‘I thank you for that,’ Kerne said formally.
‘Your superiors will not thank you for what you have done here – you know that. Your association with me will seem close to heresy in their eyes.’
‘That is a problem for another day,’ Kerne said with a shrug. ‘My task is to preserve this fortress.’
‘Even at the cost of your own life.’
‘It is what I was made for,’ Kerne told her. And there was nothing more to be said.
The cold season was moving on, and the mornings were not quite as chill and dark as they had been. The colossus guns halted their firing for a few hours before every dawn so that their crews might perform essential maintenance and reset their aiming mechanisms, which the concussion of the endless barrage shook off target.
That last morning, as the Kargad star rose above the Koi-Niro Mountains in the east of the world, a series of massive portals opened in the upper slopes of the citadel, and from those openings there uttered the roar of Mars pattern turbofans spinning to full power.
The teeming host of the Punishers looked up into the brightening sky to see three Thunderhawks erupt out of the side of the mountain above them like startled birds. They plunged down in arrowhead formation, the two wingmen opening up on the ground forces with sponson-mounted heavy bolters and lascannons, while the central craft extended its landing gear and touched down just within the encampment which housed the colossus cannons.
It came down with a roar of dust and fire, and the front ramp dropped at once. Out of the forward hold a group of Space Marines emerged, firing bolt pistols and heavy flamers as they came. When they were all out, the Hawk lifted off again, spraying bolter fire at the astonished denizens of the surrounding camps and dugouts of the enemy.
The other two gunships swooped round in a shrieking arc at low level, and dropped a series of iron bombs on the lines leading up to the colossus encampment, massive fountains of earth and fire erupting in their wake. They left a trail of chaotic destruction behind them, and then soared up into the sky once more to make another run.
But on their second pass the Punishers had collected their wits and began to return fire. The sky became alive with the fiery blossoms of anti-aircraft ordnance. Lascannon beams sizzled skywards, pale in the growing sunlight, and a hail of bolter rounds were flung up from the ground by hundreds of the foe.
The armour of the Thunderhawks shrugged off the light arms, but one was struck by a krak missile under its port wing and at once it jerked askew in the sky, trailing a thick tube of smoke. It still made its second pass, dealing out death and murder in a wide swathe, but it was slower now, and targeted even more fiercely by those below it. The belly of the craft was blown out by a second strike, and the Hawk shuddered in the sky and plunged to the ground in a spiralling cartwheel of massive secondary explosions. In its death throes it sent a Chaos Dreadnought flying through the air like a shattered doll.
The two other Thunderhawks were caught in a net of fire. They pulled up, still strafing the enemy on the ground, but so many rounds were impacting upon them that they were almost invisible in welters of smoke and flashing detonations.
The Dark Hunters forged towards their goal, ignoring the drama in the sky above. They burst through the scattered defenders of the colossus guns like a mailed fist punching through plywood, and were under the shadow of the massive siege weapons within minutes of landing. The surrounding Punisher companies were caught off balance by this wholly unlooked-for attack. Many were unaware that the Hunters were among them; most were still staring at the sky and blasting off tons of ammunition in feral rage.
Kerne caught the arm of a Chaos champion as the armoured warrior sought to brain him with a blow of his power sword. He stabbed his chainsword up, shunting it through the ceramite and fibre-bundles of his enemy until he found the vitals, and the labouring blade churned out the Punisher’s innards in a black spray of shredded viscera.
Around him, grenades were going off, and a promethium blast embroiled a trio of Punisher warriors in a wall of flame. They danced and wriggled in it blindly until Finn March’s squad cut them down with bolt pistol fire.
‘More coming up on the right,’ Fornix said on the vox. ‘Brother Pharnus, cover that arc with the heavy bolter.’
‘Heinos, find the void generators,’ Kerne told the Techmarine. ‘Hunters, give me a perimeter. We must hold them until the thing is done.’
The last Thunderhawk was finally shot out of the sky above them. It careered crazily through the air, but the pilot had enough control of its course to make sure it came down in a dense mass of the enemy. Its destruction wiped out half a Punisher company, and threw up a wall of flame to the south of Kerne’s position.
Brother Heinos’s servo-arm extended. He crouched close by the colossus guns and began tinkering with a series of corroded metal containers from which thick cables snaked. Sparks flew, and the blue flame of his fyceline torch blazed brighter than the sunlight.
‘Primitive,’ he said with contempt as he worked, utterly oblivious to the fighting going on around him.
‘How long, brother?’ Kerne asked him.
‘A few minutes, captain.’
‘Make sure that’s all it is. Brother-Sergeant March, watch your left. Enemy company closing in.’
The Thunderhawks had done their job; the immediate area of the colossus encampment had been blasted clear of the enemy, and in the confusion the Punishers were still not entirely aware of what was going on. But many of the nearest warbands were close enough to see the hated Adeptus Astartes in their midst, and these formations surged forwards with a collective bellow of frenzied hate.
‘They are being directed,’ Elijah Kass said. ‘I feel the will that shapes them. It is very close, now.’
‘Incoming on all sides,’ Fornix said calmly, flexing his power fist. ‘Brothers, today is a good day, a glad day. On this bright morning, we will show this scum how the Dark Hunters conduct themselves on a battlefield. Umbra Sumus.’
‘Umbra Sumus,’ the chorus came back.
And then the first ranks of the Punishers slammed into them.
Instinct and training took over. The enemy warriors in their loathsome approximations of Space Marine armour crashed roaring into the Dark Hunters like an avalanche of unadulterated murder. So intent were the Punishers on coming to grips with their foes that they were getting in one another’s way.
The Dark Hunters shot them down as they closed, kicked them back, shot them again, and then swept out the snarling chainswords. The first wave died there, and their bodies became entangled with the feet of the second.
Grenades went off, bright flashes of deadly white-hot shrapnel that clinked and bit their armour. Out of the corner of his eye, Kerne saw one of Fornix’s pauldrons blown clean off his shoulder, but Mortai’s first sergeant never even paused. He reached out with his power fist, grasped a Punisher by the skull, his fingers sinking into the enemy warrior’s helm, and threw him into the faces of those behind them. He was laughing over the vox as though it were all some enormous joke. His bolt pistol was blackened with firing, and the cameleoline had been scored off his much-patched armour in a dozen places, to show both Hunters blue and shining ceramite beneath.
‘Do you remember me, you scum? I am Fornix of the Dark Hunters. I am your death!’
Brother Kass was beside Fornix in the line, fighting like a man possessed. The psychic hood above his helmet was glowing with blue light, and he wielded a chainsword two-handed, swinging it back and forth in a blur.
They fought with the absolute purity of certain death, something like joy in the knowledge that they were facing hopeless odds, but they were exactly where they were supposed to be, and there was nothing else to think about except that activity which they were best at: killing. They slaughtered the enemy with the vicious economy of veterans, cutting down the Punishers as though the charging foe were nothing but a crop to be reaped. The cameleoline paint on their arms ran dark with blood.