Ventanus can feel the heat seething inside him like a fever. Since the fighting broke out, he’s taken about eighteen minor wounds, including a through and through las-hit to the meat of his right thigh, a fracture to a bone in his forearm, and a crushed fifth finger. The others are knocks, scars, and serious concussion-transmitted bruising.
His metabolism is cranking up, trying to compensate, trying to fight or delay pain, trying to maintain peak performance, trying to accelerate healing and repair. The energy debt has raised his body temperature by several degrees. He is flash-burning body fat fuel reserves. He knows he will soon need hydrolytes and additional pain-buffers if he is going to retain his battlefield edge.
He looks at the tank again. Why hasn’t it fired? Why–
The Baneblade abruptly revs its powerful engine plant, throbs jets of black exhaust into the air, and starts a rapid reverse. Ventanus can hear its track sections clattering. Its massive hull rocks tail-to-nose, and its main turret begins to traverse to the left, the battle cannon elevating.
The host of brotherhood warriors mobbing around it has to break frantically to avoid being crushed by its hasty redeployment.
What’s it doing? Is it turning? Is it turning?
There’s something in the oily fog. Something to the north-west.
The Word Bearers Baneblade fires its battle cannon. The muzzle-shock is huge, and the pressure smack puffs dust up from the ground all around it. The shell spits into the fog, creating a corkscrew ripple that slowly dissolves. Ventanus does not hear it hit.
But he hears the response.
There is an oscillating scream of energy and pressure, accompanied by a micro-pulse of electromagnetics. A thick beam of blinding energy shears out of the fog and strikes the Baneblade. The impact shakes the tank, all three hundred tonnes of it. It shakes it. It rattles it like a tin toy. It rocks it off the ground for a second and skids it sideways. Dozens of brotherhood warriors perish under its violently dislodged mass.
The energy beam bangs painfully as it connects. Huge chunks of armour plating eject, some spinning high into the air. Half the turret structure is burned away. Smoke begins to plume, and then gutters and pours up and out of the damaged section. The Baneblade shudders. Ventanus can hear it attempting to restart its main drive, stalled by the body-blow. He can hear the multi-fuel plant gagging and choking.
A second energy beam, bright as the first, scores out of the fog and misses the tank by a few metres. It hits the ground, spontaneously excavating a huge trench of superheated, fused rock, and incinerating two dozen of the brotherhood and four of the Word Bearers. Other cultists caught in the immediate target zones scream as the secondary heat-sear ignites their robes and their ammo.
The third beam, coming just a moment after the second, kills the Baneblade. It hits the hull square, under the throat of the turret, and the tank ruptures and explodes. For a millisecond, it resembles one of the wood-and-canvas vehicle dummies, little more than covered frame tents, are used in basic training exercises by the Army. It looks like a tank dummy where the wind has got up under the hem of the cover tarp and billowed it out off the underframe, lifting it, twisting the painted outline and edges.
Then the internal blast comes, sudden and bright, and hot and vast, and the twisted outline of the tank vanishes, atomised.
Two Shadowsword tanks plough out of the fog, roiling it around their cobalt-blue hulls.
Cobalt-blue. Cobalt-blue, wearing the white and gold heraldry of the Ultima.
Land Raiders and Rhinos churn through after them, then a trio of Whirlwinds, and a walking line of Ultramarines, forty bodies wide. They fire as they advance on the Word Bearers positions from the north, passing the smoking crater-grave of the Baneblade. Two or three bikes and speeders scoot after the massive battle tanks, romping over the churned-up ground.
The brotherhood formations at the head of the bridge baulk, under fire from a new angle. Hundreds are slaughtered where they stand. Some leap into the corpse-choked ditch to evade the hammering fire of Land Raiders. The Shadowswords are already firing into the fog, targeting high-value Word Bearers assets hidden from the palace by the haze. Their main guns screech out columns of energy that cook through the mist vapour. Objects in the blanket of fog explode. Flames gust high into the air over the mist cover. The smell in the air changes, like the turn from summer to autumn. New energies, new machines, new chemical interactions.
Full-scale battle is joined. For the first time since the attack on the palace began, the Word Bearers force is thrown into a defensive mode, prosecuted hard by an unexpected, mobile foe.
The cultist warriors break. Their chanting stops. Behind the first walking line of Ultramarines is a second, and a third. Their gold and blue armour is slightly dulled by the atmospheric conditions, but still it gleams. Salvation never looked so splendid. Death never looked so noble.
The cultists begin to flee. They run south down the earthwork, or flee into the mist. Those trying to follow the earthwork line, picking their way, scrambling, draw fire from the wall. Sparzi’s troopers and Arook’s skitarii lace them with opportunist weapons-fire, dropping them like sticks. Some turn back, and then turn back again, pinned and bracketed by gunfire that creeps in and slays them. Bodies slither and tumble into the death-pit of the ditch.
Ventanus sends an order to the colonel to suspend artillery. He wants to ensure the counter-strike has an unimpeded run into the enemy formation.
‘Captain Sydance,’ says Selaton, noting a standard and pointing.
‘The 4th,’ Ventanus agrees. He is surprised by the level of emotion he registers. It’s not just relief from the physical hazard. It’s honest pride of association. His company. His company.
It’s a heterogeneous mix, in all truth. Sydance has composed his battlelines out of men from several XIII Legion companies. All of them were assembled at the Erud muster. He’s patched holes and losses in the 4th Company structure with reinforcements from other broken units. One of the Shadowswords is an 8th Company asset, two of the Land Raiders are from 3rd. Ventanus notes the battle colours of Captain Lorchas, the second officer of the 9th.
The palace defenders watch whatever is visible. Most of the fighting boils back into the fog. Long-range armour duels rip through the cloudy murk. Nearer at hand, the Ultramarines finally dismember the last of the cult resistance, and engage in vicious close-quarter melee with the warriors of the XVII.
To their credit, the Word Bearers do not break like their chanting followers. They have significant numbers – a two-or three-company strength, by Ventanus’s estimate – and even caught out of position and by surprise, they dig in. From the savagery of Sydance’s assault, 4th Company and its reinforcing elements have seen too much already today to think about quarter. Ventanus wonders – dreads – what they might have witnessed and experienced out at Erud Station as the main part of the treachery broke. Did the Word Bearers encamped alongside the Ultramarines zones just turn? Did they simply rise and draw their weapons, and begin killing, without notice or warning?
He is sure they did. Ventanus is sure the Word Bearers have nothing but the absolute extermination of the XIII as an objective.
You do not just kill the Ultramarines Legion.
Lorgar’s barbarians would not have risked a fair fight. They would have gathered every advantage that surprise, deceit and entrapment could offer. They would have wanted to blitz and kill their enemy, kill him before he even realised he was an enemy.
It did not work. It did not work. The XIII has been hurt. The last ten hours on Calth might even have mortally wounded the Legion to such an extent that it will never fully recover, and, as a consequence, will always be a weaker, smaller fighting force.