Dark Hunters: Umbra Sumus

ELEVEN

Habebat Funiculum

The infantry debussed from the Chimeras right on top of the enemy trenches, shooting down into the white, snarling faces of the cultists. The squat vehicles powered over the positions, and from the top turrets the flamers sent out spewing rivers of yellow promethium to incinerate the reserves as they came charging in to counterattack.

A wall of flame, through which the enemy charged heedless of pain and fear. Their champions, tall behemoths in power armour, drove them on like twisted shepherds. The Hanemite troopers engaged in close-quarter combat with burning, shrieking shapes that swept through the line of Chimeras like living torches.

Von Arnim strode along with his personal squad keeping pace to either side. His chainsword hummed as the monomolecular blades spun too fast to see.

‘That one is mine,’ he said, pointing with the sword at a Chaos champion who had lifted a wriggling trooper into the air, impaled on the wicked blade which was affixed to his bolter. He tossed the screaming man aside as though flicking an insect from his arm, and roared with maniacal laughter, his teeth clashing, scoring his own flesh. He paid no mind to the flames which licked round his armour.

The assault had ridden over the enemy trench line, cutting it into knots and gobbets of struggling men and things which had once been men. In the light of the flamer-blasts, shadows capered in milling mayhem, bolts of las-fire searing flesh which was already charred.

A team were kneeling to one side, the gunner’s mate crouched with a heavy weapon perched on his shoulder while the gunner emptied the magazine drum in long, deafening bursts of fire, blowing waves of cultists apart, and then zeroing in on one of the towering Chaos champions, chewing up his armour, blowing chunks of flesh and metal from his bones, finally reducing him to some unrecognisable charnel-frame of meat and metal.

Von Arnim confronted the champion he had picked out of the enemy ranks.

‘Ho! Abomination! Come meet death!’ he cried, and there was on his face a wide grin of mingled rage and joy as he raised the chainsword.

The tall Chaos champion tossed aside another broken corpse. He had bitten through the trooper’s throat and blood was black and shining on his face from the nose down. It slimed his pestilential-looking armour and added a new gleam to the ceramite plates.

‘A commissar – a true believer!’ he gargled in recognisable Low Gothic. ‘Come, little man, meet the reality of belief. Let me show you a vision of the true faith!’

He bounded forward, and the scrum of fighting figures seemed to open up for him and Von Arnim as the commissar leapt to meet him. Ismail ducked the skull-crushing swing of the bladed bolter and rolled, and as he did he sent the chainsword licking out in a swift jab. It bit into the champion’s shin, the blade groaning, screeching as it churned through ceramite – and then Ismail was on his feet again. He snapped off a shot from his laspistol, which missed but threw the champion off balance, and then the chainsword flicked in again, this time slicing at the hand which held the bolter.

The champion roared and lunged forward, his hand lopped off at the wrist, the bolter falling to the ground, and Ismail stepped aside, like a man dodging an angry bull. The chainsword stabbed upwards once more and this time it dug deep, deep into the side of the champion’s neck, and Ismail held it there a moment, savouring the feel of the spine splintering and severing under the busy blades, until he let the sword complete its work and the head fell free.

The great armoured form of the enemy slumped inert, another broken carcass amid thousands, another piece of carrion – and Ismail spat upon it.

He looked around. They were mopping up now, Hanemites and troopers of the Imperial Guard mingled together, tossing grenades into the bunkers, burning out the last stubborn remnants of the enemy in their trenches.

As he watched, a Chimera came to a halt on top of one slit-trench with three cultists in it, and the driver worked the tracks back and forth with great skill so that it almost seemed the heavy machine was pirouetting in place. The slit-trench collapsed, and the cultists were crushed and buried in the same moment. Then the Chimera lurched onwards, vomiting flame, shreds of meat hanging in rags from its tracks.

Ismail thumbed the power button on his sword and knelt there in the blood-mire of the battlefield, and bending his head he said a silent prayer of thanks to the Emperor who watches all, the Guardian of Man.

We will not go gently into that Dark Night, he thought. The Imperium of Man has a flame at its heart which can never be extinguished. Lord of Terra watch over us now, as we do thy bidding, and send to thee a sacrament of blood.

By Your Throne.

He straightened. More vehicles were looming up out of the reek and the tawny dust now, like great antediluvian beasts roaring and farting smoke.

He realised that he had cultist blood stiffening dry across his face and he wiped it off in brown flakes, grimacing. He shook gore from the chainsword blade and hung the weapon at his belt. His personal squad surrounded him again – there were two missing. He nodded at the survivors, and they nodded back. They had that white, wild-eyed look of men who find themselves alive when they did not expect to be.

