I sprang to one side and aimed the shotgun as I fell. Autogun fire chewed up the ground where I was standing. The jumper, worse luck, landed on the far side of the trace of fire and came towards me.
I aimed the shotgun at the man with the rifle and pulled the trigger. The weapon kicked against my shoulder. The shooter fell, his legs cut off at the knees. He screamed and let go of his gun. I twisted, pumping the shotgun as the man with the huge spanner swung it down, intending to shatter my skull.
I wasn’t fast enough. Even as I swivelled the shotgun to bear on him, the power tool had begun its downward arc. I tried to twist myself to one side but slipped in the blood and dust.
My attacker’s head exploded, covering me in brains and body fluids. It happened as if by magic and I wondered for a moment whether Drake had used his psyker powers. Then the same thing happened to another member of the gun-crew who was drawing a bead on Ivan with his sidearm and I realised that my saviour had been Anton.
On his own he seemed to be doing as much damage as the rest of us. I realised that in our own way, on a smaller scale, we were doing what those heretic fanatics down in the valley were doing, providing a distraction while a distant lethal attacker wiped out the people fighting against us.
Bodies fell and we surged up to the gun. Even as we did so, a line of blazing fire cut in front of us. An enemy Hydra, deeper in the position, went up in a ball of hellfire. I glanced over at the gun on the extreme left of the battery and it had wheeled on its mount and was firing across the emplacement and into the other heretic guns. Macharius had seized the first gun and turned it on our enemies. I could see him standing on its side, partially covered by its armoured shield, directing fire deeper into the enemy position.
I laughed and ordered my men to get behind the controls of the weapon we had seized. Soon it too had been turned on the enemy position. It was part of Macharius’s plan that we would not be discovered too soon. The enemy were concentrating their fire on the Leman Russ below and any of their own weapons that went up would be taken as victims of the tank’s response, at least to begin with.
Our captured gun roared as we joined in, sending bursts of armour-piercing shells tearing through the enemy position. In the rage and confusion of battle, we managed to take out all of the enemy guns in our line of sight before anyone noticed us. There were still guns firing at our troops down below but they were out of sight, hidden from us by the curve and roughness of the ridgeline.
A moment later, Macharius came racing up with the rest of his bodyguard. ‘Very good, Lemuel,’ he said. ‘Now we must repeat this at the other side of the emplacement.’
‘Nothing is ever easy,’ muttered Ivan from my side. Anton came loping down from the hillside to join us. He had a satisfied air about him, that of a man with a job well done.
‘I got twelve of them,’ he said as he reached my side.
‘Only a few million more and we’re done then,’ I said. He nodded pleasantly, as if he had no doubt in his ability to kill that many and it was just another day at work. It was all right for him, I thought sourly. He did not have to get into close combat with these heretic frakkers.
‘Soonest done, soonest we get some beer,’ he said.
‘And where the hell are we going to get beer in this forsaken place?’ I asked.
‘Maybe the heretics will have some,’ Anton said, ever hopeful.
Chapter Twenty-Five
We moved along the ridgeline, skipping from the tangled remains of one destroyed enemy gun to the next, using them for cover, killing any of the enemy wounded we encountered. As we rounded the bend, we saw more enemy guns emerging from an arch in the hive side as well as more infantrymen. An unending stream of heretics seemed to be coming from that gate.
I took a deep breath. There was no way we could fight our way through so many of them and no way that they could fail to notice us once our attack began. There were thousands of the enemy pouring out from underground. I realised that even if we had killed ninety-five per cent of the population with the moonfall there were still millions of enemy below us. Not all of them would be soldiers but even if it was one in a hundred we were still colossally outnumbered.
I turned to Macharius for guidance. ‘Sir?’ I said.
‘Take the nearest guns,’ he said. ‘Turn them on the gate. Close it.’
All hope left me. Even if we closed the gate there were still thousands of the foes out there on the ridgeline, more than enough to put paid to our small force. All we could do was lay down our lives so that our comrades would live. Our own were already over.
‘Right you are, sir,’ I said.
The one good thing about being such a small force was that nobody noticed us at first. I doubted I would have if our positions had been reversed. I mean it was madness for fewer than a hundred men to attack an enemy with fifty times their number.
Of course, we had some advantages. Most of the enemy ordinance was pointed at ninety degrees to us, firing down into the huge battle going on below, and that’s where most of the enemy attention was going as well.
I saw officers ordering their men to the front line. They were moving in columns through gaps in the ridgeline, heading down into the battle below, an endless line of human sacrifices offered up to the hungry gods of war, by a High Command who did not care whether they lived or died. I felt a sudden flash of sympathy for them that I quickly quashed. That was no attitude to enter a battle with.
Macharius looked up at the sky as if he expected to see something, glanced at the chrono on his wrist and then gestured for us to begin the attack.
We advanced taking advantage of every patch of shadow, every scrap of cover. We did not want that vast army of enemy faces turning in our direction until the absolute last second.
Anton took up position amid the smashed remains of one gun, lying along its twisted barrel, allowing himself to peek out over the top and set his rifle. Anyone looking at him in the bad light would most likely see only wreckage. They would have to be looking directly at his rifle to see the muzzle flash as well, and if they were looking at it that way they were most likely dead anyway. It was a nice choice for a sniper’s nest and it meant that Anton would most likely outlive the rest of us by a couple of minutes. Until he ran out of ammunition. Even if he wasn’t spotted he would be a lone Imperial soldier on a battlefield surrounded by heretics, in sub-zero conditions, on a world where plague was all too common.
I dismissed that thought. It was pointless worrying about Anton. I had my own skin to think about and Ivan’s and Macharius’s.
The Lord High Commander loped forward like a great stalking cat. In the thunder of battle he did not need to creep silently but I knew he was doing so. He moved as if there were every chance of an alerted enemy sentry overhearing him and still managed to outpace the rest of us.
Next to him was Drake. The inquisitor glided forward over the ground, as if his feet did not quite touch the ground, and when I looked I could see no prints in the dust. His cloak fluttered around him, his shadow performed a sinister dance behind him in the flickering, multi-sourced light. His ten remaining bodyguards moved along in his wake, silent as ever. Some ancient techno-magic had darkened the mirrored face-guards of their helmets so they would not give away their positions. They held their weapons ready to use at any moment.
I wondered if they were still the same guards that had followed Drake back on Karsk, back at the start of our adventures with Macharius. I had never really spoken more than a few words to any of them, never seen them off guard, and never got to know them. I thought perhaps the movements of some were familiar, but that might just be the product of similar training. I was most likely going to die without ever knowing them.