Dark Hunters: Umbra Sumus

EIGHTEEN

Dereliquit

A meteor shower was what it appeared to be at first. They looked up at the sky to see streaks of red and white come searing across it, contrails in their hundreds filling every gap between the clouds. Most of the wreckage burned up in the outer atmosphere, but a few of the larger fragments came streaking down all the way to the ground with the shriek and roar of inbound artillery.

Jonah Kerne watched the light-show from the summit of the citadel, where he had summoned all the senior officers of the Imperium who still survived on Ras Hanem. They stood behind him, human and Adeptus Astartes, their faces as grave as his own.

It was the death of a great ship they were watching. They all knew that, though few among them had seen it before.

‘It is the Ogadai,’ Kerne murmured, his voice burned into a low ember by grief and rage.

‘I heard them. They sounded out in my mind like a scream in the night – all those lives.’ Brother Kass touched the psychic hood which hovered over his skull.

‘I cannot believe it,’ Dietrich said, shaking his bullet-head. ‘What could have happened? What could have so quickly overcome such a great vessel?’

‘The Punishers have returned,’ Jord Malchai said, gripping his crozius as though he were trying to strangle the truth from it. ‘I can feel the filth of their presence like a dead rat in an empty room.’

Elijah nodded. ‘Brother-captain, the directing intelligence I felt when we first entered the system, it has returned. It is close, now – it is above our very heads. Out of nowhere–’

‘They must have dropped out of the warp right on top of us, and smashed up the Ogadai before Massaron could respond,’ Fornix said. He clenched and unclenched his power fist and the fingers of the weapon crackled and snapped with blue-white energy.

‘All vox transmissions and augur sweeps have been floored by massive interference these last two hours and more,’ Commissar Von Arnim said. ‘We thought it might be solar activity, or just the power drain of all the new systems coming online across the city. It would seem we were… complacent.’

‘We have been played,’ Kerne said. He turned around to face them, and his black eyes were as lightless as pits.

‘When we were first sent here, the Chapter Master suspected that there might be more to this conflict than met the eye, but I do not think even he expected anything like this. There must be very heavy metal indeed up there, to destroy a ship like the Ogadai, and a man like Massaron in the space of minutes.

‘Officers of the Guard, my brothers, we must assume the worst. The enemy must now be in orbit above us in massive force, and our own fleet has been obliterated. This is no mere raid. This is out and out conquest.

‘More than that, it is a settling of old scores. The Punishers drew us in here so that they might deal the Dark Hunters a heavy blow. They mean to destroy the Imperial hold on this world, that much is obvious – but I believe what they really want is to kill us.’

‘Let them try,’ Fornix growled, his red ocular gleaming like a hot coal. ‘We beat this filth once before, and we will do it again.’

Kerne’s face tightened in a slight smile, though it was hard to read his features with the bright streaked sky behind him. He was in shadow.

‘We must hope that Massaron got word off to Phobian before he was destroyed. One of the ships may have made it away. In any case, we have two tasks before us now. We must warn the Chapter of what has transpired here, and we must prepare ourselves for defence.

‘Brother Kass, you must be able to do something which can get around this jamming.’

The Librarian bowed slightly. ‘I will do my best, brother-captain. But I am no astropath. And the passage of psychic emanations through the warp at present–’

‘Just do it, brother. The Punishers, if they take this world, will make it into a base, from which they will seek to conquer the rest of the sector, system by system. That is why they chose Ras Hanem – there are enough raw materials on this planet to resource an entire crusade.

‘The longer we deny them possession of those resources, the more time the Chapter has to come up with a riposte. But the Chapter has to know what we face here.’

‘We need to know what we face here,’ Dietrich rasped.

‘The same as you faced before, general,’ Fornix said with sour humour. ‘Only more so.’

‘But now there is a full company of the Adeptus Astartes fighting at your shoulder,’ Malchai told Dietrich. ‘You should be proud, general, to stand here in such company.’