They were good men, all of them, Hanemites and Imperials alike. It was a privilege to fight beside them.

‘Well, Ismail,’ a familiar voice said. ‘Went the day well?’

He turned, and Dietrich was standing beside him, and beyond, the command Baneblade of the regiment frowned over them both, the turret traversing like the snout of a predator seeking fresh prey.

‘We have scoured the spaceport,’ Commissar Von Arnim said formally, bowing slightly. ‘This was the last of their lines. The citadel and the Armaments District are now connected by our forces once more.’

‘The first ammo convoy is waiting to set out even as we speak,’ Dietrich said, nodding with satisfaction. ‘Now, we must consolidate. The armour will pull out of the front line while the infantry dig in.’

‘The enemy is weakening,’ Ismail said.

‘You think so?’ Dietrich screwed up one eye. ‘I wondered if it was just my own wishful thinking.’

‘His counterattacks are ill-thought-out, and lack heavy troops. He is sending in waves of cultists as if it is all he has left.’

‘He has more than that left,’ Dietrich said. ‘Of that I am sure. And I wonder to myself who he is. Somewhere, possibly still in orbit, a single mind directs all this, Ismail, and until that mind is blinded and broken, we will not have final victory here. The best we can do is survive, until we are relieved. We do not have the resources to mount another attack like today’s. It was our last gamble.’

Von Arnim shrugged. ‘A gamble which succeeded.’ For the moment, he felt it was enough to have won a victory, after so many defeats. It was so tangible to him he could almost taste it. It filled him with new energy, perhaps even a glimmer of hope after the darkness of the last two weeks. But then something else niggled its way to the forefront of his mind.

‘I hear rumours the Imperial governor is dead. Is that true, Pavul?’

Dietrich nodded sombrely. ‘That is what I wanted to talk to you about. Come, Ismail. I need your advice. We are to go to the citadel now, to meet the marshal, and I am not altogether sure what we shall find there.’

As darkness fell, the fighting died down. The battered Hanemite divisions dug in on the rim of the spaceport, and constructed defensive lines that ran all the way back to the Armaments District, six kilometres to the south. At the same time, a squadron of Chimeras donned blades and bulldozed clear a single roadway through the rubble to link up the two strongholds.

They worked into the night, while around them in the choking darkness men constructed bunkers and sangars, digging where they could, and throwing up defensive walls of shattered rockcrete where they could not. They strung wire, laid mines, and conducted dozens of little firefights as they contested a narrow no-man’s-land with the restless patrols of the enemy.

And all the while, the heavy transports of the 387th trundled through the dark, lights off, their drivers wiping their exhausted eyes and cursing as they nursed the heavily laden vehicles north to replenish the exhausted magazines of the citadel.

Feeding the beast, it was called, the replenishment of units still in contact with the enemy.

Eight hundred tons of shells were shifted that first night, and the transports were kept running in shifts all through the hours of darkness, while the multi-barrelled Hydras lined the road which had now become the jugular of the defence, seeking out targets in the torn gaps which came and went in the hovering clouds of dust and smoke above them.

But there were no bombing runs, not even the casual strafing to which they had all become accustomed. The enemy seemed to have pulled back from major contact with the Imperium’s forces, and except for isolated firefights on the perimeter and skirmishes between patrols, the lines were quiet. The Basilisks kept up interdictory fire through the night, but even that low endless crump seemed nothing after the fury of the last fortnight.

Marshal Veigh sent a full company of Hanemite regulars to escort General Dietrich and Commissar Von Arnim into the citadel, as though he were taking no chances they might not make it there. They entered by a low postern door to one side of the main gates. Even this minor entrance was constructed from gleaming adamantium, and despite the fury of the past days there was scarcely a nick on the metal.

Within, the great subterranean generators which pulsed in the heart of the citadel were still running at full power, and they could be felt as an almost constant vibration in the soles of one’s feet.

In the heart of that hollowed-out, man-made mountain the lights were undimmed, and they seemed dazzlingly bright to Dietrich and Von Arnim after days of huddling in the dark, the shadows, the confined interiors of fighting vehicles. Here there was cleaner air, also, as the great filters which were plugged into the sides of the citadel were for the most part in perfect order, despite repeated bombing runs by the enemy fighter-bombers. There was a slight haze hanging in the atmosphere, and it was stiflingly hot, but there was water to be had – water that was not brown or opaque and that did not smell of death. And iron rations, bricks of compressed protein to fuel the body even if they did not entice the appetite.

The citadel had weathered the fortnight of war well. For some reason that angered Dietrich.

