Terek-8-10 switched to manual control and began to swing the Caestus around. The increase in thrust sucked air into the atmospheric intakes, and the loxatl on the fairing was dislodged. It ripped past him, claws squealing on the metal, shrieking an inhuman scream as its tail and one hind leg vanished into the intake.
Terek-8-10 could hear the loxatls already aboard breaking through the compartment hatches under his position. The sickening stink of bad milk grew stronger. He adjusted the ram attitude again, tilting it more steeply, trying to train the magna-melta on the gantries overhead.
He got a decent angle.
‘Cover yourselves,’ he voxed.
Below the ram, the Space Marines backed off, shields raised.
Terek-8-10 had enough power in the heat cannon for three more decent shots. He fired. Part of the overhead girderwork exploded, and droplets of molten metal rained down. The melta blast torched loxatl into blackened, shrivelled shreds that roasted off the gantries like scraps of burning paper.
He fired again. A huge section of the roof gantry, on fire and covered with burning loxatl, fell away, and glanced off the ram on its way to the chamber floor.
The creatures on board were in, right below him. They had torn open the compartment hatches. They fired up into the roof of the stowage bay and razor shrapnel from the flechette rounds burst through the floor of the pilot’s position, shredding Terek-8-10’s legs and groin. He felt the ice-pain of tiny hypervelocity metal shards travelling up through his torso, bursting organs, severing augmetics, and liquidising blood vessels. He felt them in the sacs of his hearts. He felt his lungs collapsing. Blood filled his throat. The loxatl underneath his position, chattering and squealing, kept shooting, blasting shot after shot up into the pilot’s position.
With his last double heartbeat, the pilot-servitor triggered the afterburners.
Kolea’s eyes opened wide. It was one of those sights he would never forget. He’d seen some things in his life as a Guardsman, seen some things before that too. This was a new brand on his memory.
He saw the Space Marines’ boarding ram, the Caestus, damaged and blackened, crawling with loxatl. He saw it tilt, nose up, pointing at the tangled, complex ceiling structure of the depot chamber, a structure that was dripping with xenos. The loxatl were spilling out of the roof space like maggots out of bad meat.
Kolea was at the top of the makeshift scaling ladder, poised on the lip of the puncture hole. His men were behind him, yelling at him to go on, jump down, make way for them. He had to stick out his hand to steady himself. The ragged metal lip of the hole was hot.
‘What can you see?’ Rerval was yelling, from the girder behind him. ‘Major, what can you see?’
He could see the tilted Caestus, engines pulsing, a writhing mass of loxatl across its upper hull, some falling off, tails lashing. He could see the Space Marines and their weapon servitors on the floor of the chamber below, blasting at the grey reptiles as they rushed in from all sides.
He could smell rancid milk and crushed mint.
‘Major?’
Kolea watched as the Caestus shuddered. It fired up at the ceiling vault, bringing down huge chunks of machinery in showers of flame and sparks. Burning loxatl dropped like comets. It fired again. A massive pylon cylinder broke free of its ceiling mount and came crashing down, strung with fracturing gantries and doomed loxatl. The huge structure, streaming smoke and flames, barely missed the Caestus as it fell. It hit the chamber floor so hard that Kolea felt the shockwave shake the girders he was standing on. It almost crushed one of the Space Marines, the towering Silver Guard Eadwine.
Eadwine hurled himself full length to avoid the impact. He landed in the midst of recoiling loxatl, and immediately had to kill them to protect himself. The pylon cylinder toppled after the impact, and fell on its side with a second crash that kicked up sparks and a blizzard of burning scraps. It rolled, burning.
The Caestus was almost overwhelmed. Its afterburners lit. The rockets roared with scorching white heat. Laden with loxatl, the ram accelerated up into the roof.
That’s when the real shockwave came. Kolea felt it in his lungs. He felt it punch his ribcage. He felt it hammer the deck and the compartment walls. He felt it knock his legs away.
The Caestus tore into the vault, triggering a vast fireball that ripped through the ceiling structures, destroying them. Macerated, burning loxatl were hurled in every direction. The expanding fireball, a rolling wave, lapped out across the ceiling of the vault and down the walls. Falling, Kolea felt the heat of it.
Wrecked but essentially still in one piece, the Caestus fell back out of the roof, bringing the ceiling down with it. Energy crackled and sparked like lightning around one of its twisted engine sections. A ramp door tumbled off. The air was full of flames.
The collapsing wreckage hit the chamber floor with a numbing crash.
Kolea hit the floor too. The blast had smacked him off the girder into the depot chamber. He jumped up, dazed, gazing at the devastation ahead of him.
‘Major. Major Kolea. Respond!’ Rerval was yelling over the link.
‘Get in here!’ Kolea yelled back. ‘C Company get in here. Now!’
He raised his weapon and ran forwards. Behind him, Ghosts were leaping in from the rim of the puncture.
Eadwine got up, throwing wreckage aside. A loxatl reared up at him, and he killed it with a headshot.
‘Status!’ he demanded over his helmet link.
‘Alive!’ the voice of Sar Af snapped back, a vox crackle.
Holofurnace didn’t answer, but Eadwine knew that was because the Iron Snake always had something better to do. Eadwine could see him, thirty metres away across the piled and burning rubble, fighting at close quarters with a dozen of the surviving loxatl. Holofurnace’s spear circled and stabbed, killing them one by one, leaving arcs of xenos blood in the air behind it.
According to Eadwine’s visor display, they had lost one of the gun servitors, crushed under the fall. Regrettable, but an acceptable loss. He activated his helmet’s vox-record.
‘Note for posterity,’ he said, turning to despatch another pair of lunging reptiles. ‘The selfless sacrifice and attention to duty of–’
Eadwine paused, shooting out the spine of a leaping loxatl. He couldn’t remember which ancient pilot servitor had been assigned to the Caestus for the mission. It would be on file. He would amend the citation later.
Eadwine clambered forwards. Two flechette rounds punched his shield. He turned and fired a bolt round that detonated a xenos head.
Ahead of him, beyond the strewn wreckage, he saw that the White Scar had made it to the far exit of the depot chamber. Cunning and shrewd, Sar Af was always moving, always looking for a path.
There were loxatl all around the old bastard.
Eadwine ran a couple of steps, and leapt off a pile of steaming scrap metal. Despite the added weight of his revered boarding armour, the bound cleared a significant distance. He landed, leaping again, and came down a short distance behind Sar Af.
As he made this second landing, Eadwine cleared three targets with killshots. Sar Af turned, smacked a loxatl aside with his shield, and stamped on its neck to kill it.