‘I am proud,’ Dietrich retorted. ‘Proud of my men, who did the impossible once. Now they are being asked to do it again.’

‘They will obey orders,’ Von Arnim said crisply. ‘That is all we ask of them. It is all we ask of ourselves.’

‘Well said, commissar,’ Malchai said, with something approaching approval.

‘The Chapter Master will not forsake us,’ Fornix said. ‘And he will have planned for such a contingency.’ He looked at Kerne, but the captain’s face was unreadable.

‘We will hold,’ Jonah Kerne said quietly. ‘We will hold here until we are relieved or until we are all dead. Is that clear?’

They raised their faces to him – his brothers were unmoved. Fear did not come into their mental make-up. Fornix looked positively light-hearted. Kass was less ebullient. The young Librarian was the only psyker on the planet that they knew of, and he could sense currents and portents that passed the rest of them by.

But he nodded at his captain. He looked preoccupied, like a man with much on his mind, but he was a Dark Hunter, the most stubborn of all the Adeptus Astartes. There was no need to suspect his resolve.

Dietrich was resigned and angry. He had brought his command through weeks of hell, to what he thought was victory, only to have that victory slip out of his fist. But he would fight. Like Massaron, Kerne thought, this general of armour did not know how to do anything else.

And the commissar, Von Arnim – he held within him no reservations whatsoever. His narrow, white face looked carved out of marble. In some ways, he reminded Kerne of Jord Malchai. The commissar and the Reclusiarch had both expunged all doubt from their souls. For a brief instant, Kerne almost envied them their blind certainty.

And yet, there was another kind of faith and certainty too. It had to do with one’s place in the scale and portent of things. Strangely, Jonah Kerne felt a kind of unfettered relief within him. The news was bad – it would no doubt become worse. But he did not care. He was here, in this place with his brothers, about to do what all his long life he had been trained and bred to do. What could be wrong with that?

Better this, than to sit upon Phobian in the dark and the snow, listening to wars and rumours of wars pass me by, he thought.

He felt oddly light-hearted. If this be my last fight, then I will make it one worthy of memory.

He looked at his first sergeant. Fornix met his eyes and Kerne knew that they were wholly in agreement. They had always understood each other at times like this.

‘Whatever happens here in the days to come,’ Kerne said, ‘we will make the Imperium remember us.’

It rained that night, an unseasonal event that made the natives of the planet stare wonderingly at the sky.

The last bright contrails of the Ogadai’s wreckage were fading, fattening out into wide ribbons lit up by the red light of the sunset, so that it seemed all the sky was aflame. And they in turn seemed to catch hold of what moisture there was in the atmosphere, so that the cloud thickened about them, and boiled up in toiling thunderheads, slate grey and purple, flickering with lightning.

The thunder echoed about the ruined streets of Askai, and the rain hammered down out of it, settling the dust and rehydrating it into mustard-coloured mud.

And all through the night, the defenders of Askai worked in the rain, building booby-trapped barricades, excavating trenches, constructing strongpoints in the rubble, shifting munitions by the scores of tons.

The Dark Hunters were issued with cameleoline paint, and this they slathered over their armour, covering the midnight-blue livery of the Chapter and even the white axe that was their badge. The synthetic polymers in the paint bonded with the outer alloys of the power armour and took on colour from anything they touched or that surrounded them.

The giant warriors could now stand quite still in the broken cityscape and fade into the rubble, almost to invisibility in the right light.

It was a tactic that the Dark Hunters had utilised often down the years. In fact, there was a legend which held that it was how the Chapter had got its name; a predilection among certain companies of the White Scars Legion for stealth over the fast-flowing tactics of their brethren had seen these Adeptus Astartes peeled off into their own disparate organisation for special missions.

They had fought on joint operations with the Raven Guard Legion, and on their return, the tactics these White Scars had learned from their brethren had become part of the battle-code of their company.

