They started running. Nyman and Trooper Fernis scurried the poor tech-adept along. The damaged man had little clue what was going on. Trooper Galvet had been slow to recognise the intended effort, and once he did, ran the wrong way. Nyman, dismayed, believed that Galvet had suffered some concussion during the crash, and was not thinking clearly.
His fuzziness cost him his life. Two silver-shelled Chromes ran him down and fell upon him, shredding him with their claws.
Nyman didn’t watch. He ran, dragging the tech-adept by the arm with one hand, firing at the Chromes that menaced them with his weapon in the other.
As soon as the Asmodai were moving towards the hill slopes, Tranquility fell in behind them, his back to them, retreating and fending off the Chromes that gave chase. He whirled his hammer and struck them down as they came at him, knocking them over onto their backs, splitting their shells, breaking their limbs and their spines. His power hammer was a long-hafted, weaponised version of a stonemason’s mallet, the sort of tool that had been used to raise the bulwark walls and defences of the Palace of Terra. Its design was symbolic. Its effect was not.
Nyman, still moving with Trooper Fernis and their befuddled charge, was suddenly aware of yellow shapes racing past them from the direction of the slope. Daylight, Bastion Ledge and Zarathustra had joined the fight.
Daylight had his gladius raised. Zarathustra was lifting his war-spear. Bastion Ledge hefted a power mace. They reached the line where Tranquility was single-handedly stopping the Chromes and crashed into the mass of them, rending and slicing, smashing and tearing.
Nyman reached the lowest of the heaped boulders at the foot of the slope, and pushed the tech-adept into cover, with a gesture to Fernis to look after him. His men were taking up positions among the tufted rocks and outcrops, slithering up the scree and loose pebbles and sighting their rifles as they found good firing places.
They looked back at the fight.
Several hundred Chromes, most of them silver-shelled, had broken out of the soil of the plain and were assaulting the line. Dozens of them already lay dead, generally split or sliced open. Steam from hot fluids clouded the cool air of the grassy plain. Overhead, a looming volcanic darkness threatened to close down the light.
The four Imperial Fists, wall-brothers, battle-kin, shield-corps, fought side by side. It was diligent work, dutiful work, holding ground so that the Guardsmen could find cover and in turn support them with directed fire. It was a blocking action, it was a defensive stance, it was holding ground, it was everything that the Imperial Fists did best.
Daylight knew that none of them, none of the four of them, would or could ever admit that joy was filling them at that moment. Despite the crisis, the predicament, the threat, and the possibility that their Chapter was lost and dead, they secretly felt joy.
Their greatest and darkest prayer to the God-Emperor of Mankind, and to the Primarch-Progenitor who sired them, had been answered.
After years of silence, ritually patrolling the walls of the Imperial Palace, they had been granted the right to fight again, perhaps for one last time.
War, for which they had been wrought, had finally admitted them back into its secret, dark and savage mystery. They were whole again. They would make the most of it.
Nyman and his men watched in awe as the four wall-brothers fought back the tide. Imperial Fists chosen as wall-brothers were the greatest of their kind, and had excelled at feats of arms. It was for their very excellence that they were selected as the embodiment of the Chapter’s creed, and set to stand guard on the walls where they had mounted their greatest defence and paid in blood.
He could see why these men had been chosen.
He could also see how many more Chromes, hulking and dark-bodied, were splitting the soil of the plain and clawing their way into the sunlight.
Nineteen
‘Any signal from the surface?’ asked Admiral Kiran.
The vox-officer shook his head.
Kiran slowly crossed the bridge of the Azimuth to meet Maskar and Lord Commander Militant Heth. Heth had joined them from his warship as the reinforcement fleet decelerated to the drop-point.
‘We’ve lost them, then,’ said Maskar. ‘Sheer madness going down into that murk and mayhem blind.’
Heth looked at him.
‘I suggest you get your men ready, Maskar, because you’ll be following soon enough. We’re not going to leave the Imperial Fists to rot down there.’
‘And what makes you suspect they are anything except dead already, sir?’ asked Maskar. ‘With respect, look at the screens. Look at the dataflow. This is a fool’s errand. Nothing has survived the fate that has befallen Ardamantua. Not even their damned fleet survived.’
‘We give them another five hours,’ said Heth. ‘That’s my word on it. Five hours, then we send in more scouts. The first thing Daylight will do is set up a workable uplink or send some kind of signal.’
Maskar looked at Kiran. There was no love lost between the Navy man and the Guard commander, but they were thinking the same thing. Heth, a High Lord, was painfully out of touch. He clearly thought the Adeptus Astartes immortal. There were certain situations, certain conditions, certain environments, that nothing could survive. They were both working men, fighting men, and they had seen how bad it could actually get, not how bad it could be imagined from a throne in the Palace.
‘Move the picket ships in closer,’ Admiral Kiran told his deck officers. ‘Have them despatch more long-range probes.’
‘Probes will be obliterated, just like the last spread,’ said Maskar.
‘Some may survive,’ replied Kiran curtly. ‘Even if one of them survives to send back a millisecond of data, it will help. Besides, with the picket ships closer to the atmospheric rim, we can try penetrating deeper with auspex and primary sensors.’
Heth nodded. The deck officers hurried to their stations and began to relay instructions.
They watched the strategium display as the reinforcement fleet began to move into its new spread, circling the stricken planet. Indicator lights and icons drifted like sunlight dapples across the topographic grid. In the lower portion of the strategium’s vast hololithic array, columns of data spread, jumbled and reassembled, processing the energetic flux and signature of the planet. Kiran had never seen a planetary body generate so much wild and contradictory data so rapidly.
‘Wait!’ he said, suddenly.
He crossed to one of the observation consoles and shoved two sensor-adepts out of his way. He began to manipulate the controls himself.
‘What are you doing?’ asked Heth.
Kiran didn’t reply immediately. Most of the crew in the huge bridge space were watching him. Kiran irritably yanked off his gloves so he could better manipulate the control surfaces. His fingers wound back the brass dials and adjusted the ivory sliders until he had recaptured the data-stream information from a few moments before.
‘There,’ he said.
‘I don’t know what I’m supposed to be looking at,’ Maskar ventured.
‘Admiral, please elucidate,’ said Heth.
‘I know what I’m seeing,’ said Kiran, ‘and I’m sure my senior officers do too.’ In truth, many of them hadn’t immediately recognised it. Few had Kiran’s years of experience, and few had seen as much cosmological data speed by them as the admiral had, but given a few seconds, with the data-stream artificially suspended and frozen, they could pick it up.
‘A ghost,’ said the primary auspex supervisor.
‘A ghost,’ agreed Kiran with a grin.
‘It could just be an imaging artifact,’ said the gunnery officer.
‘Or the echo of a piece of debris blown out by the surface disruption?’ suggested the oldest of the navigation adepts, running the same data through his own, handheld quantifier.