‘Gathas?’ he asked the last warrior.
‘Down,’ Mycorian replied.
Sagittarus bunched useless muscles on instinct. He was already turning to plunge back into the blood-mist when Mycorian moved to stand before him.
‘I would’ve saved him if there were anything left to save.’
A warrior Sagittarus had fought beside for over a century, one of Ra’s own brethren, lost in the mist. Reluctantly they moved on, weapons ready, a hunting party at the heart of an alien city. This was no painstakingly planned siege committed by regimented forces – this was the fulcrum moment of a war, avenue by avenue and step by step.
The sky around the Godspire was miserable with creatures soaring on the nonexistent wind, repelling any aerial approach. Something winged darkened the sky overhead, beating a carrion stink downwards with its leathery wings as it passed. The roaring shape of a Stormbird raged after it on howling afterburners, raining spent shell casings on the warriors far below.
Sagittarus’ retinal display dimmed to compensate against the sudden brightness as the Stormbird went nova. Its gold-and-silver hull was torn from the sky with a dragon’s roar of wrenching, protesting metal. The daemonic shape that sent it to the ground flew from the falling gunship, its black wings beating to carry it free of the detonation.
He looked across the arching bridges to the Godspire, still too distant to make out individual defenders. Gunships rose from nearby only to be torn down like the first, helpless against the sheer numbers of winged creatures circling the central tower. A convoy of Mechanicum crawlers and battle-walkers was threading its way from the tower’s west courtyard, attacking through a thick tide of daemonic blades and flesh.
Sagittarus and Dynastes sprinted across the long bridge, their strides sending echoes through the bone ground. Spears that were growing dull through overuse still cut and carved, blasting their foes apart through the slam of power fields against flesh as much as by the blades’ fading capacities to cleave. Sagittarus was reduced to using his empty assault cannon as a bludgeon.
Another gunship streamed overhead, spinning on screaming engines, falling into the abyss between the great city platforms.
We’re going to lose the city. It wouldn’t detach from his thoughts.
The bridge’s previous defenders had been a regiment of Adsecularis thralls, near-mindless but numerous to compensate. As Dynastes advanced upon the daemons laying claim to the span, they stepped over the bodies of the cyborg slaves that had died to hold the bridge for a few minutes longer.
Sagittarus caught a beast’s blade against his forearm. The creature shrieked a demand to know when the sun would rise, and he killed it with the returning backhand swing. The foulness that served as its blood bubbled and gushed forth.
Blades and whips lashed against his armour plating, slowing him, sending shivs of pain jabbing into the mutilated limbs floating within his cold cradle. He killed and killed and killed by instinct and rote, too weary now for bloodlust or the joy of battle.
He saw Mycorian on the ground with three jagged swords drilled through his back. Standing over his companion’s fallen form was Juhaza, another of Ra’s so-called Lords of Terra, his guardian spear long lost, fighting with his paired meridian swords in a swirling dance. He wouldn’t leave Mycorian’s corpse.
‘He’s gone,’ Sagittarus shouted at his kinsman.
Juhaza had lost half of his face, his features abraded down to the bone. One eye gone, his jaw hanging slack, he didn’t have enough muscle left on his face to speak. His acknowledgement of Sagittarus’ words came through motion alone, as the other Custodian cut his way closer.
Up close, the damage was far worse. Juhaza’s helmet had been wrenched clear, taking a significant section of the back of the warrior’s skull and brain matter with it. Blood had washed into the recesses of his pauldrons and soaked his cloak of Imperial red. Yet the Custodian was fighting on, facing the creatures surging across the bridge, spinning his spear and building momentum. The fact he still stood with those wounds defied reason; Juhaza had no idea he was already dead.
Another war-horn sounded. Sagittarus knew it at once, that unmistakable clarion cry ringing out across the besieged city: the Scion of Vigilant Light – Ignatum’s lone Warlord – fought on, claiming another kill. Risking the clatter and crash of weapons against his hull, the Dreadnought looked up to the mist-hazed sight of the city spread above and beyond in the great tunnel. Those distant streets were just as choked with teeming bodies and the flicker-flashes of discharging weapons. Larger, darker shapes showed Titans – and things the size of Titans – moving between the bone buildings, laying waste to their surroundings as they grappled and marched and fired. Across hundreds of vox-channels, the city’s defenders murmured and appraised and coordinated, dangerously cold and calm where human soldiers would be yelling orders and shrieking of their wounds.
Sagittarus ground the dissolving bodies of his foes beneath his iron tread and moved forwards.
His name crackled over the vox, going unheard until the third repetition. A recall. A recall back to the Godspire.
‘Dynastes is embattled,’ he replied. ‘We require a transport.’
‘It will be done, Sagittarus.’
‘Dio? Is that you?’
The Raider tank resembled a Space Marine Spartan in all but three ways. The first was its increased size: not only did it possess a larger maw and increased cargo capacity, it was also armoured in dense layers of ceramite reinforced with rare Martian alloys considered far too valuable for line service among the Legiones Astartes. The tank was considerably bulkier, turning its smooth red hull into the plated skin of something mythic and bestial. As one might expect, the divided skull of the Martian Mechanicum showed along its sides, along with holy binaric and trinaric scripture painstakingly etched into every inch of its ceramite plating.
The second difference was that it had an armoured servitor-manned turret pod on its roof, giving the massive quad-bound volkite culverin array a three hundred and sixty-degree firing arc.
The third and most dramatic divergence from the mainstay of the Space Marine Legions’ vehicle armoury was the fact it lacked any sign of treads or tracks. This Raider skimmed over a metre above the ground, moving significantly faster than its grounded cousins.
It thundered across the bridge, its anti-grav suspensor panels protesting, grinding monsters into aetheric ichor against its forward hull. The sound of the impacts was the beat of a drum, like great hailstones pounding against a metal roof. Those creatures that weren’t pulped by its momentum fared no better. They burned beneath its guns, hordes of them igniting into shrieking silhouettes under the screaming beams of the tank’s volkite array.
The hardwired servitor spending its existence in the pod itself had been ritually stumped at the knees and surgically fixed into place, mono-tasked with simple – and entirely vicious – find/see/kill protocols. It went about its goal with cold, calculated aggression. It had neither emotions nor nightmares within the shadowy nothingness of its skull, thus the creatures it faced held little clutch on its heart.
Behind the lead tank came three Spartans, hovering on the same anti-grav repulsor fields. These were cast in Imperial gold, marked with the eagle sigil of the Legio Custodes. Ra recognised the squad-specific honour markings along the transports’ hulls at once.
Gang ramps slammed down into the mist. Bulkheads whined open. The three gold-hulled tanks disgorged the bulky forms of Zhanmadao and his favoured Terminator squads, each warrior bringing an incendium firepike to bear. They breathed dragons’ flame across the beasts that sought to assail them. Daemonic corpus melted as surely as mortal flesh when bathed in pyrochemical fire.