And when the Heresy was over and the time had come for the great Legions to be broken up, the warriors of this singular company had held together, eventually recognised as a full Chapter in their own right.

But that was mere legend.

Kerne’s preoccupations were with the space he had to defend on the ground, and the time he had to prepare it.

Dietrich’s methods had proved sound in the initial invasion, and the Hunters would utilise his defences, build upon them, and strive to hold the same ground the Guard general had clung onto before their arrival, for the same reasons.

But there were certain changes.

The massive walls of the city, with their six gates, would not be abandoned as easily as in the first conflict. Squads of Space Marines and Haradai would be stationed at each gate, to make sure that the enemy did not capture them without warning.

Kerne did not hope to hold the circuit of the walls for long – they were simply too extensive for that – but if the invader wished to bring armour into the city, it would have to come through a gate, and that was something which had to be postponed for as long as possible.

The spaceport was too vulnerable, and the Thunderhawks could not be defended if they were lined up on the sole working launch-pad, so Kerne had the craft dragged into the citadel itself. Once inside, they were brought up through the bowels of the fortress on the great munitions elevators, stripped down, wings folded, and set in place in cleared-out gun-caverns which opened onto the sides of the man-made mountain. Here the craft were prepped for flight once more.

They could be launched only once from these armoured caverns, for there was no way that even Space Marine pilots would be able to fly back inside openings so narrow their wings had only a half-metre clearance on either side. But they would be protected behind the blast-doors until they were needed. They were a last reserve, and if it came to that, a last means of escape from Askai.

One Thunderhawk was kept separate from the others, stripped of all weaponry and most of its armour, made as light and agile as the servitors could devise. This craft was kept waiting on the launch-pad, ready for immediate take-off.

It was Brother Simarron’s mission, and he would crew the Hawk alone.

‘Make it quick, and make it quiet,’ Kerne told the pilot. ‘As soon as you appear on their augur, your life begins ticking down in seconds. Get yourself a good look at them, brother, send word back to us, and then–’ He could not find the words.

Simarron smiled. ‘And then die.’

Kerne looked him eye to eye. He and Simarron had known each other a long time. ‘You are the best pilot we have – that is why I ask this of you.’

‘I regret only that my gene-seed will be lost to the Chapter, brother-captain.’

‘Your name will endure, Simarron. I will see to that.’

The pilot extended his hand, and Kerne took it in the warrior grip.

‘In the end, brother, we all go into the dark together.’

‘Hunter One is leaving atmosphere now,’ the servitor intoned, skating its many-fingered hands across the control console.

‘Vox is good,’ Simarron’s voice echoed through the room. ‘The power-boost we jacked into comms is working well for now.’ Static, a rumbling sound.

‘Am now free of planetary gravity. Isolating forward turbofans. All systems green. Punching it.’

Another long-throated roar.

‘Coming up to twenty thousand kilometres off-world. Increasing power. Debris field–’

There was a crash on the vox.

‘Heavy debris field in low orbit, extending out some fifteen thousand kilometres.’

Jonah Kerne clenched his fists, listening in. Beside him, Malchai and Kass were standing, equally rapt.

‘Now, Brother Kass,’ Kerne whispered.

The Librarian’s psychic hood began to glow. He bowed his head, and closed his eyes. Behind the lids, the cerulean brightness of his eyes flared out through the skin, lighting up minor blood-vessels in scarlet lines.

‘I feel you, brother. I feel you in my mind,’ Simarron exclaimed.

‘Stay on target,’ Jord Malchai warned.

‘Onboard augur engaged, and recording. I hope you are getting this, brothers. I see one big capital ship thirty thousand kilometres to starboard, and am turning in a wide sweep to try and come around behind its stern. Emperor’s blood, but it is big, Jonah.’

‘Class?’

‘Oberon class, at a guess. It’s a traitor ship, no doubt of it. But the Ogadai did not go down without a fight – I see major damage in the bows and down the starboard side.’

