothers, but they were all Kerne could spare from the main line.
‘Tell me when you are in position, Kagan.’
‘Acknowledged. Moving now.’