He could not face eating, despite his hunger. In the city, there were civilians living on half-putrid rats and cockroaches, gnawing out their existence behind his lines in cowed, starving mobs. Soldiers had to eat first – that was the merest logic. But the thought of those desperate crowds made him refuse the offered food all the same.

Their ears popped as they rode up the mountain in one of the great lifters. These were open to the floors and levels they passed, and Dietrich was able to glimpse the gun-caverns with their hundreds of crews, whose work had won his gamble for him, and the endless store-rooms, magazines, dormitories and barracks, all thinly populated but running as smoothly as the workings of a clock. He marvelled at it, and for a moment could understand why Governor Riedling had thought to sit out the war in here. The citadel was set apart, not untouched by the fighting, but in comparison with the wreck that was now the city of Askai, it had barely suffered at all. Small wonder a man as insulated as Riedling had closed his eyes to what was going on outside.

They changed lifters, Dietrich yawning to try to get his ears to pop after the swift ascent, and travelled through a tech-level where the priests were incanting their prayers and the air was redolent of incense. They were blessing a series of massive shells larger than a man – some of the ammunition which had come up from the Armaments District in the last hours. As soon as the priests had made the holy prayers and anointed the shells, the ammunition was trundled off on low-loaders, to be taken to the gun-caverns. Another kind of food for the war.

Dietrich was staggering with tiredness, whereas beside him Von Arnim seemed a creature sculpted out of tireless bone and leather. He was watching and noting everything, and he questioned the young lieutenant who was their escort constantly. Questions Dietrich should have asked perhaps, about ammunition levels, casualty rates, food supplies, generator power.

But Dietrich was saving his questions for one who might be able to answer them more fully than some flustered lieutenant of militia. Ismail might seem as impassive and unperturbed as a snake, but his impatience and apprehension showed in the way he interrogated the young man until the lieutenant had to beg utter ignorance and apologise profusely.

The elevator stopped, the doors slid open, and they stepped out.

‘Feel better?’ Dietrich muttered to Von Arnim.

‘It was that or butt my head against the wall, Pavul.’

‘I hear you, brother.’

They were in the palace, that gaudy scrap of tinsel at the very summit of the citadel. It was less opulent than it had been – one could see by the state of the floor that real soldiers had been coming and going.

‘At least we know the way,’ Dietrich said. Although it seemed a very long time ago now that he had trod the corridors of this place in a time of complacent peace, with gaudily uniformed bodyguards at every corner.

These were gone now. In fact, the whole place was eerily deserted. Waiting for them, Marshal Veigh stood alone in the Audience Room in an old-fashioned soldier’s grey cloak, and with a laspistol in a weathered leather holster at his waist. Under the cloak, he wore not the battered fatigues of a field officer, but the rich ceremonial uniform of a marshal of Ras Hanem, the decorations glittering at his ribs and throat, catching the light of the overheads. An odd combination of campaign and parade ground which made Dietrich raise his eyebrows.

The marshal had aged twenty years in as many days.

I suppose we all have, Dietrich thought, and he strode forward with his hand outstretched. Veigh’s grip was clammy, skeletal. He almost outdid Ismail in the cadaverous stakes, but whereas the commissar radiated energy and impatience and passion, Veigh seemed like a coal burned past flame and holding together only as an outline of ash.

‘It is good to see you, general,’ Veigh said with the ghost of a genuine smile. ‘And you, commissar. I am particularly glad to see you here.’

Von Arnim bowed slightly, his forehead creasing in a moment’s puzzlement.

‘Gentlemen, I would appreciate it if you indulged me in a glass of wine. It is a good vintage – the last from Cypra Mundi itself. I should like to toast our recent successes against the Great Enemy.’

He led them to a large table, which judging by the marks on the floor, had been dragged here from an antechamber. Upon the table were heaps of cogitator readouts and data-slates and a large map of soiled plasment – and a crystal decanter surrounded by glasses.

Veigh filled these, and offered them to his guests.

‘To the Emperor, may he guide us always.’

‘To the Emperor,’ Dietrich and Von Arnim echoed. Dietrich downed his wine in one gulp, though the commissar merely sipped at his before setting the glass firmly down again.

Veigh looked at the map on the table.

‘Old-fashioned, I know, but when I plot the locations of our forces, it sticks in my mind better to draw them myself, rather than let a signaller plot them on a pict screen. I just updated it, general – the positions and strengths marked here are accurate as of one hour ago.’

Dietrich bent over the table in sudden interest, scanning the plasment. It was the outline of Askai and all the land up to the Koi-Niro Mountains in the east. Marked out in red and blue, like the monitors in his Baneblade, what he saw thereon made him whistle.

