‘Very well.’ Then Kerne looked at the Librarian, who was standing as silent as a stone, staring past him.
‘What is it, brother – what do you see?’
The young epistolary had taken off his helm. Where once his eyes had been cobalt blue, now they had darkened into a grey as flat as old iron. He seemed to have to drag his gaze away from the ranks of the enemy.
‘He is here, brother-captain, upon this planet. Not orbiting above any more, but here in the city with us. He has come to oversee the final act of the conflict.’
‘Good,’ Kerne said with savage emphasis. ‘If he is down here with us in the dirt, then we can kill him. Get inside.’
They trooped in through the adamantium gates, the Baneblade taking half a dozen missile strikes as it went past them. It could barely limp into the citadel under its own power. Dietrich and his men stood around it as it halted, belching smoke, and the general patted the massive tank’s side as though it were a trusted horse.
The rest of the squads came in, still firing, errant rounds sparking and scoring their armour. ‘All present, dead and alive, captain!’ Fornix shouted.
Kerne looked up at the banner he held as Fornix joined him. To one side there stood Te Mirah and her eldar, seventy or eighty of them in their green armour. He looked at the eldar farseer, and she nodded in her tall helm.
‘Shut the gates,’ Kerne ordered. ‘Commissar Von Arnim, you may commence firing the heavy guns.’
The adamantium colossi slammed shut, crushing half a dozen of the foremost enemy warriors on the very threshold of the citadel. There was a moment almost of quiet in the wake of that great echoing boom, and then the thundering of the artillery began.
TWENTY-THREE
Pugna Ultima
The citadel of Askai on Ras Hanem had been built nigh on a millennium before.
Once, in that long-lost era of time before the coming of men to this part of the galaxy, there had been a hill beside a bright, free-flowing river, the Koi. The hill had overlooked the badlands to the west, and the rolling savannahs beyond. This terrain had come into being only in the last few thousand years; before that there had been thick forest and emerald-bright jungle carpeting the planet, and under the trees had walked the eldar.
The cataclysm that had hurled Ras Hanem and the Kargad system through the galaxy had seared the surface of the once fecund world, devastating flora and fauna, and destroying the ancient civilisation which had named the planet Vol-Aimoi. The eldar had fled the unstable system in a massed fleet of their beautiful ships, but not before burying the device which protected their dead deep in the earth of Vol-Aimoi.
They had meant to come back and retrieve it once the turmoil had died away, to begin again and rebuild their world. But, beset by the Chaos fleets and armies which teemed out of the newly opened Eye of Terror, harried by the advancing crusades of the Imperium of Man, they had never managed to return. And so, even their long memories had lost all knowledge of the forgotten world, even as its last exiles were hunted down and destroyed in a hundred battles over a thousand years. The eldar who had lived on Vol-Aimoi became extinct, and all record of them was lost in those tumultuous centuries.
Millennia passed. Men arrived near the star they named Kargad, and took the system as their own.
They landed at the foot of the hill, beside the river, and on that hill they built their first base, while they surveyed the planet and discovered the deep-buried riches of its ores. They built their houses and workshops and fledgling manufactoria under the fortifications on the hill, and grew in number.
The years came and went, and the settlement by the river grew into a city, and spawned others across the world that men now named Ras Hanem. The city was constantly enlarged, rebuilt and redesigned, until it was decided that Ras Hanem was important enough to warrant a major construction project. The fortress on the hill was dismantled and the hill itself was enlarged, built higher in a gigantic feat of engineering until it became a mountain, faced with igneous stone, braced with adamantium, hollowed out and reared up into a mighty bastion full of guns – a city to itself.
Thus was the citadel of Askai born, and it had stood for a thousand years, home to the ruling house of Ras Hanem, the Riedlings, who in turn were merely descendants of the first explorers and traders set human foot on the planet.
The citadel was a thousand metres tall, and within its hollow heart tens of thousands of people lived and worked and hoped and hated and loved and died, while below them the city of Askai sprawled out at its feet, and underneath it the mines of the Administratum delved ever deeper, seeking the precious ores which fed the war machine of mankind.
Until the Punishers came.
Now, the citadel of the Riedlings was under siege. It was the last remaining outpost of the Imperium of Man in the entire system, and though it had originally been built with such trials in mind, the long years of peace had atrophied many of the systems and mechanisms of the defence.
Manufactoria buried in the mountain’s foundations had fallen into disuse because the Armaments District with its massive production lines was only a few kilometres away. Food stores and water purification plants had been neglected under the latest and last scion of the Riedlings, and the defences had been allowed to run down in the years before the present catastrophe.
It was in this place that Mortai Company and its allies awaited the final assault of the massed Chaos hordes.
‘Si vis pacem, para bellum,’ Brother Malchai said. ‘If you wish for peace, prepare for war. A proverb more ancient than the Imperium itself. The men who governed this planet might have done better to learn such ancient wisdom.’
Outside, the endless thump of the siege guns went on, a noise they had ceased to notice. It was part of the music of their lives, as unremarkable as the hot, humid air they breathed.
The blast doors of the citadel had been shut, and the fortress-mountain had closed itself off from the world, and the fury that was outside. The stone slopes of the mountain thundered with the endless bombing runs of the Stormbirds, and down at the gates, the Punishers were still trying to batter their way through the massive adamantium defences, like a bull charging at a cliff face. They had not stopped for twenty-six days, now, and the ancient gates of the citadel were still intact, but the stone in which they were embedded was crumbling away under that relentless barrage.
‘Brother Heinos,’ Jonah Kerne said. ‘How long do you give it before they break through?’
The Techmarine looked up at the vast gleaming mechanisms which upheld the stark adamantium of the gates. The air before him was full of dust, but the specialised auspex built into his helm saw through it, scanned the microscopic and not so microscopic cracks in the metal and stone.
‘I estimate that given three more days of this, the surrounding material will lose all integrity. The gates will not break, but what holds them in place will crumble.’
‘Three days!’ Fornix exclaimed. ‘Well, it’s good to be forewarned.’
‘What about our repairs?’ Brother Malchai asked. ‘General Dietrich has had his engineers all over these gates day and night for the last four weeks.’
‘It is the larger area that is in question,’ the Techmarine told him implacably. ‘It cannot be adequately repaired unless this entire section of the mountain is demolished and rebuilt. As it is, captain, I recommend that we abandon this section of the lower fortress. It has become unstable and could collapse of its own accord at any time.’
Kerne walked away from his brethren and stared up at the tall gates. They had been shored up from within time after time, and rockcrete had been poured around the massive hinge-supports, but outside the Punishers had brought up two colossus cannons and they had been pounding the citadel unceasingly.