‘Any other ships, brother?’ Jord Malchai asked.

‘Extending augur now. Interference is nominal. Yes, Reclusiarch. I am reading a major formation some eighty thousand kilometres out, coming this way. Brothers, there are a lot of ships out there. I see signatures equivalent to heavy cruisers and battlecruisers, plus what looks like a whole fleet of transports.’

They heard a warning klaxon sound over the vox.

‘They’ve spotted me. I’m reading major energy charges along the flanks of the Oberon. I’m going in closer. I see no fighters as yet, but he’s launching torpedoes, and his lasburner batteries have begun to fire.’

Jonah Kerne walked away from the vox console, hunching his shoulders as though he were expecting to be struck.

‘Simarron, this is Kerne. You’ve done enough – see if you can get away.’

A gap, during which the vox was still open. They could hear Brother Simarron breathing, and beyond his helm there were alarm-systems sounding monotonously in the Thunderhawk’s cockpit.

‘Negative, brother-captain.’ A pause. Simarron grunted. ‘I have eleven torpedoes locked onto me. I am going to try and lead them back on the traitors who fired them. If I can–’ A thump of breath escaping Simarron, as though he had just suffered a blow.

‘I’m taking the Hawk into the enemy ship. With luck, at least one or two of the torpedoes will follow me in. May the Emperor’s light be with you always, my brothers. Umbra Su–’

There was a high whine over the vox, a sudden snort of brutal static, and then silence.

‘Umbra Sumus,’ Jord Malchai said. And he bowed his head.

Kerne turned back to the others, his face set like flint.

‘Brother-Librarian Kass, what did you learn?’

Elijah Kass opened his eyes. His corneas were half-flooded with scarlet.

‘I saw it, captain. I saw the ship Brother Simarron spoke of. More than twice the size of the Ogadai, a battleship of ancient lineage. It is true that it is damaged, but not enough to cripple it. And the guiding intelligence of this enemy host is upon it, looking down on us even now.’

‘So the Oberon is the flagship,’ Kerne said. ‘What else?’

‘A mighty fleet is approaching us, brothers, only hours away. On board its ships are tens of thousands of the Great Enemy, and these are not mere cultist rabble. I sensed the minds of ruined Traitor Marines, twisted beyond sanity, and creatures worse than those.

‘What came before was a mere foray, a reconnaissance in force. This is the main body. It means to conquer – it is here to stay.’

‘Brother Kass, I want you to keep trying,’ Jonah Kerne said. ‘You must get a message through to Phobian.’

‘I have been trying, brother-captain. And I will continue to do so until I succeed.’

Kerne nodded.

‘Brothers, we have only a few hours remaining before the attack begins. It will be made in overwhelming force. I have often heard it said that the Dark Hunters have through their history proved themselves to be the most vicious in defence of all the Adeptus Astartes. We must hold true to that reputation in the days to come.’

‘The Kharne will take to the warp with everything he has, once he learns of this,’ Fornix said doggedly. ‘He’ll not forsake us, no matter the cost.’

Jord Malchai tabbed the butt of his crozius against the floor, so that it rang on the stone. ‘This is a task beyond the Dark Hunters alone, and the Chapter Master will realise that. The Kharne will try to reassemble our old allies in the other six Chapters who swore the oath with us. That will take time. In the meantime, we must hold on here, maintain a foothold. We must–’

‘Survive?’ Fornix interrupted him, smiling crookedly.

Malchai stared at him coldly. ‘That is our mission, brother-sergeant.’

‘At least now, Brother-Reclusiarch, I know that you can no longer send reports back on my misdeeds,’ Fornix sneered.

‘Enough,’ Kerne barked. ‘Malchai, what was the last report you sent back to the Kharne? What does Phobian know?’

‘My reports are confidential,’ the Reclusiarch said.

