The brothers in the squad accompanying the captain are mown down around him. A broken fragment of armour, outflung from a toppling Ultramarine, gashes Phrastorex’s right eye socket, damaging the optics. The impact snaps his head sideways.
It snaps him awake, out of his stupor, out of his shocked daze.
He rises, aiming his weapon.
The crimson Space Marines are advancing towards him, up the blood-soaked slope. He can hear them chanting. Their weapons are blazing.
‘You bastards!’ he yells as a headshot slays him.
At the top of the slope, in the deeper forest, Ekritus turns as he hears the gunfire.
He doesn’t understand what he’s seeing.
Around him, other men turn and stand, dumbfounded. They watch the slaughter unfolding as though it is some trick or illusion that will be explained later.
Men in the stunned formation around Ekritus start getting hit. Heads snap back. Carapaces explode. Brothers are flung backwards. Others sag, life leaking out of them.
Ekritus shakes, too stunned to make a decision. What he’s seeing is impossible. Impossible.
He sees Phrastorex, far below.
He sees him rise, gun in hand. In the wrong hand.
Then he sees him smashed backwards, headshot. Dead.
Ekritus roars in fury. He starts down the slope, into the hail of gunfire. Anchise grabs him and stops him.
‘No,’ the sergeant shouts. ‘No!’
He shakes Ekritus and turns him.
Titans advance through the forest to their right. Trees crash down, uprooted or snapped by the massive fighting engines. War horns boom. Ekritus smells the stink of void shields.
The Titans begin to shoot.
Sergeant Hellock shouts orders. No one is listening.
Bale Rane stands, open-mouthed, dazed by the overload of shock. Men run in all directions. Fireballs scream down out of the blood-clotted sky and explode all around them. Rane tenses and ducks as the pieces of orbital debris swoop over and hit. A kitchen tent explodes on the far side of the parade ground. The medicae section is thrown into the air as though mines have been triggered beneath it.
Each blast makes Rane flinch, but his eyes never leave the main wonder. A ship just crashed about thirty kilometres west of them. A whole ship. It’s sitting there now like a newly raised mountain range, broken, smoking. Ripples of explosions fire-cracker across its fractured hull.
It’s beyond anything he can imagine. It’s too big to be real.
All he can think of is Neve on the far side of the river. She’ll be scared. She should be alive; he reassures himself of that, at least. The starship fell on the Kalkas side of the river. Numinus was spared, though debris is fireballing the whole region. Whoever knew there was so much stuff up there in space that could fall out of it? She’ll have gone to her aunt’s, most likely. She’s a smart girl. She’ll have gone to her aunt’s and got in the cellar. Safe as houses.
Rane swallows hard.
He realises he doesn’t love her. He probably never did. He sees that with clarity, suddenly. It was all so easy, so romantic. He was going to be a soldier, and go off with the Army muster, so their time was precious. They’d probably never see each other again. So it was easy. It was easy to commit. It was easy to make grand gestures when nothing had to last. Everything was romantic. Everything was poignant. Everything took on a significance because they had so little time. They got married. It was like a huge send-off. Everyone cried. So romantic. So romantic.
So unreal. As unreal and unlikely as a broken starship sitting where Kalkas Fortalice used to be. As unreal as this whole day.
It’s as though he’s gone from a daydream into a living nightmare where everything makes more sense.
Krank knocks him over.
‘What the hell–?’ Rane gasps.
Something that is almost definitely a wheel from a battle tank, glowing red hot, has come bouncing across the compound, flattening tents and water bowsers. It would have mowed him down, but for Krank.
‘We’re moving!’ yells Krank.
‘Where?’
‘The dug-outs!’ Sergeant Hellock is shouting. ‘Get into the dug-outs!’
That makes no sense either. There are several thousand troopers in the immediate zone, and a few dozen dug-outs, constructed for air raids as per regulations. And if another starship falls on them, a bastard hole in the ground isn’t going to save them anyway.
‘Look!’ Trooper Yusuf calls out. ‘Look at the wire!’
They look at the fence dividing their compound from the Army auxiliaries serving the XVII. They were chanting earlier. Now they’re up against the fence. They’re pressing pale hands and woeful faces against the metal link. They’re calling out. Rane can see flames licking on the far side of the neighbouring compound.
‘They’re trapped,’ Hellock says. ‘Bloody bastards. They’re trapped in there. They can’t get out.’
Some of the men run forward to see if they can open the connecting gate.
‘Wait,’ says Rane. ‘Don’t.’
They’re too close. His squad mates are too close to the wire, too close to the pale, staring faces.
The fence goes down. It’s been cut in places, and it simply falls flat on the ground, jingling and rattling. The foreign auxiliaries spill over into the compound of the Numinus 61st.
‘What the bastard hell is this?’ Hellock says.
The foreigners have guns. Rifles. Side arms. Blades. Hafted weapons. They’ve got bastard spears.
The first shots take out the nearest Numinus troops. They buckle and drop. The heathens are howling as they charge in. One rams a spear through Yusuf’s gut. Yusuf screams like no one ought to ever have to scream, and the scream carries on, in broken sections, as the heathen twists and jerks the haft. Seddom, another man Rane has got to know, takes a las-round to the cheek, and his head goes a peculiar shape as he falls over. Zwaytis is shot as he turns to run. Bardra is stabbed repeatedly. Urt Vass is shot, then Keyson, then Gorben.
Rane and Krank start to run. Haspian turns to flee with them, but he trips over Seddom, and then the heathens are on him, pounding him to death with spears like washer women using beetles at the river side.
Hellock screams out a curse, draws his autopistol and fires. He makes the first active loyalist kill of the Battle of Calth, though the fact is not remembered by posterity. He shoots a heathen with a spear and puts him down dead.
Then a spear goes through his arm and another splits his thigh, and he falls. He’s screaming as they pin him to the ground, screaming every insult he can dredge up.
The Ushmetar Kaul pour past, slaughtering his men. Hellock, through his rage and pain, realises they are chanting again.
One of the bastards pinning him bends down to slit his throat with a knife, but another bastard stops him.
Criol Fowst looks down at the man his soldiers have pinned. An officer. Rank has value, ritual significance.
He can use the wounded sergeant. There are things that will have to be fed, after all.
Ventanus carries Arbute through the burning port complex, but she directs the way. Selaton and the seneschal’s aides follow them, escorted by Amant and his squad.
‘This way,’ she says. ‘Down that ramp. Down there.’
There are two huge listening pylons ahead of them, scaffold-frame monsters with a dish receiver set between them. It’s old stuff, very basic, probably constructed by the first pioneers when they began the Calth colonies. It’s military grade, though. No frills. Built to last.
‘My father worked the port for thirty years. I spent time here. This was part of the original port authority traffic system, before the Mechanicum arrived and set up a proper manifold. It should have been scrapped a century ago, but they kept it serviced.’