Minutes became hours, and hours lost any shred of the dubious meaning they’d so far managed to hold in a realm without any true chronology. The battle raged down tunnel after tunnel, with the Ten Thousand and the Silent Sisterhood forced into a neverending fighting retreat by the sheer weight of numbers hammering against them. Tunnels branched and divided and rejoined on the route back to the Imperial Dungeon, each passageway thick with rebel war machines, legionary battalions and hordes of the warp-wrought.
The only respite came at the barricades of wrecked vehicles and downed Titans that the defenders pressed into service as fortifications. All pretence of conventional war had been abandoned. At least in the city they had been able to see the assault as a siege. Here, with the foe choking the tunnels, it was like fighting back the tide of Terra’s last ocean.
Nor were the attacks limited to the very end of the Imperial column. The evacuees came under constant threat from capillary tunnels where the rebel forces and their daemonic ilk had outpaced the Imperial rearguard to strike deep within the refugee column.
Jaya remained with the Ten Thousand and Sisterhood units making up the rearguard, backed up only by Sacristan Torolec and his small team in their heavily armoured Logrus-pattern munitions loader. The rest of Vyridion’s courtiers were scattered throughout several kilometres of webway tunnels, fighting off secondary attacks along the evacuation line.
The fighting was at its fiercest and thickest at the rearguard, with an ever-diminishing number of the Emperor’s finest facing the bulk of the foe’s horde.
Repeated vox-calls for the Archimandrite went unanswered. Demands for servitors and Protectors to return from further down the line were answered with similar silence.
Gunflare flowered in the golden dark as her cannons chattered their lethal song. Legionaries, and the creatures that added to their ragged ranks, fell before her in droves. The tunnel gave a great heave around her as a Fellblade rolled from the mist, its Legion colours unreadable, belching its main cannons in her direction. The shells erupted against the tunnel wall nearby, shrapnel impacting against her angled energy shield. She knew herself just how worthless targeting arrays were in the mist. The golden fog unlocked and threw off even dead-sight aiming confirmations.
She veered aside as the debris clattered against her shield. Not for the first time she wondered if these tunnels of alien matter could collapse beneath the weight of the violence inside them. They hadn’t yet. Perhaps that boded well.
The Ignatum Warhound Ikarial, shield-dead and decorated with the scarification of near-terminal wounds, bounded forwards on sparking, damaged legs, its gunlimbs kicking. One moment Jaya’s display was lit by the gunflare of its mega-bolters, the next Ikarial took an unnaturally awkward step backwards and toppled sideways into Imperial ranks, trailing smoke from where its cockpit-head had been.
‘Baroness.’ She knew the voice of Tribune Endymion, and knew his command before he needed to speak the order.
‘Engaging,’ she voxed back, slamming her control pylons forwards. Her nameless, inherited Castigator leaned into its loping run with vicious eagerness, kicking through the shrieking infantry at its shins and raising its power sword high in the mist. Lightning raked along the active swordlimb, spitting sparks as it reacted with the golden fog.
Gunner, she thought. Sweat bathed her inside her suit and stung her eyes within her helm. Driver.
The Fellblade, Ikarial’s killer, fired again, the boom of its shells shaking Jaya’s bones at such close range. Even clipping her was enough to overload her ion shield and rock her sideways in her throne. Her nimble Castigator staggered but kept its balance – a heartbeat later she was on the tank, one foot slamming down onto its forward plating to arrest her own momentum, plunging her blade downwards in a smooth thrust.
In and out darted the impaling shaft of lightning-wreathed steel, searing through the dense ceramite of the Fellblade’s turret. Gunner. In and out a second time, just as smoothly, into the plating directly beneath her. Driver.
A third sweep of the energised blade severed the long-barrelled accelerator cannons halfway along their length. For the sake of it.
Quad lascannons tore past her as she sprinted back to the line of gold and black, where the Custodians and Silent Sisters were making their stand. She angled her rekindled shield behind her and ran on, risking the sponson fire rather than wade amidst the foe for any longer than necessary. Damage reports showed as angry runes in the corner of her vision. All fine. Nothing critical.
Something winged slapped against her forward hull. Her automated stubber rattled off a chorus of rounds, ripping the daemon-thing from the air.
She strode over the warring forms of Ra and Dynastes Squad, their spears spinning with the speed of rotors. Half turning as she walked over them, Jaya sent another stream of high-velocity bolts from her gunlimb in a shredding crescent through an enemy phalanx.
The smoking cannons whined to silence.
‘Falling back,’ she voxed to the front line. ‘Reloading.’
Torolec was waiting for her once she had weaved between the grav-tanks of the Ten Thousand and the Sisterhood’s skimmer platforms. The munitions loader was an ugly tracked vehicle with a humanoid crane mechanism on its back, appearing as nothing so much as centaur of Terran myth formed from a Sentinel cargolifter and a tank. Torolec brought the Logrus around behind her. She locked her stance and waited, tense in her throne, willing them to work faster.
‘Where are the war servitors?’ one of the Custodians was calling out across the vox. His voice was ragged with the effort of battle. ‘Where is the accursed Mechanicum?’
Jaya had no answer. She listened to the heated exchanges, hearing her own scions reporting the absence of significant portions of the convoy’s defenders. Hundreds of servitors, tanks and Protectors were simply not there.
The Knight rocked gently as ammunition canisters were crunched into place. A moment later she felt the slight sway of her gunlimb as ammunition belt feeds were reconnected.
‘For Highrock,’ Torolec intoned the traditional words of readiness.
‘For the Emperor,’ she replied, and slammed her control pylons forwards once more.
An unknowable time later, the enemy fell back. Perhaps more accurately, they failed to pursue the withdrawing Imperials. No more of them drifted from the golden mist; no hunched silhouettes or screaming warriors or ravening beasts emerged from the fog to hurl themselves at the rearguard. Knowing this precious moment of peace wouldn’t last long, Ra made ready to repel another wave.
‘Fourth and fifth ranks advance,’ he grunted into the vox. ‘First through third, fall back.’
Most of the exhausted warriors collapsed where they were, seized by muscle cramps in their first moment of peace in untold hours. Grav-tanks and relatively fresh warriors took their places, advancing in place of the exhausted waves of their kindred who had held until now.
Ra slumped to the ground, his muscles in spasm, physically unable to bring himself to rise. The stimms and adrenal-spikes were wearing off at last, forcing him to confront the reality of his overworked body. He was poisoning himself with sleeplessness, his blood rich with chemical stimulants and his thoughts prey to the distortions of a brain refused the mercy of rest.
By his loose calculations he had been awake now for fifteen days, fighting almost every minute since the walls fell, his ears endlessly ringing with a vox-crackling orchestra of conflicting voices. His body was eating itself for nourishment. He struggled to stay aware of how the evacuation was proceeding farther along the passages, but there was no word beyond the Archimandrite’s absence and the predation of foes from many of the side-tunnels. His thoughts were dull and slow, his reflexes slower. Everything he saw was stained by the greying haze of exhausted starvation.