‘They’re trying to cut us in half again,’ Brother Kass said. ‘We cannot keep this line whole for much longer.’
‘We must, if we are to hold the Armaments District,’ Jonah Kerne told him. And the entrance to the mines, he thought.
‘I will bring another team of my people up to reinforce you,’ Te Mirah said. Kerne inclined his helm in response.
The eldar witch was playing the game well. Her warriors were fighting and dying beside his own with no hint of treachery as yet. It would remain so until the outcome to Fornix’s expedition was known. After that, there was no telling what these xenos would do.
But he found himself admitting to a grudging respect for the farseer. She fought well, and more than once she had single-handedly turned the tide of a critical combat by plunging into the fray with that wicked spear and the psychic energies she wielded along with it. Kerne had seen her fell an entire squad of Punisher warriors with a dazzling storm of psychic energy. When the time came, she would prove a formidable foe.
She seemed to sense the drift of his thoughts, and was watching him. He guarded his mind as best he could.
‘It is nothing I have not already concluded myself, captain,’ she said. ‘We are allies of convenience only – we both know that.’
He turned away. ‘I must walk the line. Brother Kass, you will remain here with the–’ he almost said witch. ‘With the farseer.’ Keep an eye on her.
Elijah Kass nodded.
Kerne strode off. As he went, he felt the leather pouch which housed Mortai’s banner slap against his thigh. He would not unfurl it, not yet. The banner was for the end, when he needed to give his brethren a last focus. And besides, his brothers were trying to remain unseen – a banner flying above their heads would undo that.
He did long to see it fly, though. To bring some glory to this ugly, desperate fight.
For fully twelve kilometres through the ruins of Askai, the Dark Hunters held the line along with Dietrich’s men and Te Mirah’s eldar. As unlikely a combination of allies as had ever been seen on the battlefields of the Imperium, their positions ebbed and flowed along with the assaults made by the Punisher warbands. The Imperium-held ground resembled an hourglass in shape, the top being the citadel, which although heavily bombed by air attack and artillery was still capable of dealing out an enormous amount of punishment. The bottom was the Armaments District with its massive interior walls and reinforced manufactoria. The waist of the hourglass was the vulnerable spot, comprising what had once been the spaceport. This narrow killing-ground had to be maintained if communications between the two strongholds were to survive, and if the citadel were to continue to receive its nightly convoy of munitions.
The landing pads of the spaceport had long since been torn up into a shell-shattered wasteland, criss-crossed with trenches and pocked with heavy-weapons strongpoints. But it was still more open than the rest of the ruined city, and it was here that the enemy had thrown attack after attack, spearheaded by their armour. With the aid of the Dark Hunters, what was left of Dietrich’s armour had thrown back these assaults, but now his regiment was down to barely half a dozen vehicles, all of them damaged in some way. And Dietrich had lost a thousand men in the last two days.
It could not go on like this – some part of the line would have to be sacrificed so that they could consolidate on the rest.
A sigil popped up in Kerne’s readout that he had not seen in more than forty hours. He broke into a run towards the coordinates, moving faster than any unencumbered human athlete could hope to, and when he ran full-tilt into a squad of Punisher warriors, he barely broke stride.
Biron Amadai’s ancient bolt pistol came up and fired six three-round bursts, downing three of the enemy – then Kerne had barrelled into the others before the bodies even hit the ground, weaving and spinning with the chainsword at full power. He kicked a dead Punisher into two more, decapitated a third, and smashed the butt of the bolt pistol into the skull of the last, just hard enough to disorientate the head inside the ceramite casque. He felt the impact of bolter rounds as they scored his antique armour, and the pain as one pierced his side deep enough to flatten against the carapace which underlay his skin.
He ground the chainsword into the face of the one who had shot him, the blades churning through metal, then flesh and bone. And then he bent and put four more rounds through the heads of the warriors he had knocked down.
The entire skirmish took perhaps twenty seconds, and then Kerne was running again, hissing as his body began to repair itself and stem the bleeding from his side. The flashing sigils in his helm went from red to amber to flickering green again. He blinked on the tactical overlay once more – yes, there was no mistake.
Fornix was back.
He made his way into the Armaments District, all the while keeping track of the counterattack going on up to the north, shifting squads around like a man plugging ten leaks with five fingers. Dietrich’s men made way before him as he strode through the manufactoria, past the roaring machinery and the exhausted, half-starved figures who manned it, until finally he was at the main entrance to the mines. A group of Guardsmen had gathered there, and two Space Marines.
Only two.
One was Heinos, his outline unmistakeable. The other was Fornix, though Kerne would not have known Mortai’s first sergeant without the blinking sigil on the tactical outlay to guide him. The armour of both warriors was scorched black, down to the shining ceramite in some places. In others, it had been eaten away like leprous tissue. Acid damage. Kerne could see by the very way they stood that both his brethren were wounded, and weary beyond any human conception of the word.
But what had happened to the eldar?
On the vox, he said: ‘Apothecary Passarion, to the mines’ entrance, best speed.’ And to the pair of Space Marines before him: ‘Report.’
Fornix unhelmed slowly. His face was haggard, and there was the scar of a still-healing burn down the side of his neck.
‘Well, we got the thing we went for, for what it’s worth. The eldar are all dead – not at our hands – well, not all at our hands. There were wraithlords guarding their damned relic, and they took a lot of beating before they went down.’
‘Our people?’ Kerne asked quietly.
‘Brothers Steyr and Pendar died well. Without them we would not have survived. Brother Gad perished in a stupid accident on the way back.’ Fornix’s face clouded. ‘A slip of the foot, that’s all it was. He went into acid.’
‘Their gene-seed?’ Kerne asked.
‘Lost, all of it.’
The captain sighed. ‘Where is this thing the eldar deem so important?’
‘I have it, captain,’ Brother Heinos said. ‘Tucked in below my servo-arm, out of sight.’
‘Does it look like a weapon, brother – something that could be used against us?’
The Techmarine hesitated a bare second. ‘I would say no. The xenos named Ainoc said it was a repository of eldar souls, and I believe he was not lying. When he found it, his reaction was one of extreme joy – and that was his undoing. If it is a weapon, then it was not one he was able to use. It availed him nothing against the machine-spirits of the things that killed him.’
Kerne nodded. ‘Thank you, brother.’
‘Brother Heinos did well down there,’ Fornix said. ‘He saved my life.’ And he grinned, some of his old fire lighting up his face. ‘It just goes to show, Jonah, Techmarines are good for something after all.’
There was the counterattack to oversee, reserves to move around yet again. Another bloody day on Ras Hanem went down into the dark, and the fighting went on into the night. There was no let-up in it now.
Jonah Kerne called a conference of the Dark Hunters command in the early hours, once the frayed lines had been stabilised somewhat. Brother Malchai was there, as well as Apothecary Passarion, Fornix – his armour now made even uglier by a series of hasty repairs – Finn March, who was the senior sergeant after Fornix, and Elijah Kass, who had finally been persuaded to don cameleoline paint on his armour so that he might not prove to be so much of a bullet-magnet.