‘I am force commander of a company about to face overwhelming odds, upon the last surviving outpost of the Imperium within an entire system. You will tell me, Brother-Reclusiarch.’ Kerne’s black eyes were fixed on Malchai, unblinking. Even among Space Marines, there were few who could meet that gaze for long.

‘Very well. My last despatch was sent through normal channels by vox-burst, and it informed Mors Angnar that the planet had been retaken and that the Chaos taint, while not wholly expunged from the system, was now weak and would soon be eradicated.’

Kerne sighed. ‘That’s what I was afraid of. They have no inkling.’

He took his helm from the table and stared a moment at the ugly, corvid beak of it.

‘Brothers, to your stations. Fornix, the Armaments District. Brother Malchai, the spaceport trenches. Brother Kass, you will remain with me in the citadel. I wish to liaise with General Dietrich.’

The other Space Marines gathered their wargear without a word. They began to leave, and then Kerne remembered.

‘Reclusiarch–’

Malchai turned, his skull-helm on his head, as unreadable as stripped bone.

‘I still have Biron Amadai’s pistol, Malchai. You may have it back now, and I thank you for the privilege.’ He held out the ancient, beautifully worked weapon to the Reclusiarch.

Malchai sawed a hand to one side, a gesture of refusal. ‘It is yours now, Jonah. May it bring you some of the faith and valour of Amadai himself.’

It was a princely gift. A gesture of truce between them, perhaps. Jonah Kerne nodded. There was no need to say more.

Night had fallen when the first landings began. There was no preparatory bombardment, but the clear star-spattered sky above Askai came suddenly to life with new constellations, dozens of afterburners firing in low orbit, and then the fiery contrails of craft making re-entry to the atmosphere.

As these invaders became clear on the augur systems of the defences, so the defenders puzzled themselves trying to fathom what exactly they were. Elijah Kass, who knew his history, was able to identify them.

‘Stormbirds,’ he told Jonah Kerne. ‘I did not think such craft still existed in the galaxy – the model is tens of thousands of years old. It was used during the Great Heresy.’

‘What do they carry?’ Kerne asked the Librarian.

‘A full company of Adeptus Astartes in each one, or the equivalent.’

They were standing in the command centre at the heart of the citadel. Scores of human technicians were already linking the augur-readings into the firing resolutions of the big guns.

Kerne turned to General Dietrich, who stood beside him.

‘General, when you are ready, I believe you may open fire.’

‘My lord,’ Dietrich growled, ‘it will be a pleasure.’

He spoke into the vox-receiver. ‘All batteries, engage targets at will. Fire for effect.’

Askai was lit up. From the gun-caverns of the citadel and hidden positions on the ground the fire leapt up into the night sky in skeins and streams of light. The enemy squadrons came out of orbit to be met with a hail of kinetic and energy weaponry.

The defenders looked up to watch a sea of flame erupt above them, turning night into day, the stuttered flashes of the explosions merging into one, the roar of the barrage a stunning thunder, something which could be felt deep in the chest, vibrating flesh and bone and shaking dust into the air in a pale haze.

They were on target. The first flight of enemy ships was smashed into oblivion, six of the huge craft impacted by missile and plasma beam, to be knocked into spinning fragments.

But more were coming. And now that the batteries had revealed themselves, others were peeling off to launch their own payloads in counter-battery fire.

A duel began. Stormbirds heavy with ordnance came lancing out of the upper atmosphere in near vertical trajectories, to drop heavy clusters of old-fashioned iron bombs on gun-batteries that had given away their positions. As they pulled up – and many did not, but hurtled to the ground in vast explosions – they launched missiles and sprayed out fans of flares and smoke to confuse the targeting arrays below.

The ground rippled in a staggered, shattering welter of destruction. But Kerne’s people had dug in deep, and while several of the gun crews were knocked out, most continued to fire as the Stormbird bombers hauled their huge hulls up into the sky again. Fire followed them relentlessly. The blossoming smoke was lit up by it so that it seemed a storm was hovering directly over the city, lit up by red and yellow and green lightning.