‘Are you sure of these positions?’ he asked Veigh.

‘Our augurs here, on these heights, are far-ranged and exceedingly precise, general.’

‘And the enemy strengths?’

‘As accurate as my technicians can make out.’

‘Ismail, look at this.’

But Von Arnim had ignored the map. He was watching Marshal Veigh closely.

‘According to this,’ Dietrich said, scratching his bald scalp, ‘the enemy is currently present in far less strength than we had supposed.’

‘He has been sending formations out to the west for several days,’ Veigh said. ‘Transports have landed and taken off by the dozen, out in the western badlands. I believe he has been shipping the best of his troops off-world, back up to his fleet.’

‘That’s why the attack yesterday was successful,’ Dietrich said, straightening. ‘He’s just holding us here, keeping the pressure on – he has other fish in a pot elsewhere. But this is the last Imperial presence in the system, here in Askai, and this city is the key strategic objective. What else could he be planning?’

‘Did Governor Riedling know of this?’ Von Arnim asked suddenly, as sharp as a viper.

‘Yes,’ Veigh said. ‘He knew. It was another reason for him to hole up here and await events, rather than try and aid you and your men in their assaults on the ground below.’

‘What happened to Governor Riedling?’ Von Arnim demanded.

Veigh looked very tired. He looked back and forth at the general and the commissar who now both stood watching him.

‘I think you know,’ he said simply.

Dietrich sighed and rubbed his eyes. ‘I had hoped it was otherwise.’

‘There was no other way, general. He would have sat here and watched you fail, seen you and all your command destroyed. I could not let that happen. I am a soldier too. I am a soldier first and foremost – it may be I have not seen the battlefields you have, but it has been my calling also, and I have followed it all my life.’

‘Then you should know how to obey orders,’ Von Arnim said harshly. ‘The Imperium is built on loyalty and obedience. Without those, we are nothing. Without those, the Emperor turns his face from us.’

‘Would you rather I let you and your men perish, commissar?’ Veigh asked, and there was genuine surprise in his voice.

‘Yes. We would have died honourably. Now our victory is tainted by your crime. You must summon the Adeptus Arbites here, now, to this room.’

‘We are under martial law – the Adeptus Arbites no longer has jurisdiction here, commissar. I am the supreme commander of all forces, military and civilian, on this planet.’

‘You have forfeited that position with your treason.’ Von Arnim drew his laspistol. ‘I am sworn to uphold the authority of the Imperium. By my life, I cannot see that authority flouted, no matter the conditions or the circumstances.’

Strangely, Marshal Veigh smiled. There was almost a kind of relief on his face. ‘I expected no less of you, commissar. Will you indulge me for one more minute?’

‘Hear him out, Ismail,’ Dietrich said, eyes like stone. He set a hand on his commissar’s pistol and lowered the barrel gently. ‘He isn’t going anywhere.’

‘Thank you,’ Veigh said. He reached for the table and lifted a data-slate.

‘On this is a document I had drawn up this morning. It has already been uploaded to the banks of every cogitator and voxponder in the citadel, and it has been sent in burst traffic to Cypra Mundi itself.’

‘What is it – a confession?’ Von Arnim sneered.

‘Yes,’ Veigh said quietly. ‘I set out my case for killing Governor Riedling, a murder in which no one else of my command had any part. I also formally relinquish command of all forces and other authorities here on Ras Hanem and throughout the system.’

Veigh’s voice was stronger now, and he had straightened. It was possible to see a glimmer of the man he must once have been, a leader to look up to.

‘There is no excuse for my crime, not in the Imperium in which we exist. But I believe it was a necessary act.

‘And that is irrelevant now.’

Slowly, he opened the flap of his holster, and drew out his pistol. He looked down upon it.

‘This was my father’s.’ He handed it to Dietrich, butt-first. ‘It is yours now, general, and with it, the supreme command here on this planet and within this system, until the Emperor or some higher authority relieves you.’

Dietrich took the pistol with great care, as though it were a relic of some saint.

‘I will speak for you, Veigh, when it comes to it,’ he said softly.

‘Do not. I will not taint your career. It is enough to have destroyed my own and to have soiled my family’s good name with my crime.’ Veigh drew himself up, and straightened the medal which hung at his throat. He turned from Dietrich to Von Arnim.

‘Commissar, do your duty.’

Von Arnim paused a moment. ‘A traitor you may be, Veigh,’ he said, ‘but you are a man, at least.’

Then he shot Marshal Veigh through the heart.