Out of this thundercloud the troop-carriers arrived. Close on the tail of the bombers, they came shrieking down at high speed, deployed thrusters at the last possible moment, and slammed into the rubble and broken stone of the city below them like slab-sided meteors hurled to earth. They dropped their ramps, and mobs of huge armoured figures boiled out of them like a tide of giant cockroaches, barbed, lit with hellish eyes, roaring.

The Stormbirds kept coming. They lost one in three of their number, but never hesitated. Many careered through the sky, half shot-to-pieces, then belly-flopped in the midst of the city and were broken open like tin cans.

Incredibly, after these crashes, dozens of their occupants still crawled forth, and began fighting with whatever and whoever they found around them.

Perhaps five thousand Punisher troops were landed in that first wave. They fanned out, and began making for the gates in the surrounding blast-walls of Askai – the invincible adamantium gates which stood intact after all the months of warfare, and which had not been opened since the beginning of it all.

The Punishers assaulted the bunkers and strongpoints which guarded the gates from within the city, and began chewing them up, pouring over the terrified Hanemite Guard who manned them.

These unfortunates, the living and the dead, were dismembered, and the Punishers took their limbs and heads and gnawed on them, laughing, then daubed their black and yellow armour with the blood. They clambered over the locking mechanisms of the gates like lice seeking warmth, and began to hammer here and there in a bid to open them, ignoring the volleys of lasgun fire that sizzled in the air around them.

At the main western gate a group of six shadows, bulky but swift, flowed along the ruined street towards the gatehouse where dozens of the enemy stood, garbling amongst themselves, shooting at the sky, and bickering over the remains of the dead defenders like dogs quarrelling over meat.

It was Finn March and what remained of Primus. The wounded battle-brothers of his squad who had remained on the Ogadai for treatment were all gone along with that ancient ship, and it had seared his cold and bitter hearts to think of his brothers dying in such a hopeless, useless fashion. Now he meant to avenge their names.

The vox was cracking and slurring like a badly received wireless station, but March spoke anyway.

‘Captain, Primus at western gate. They are trying to open it. Will engage as ordered.’

No answer. It mattered not.

March did not need to look at his brothers. They fanned out around him in their cameleoline-daubed armour, as much a part of the darkened street as the corpses and the broken stone. Whatever noise they made was lost in the fighting which now was flooding the city.

‘Brother Terciel, go right and cover,’ March said. Terciel was from Novus Company, and carried a heavy bolter. Without reply he darted sideways and rested the weapon on an outcrop of rockcrete. He lifted the ammo belt, checked that all was in order and then said: ‘Ready.’

‘Fire after me. Targets left to right. Three-round bursts for the first two, then empty your magazines. Terciel, pick up fire as we reload.’

They crouched in the ruins, watching with dark hatred the cavorting, blood-painted ranks of their enemies ahead, only some hundred and fifty metres away.

Finn March picked his targets, blinking on them one by one so that they queued up in his targeting software. He aligned his bolter casually, and said not a word before opening fire.

At that range, even power armour could not withstand the heavy self-propelled bolter rounds, and the wargear of the enemy was not well maintained. March’s first burst blew off the head of a Punisher sergeant. His second opened up the intestines of another, the guts pouring black and steaming down the thing’s thighs as his belly-plate was blown open in jagged shards.

Then the rest of the squad came into line with their bolters. They did not speak. They did not utter a battle-cry. They chose their targets and obliterated them with serene detachment, as though it were an exercise on the range.

Terciel on the heavy bolter took up the fight as his brothers began to change magazines. The big weapon jumped against his shoulder as he hosed down the enemy, tracer spitting in bright fiery arcs across the street, bouncing off rockcrete and rocketing into the air, skittering along the ground like stones spun across water.

At least a dozen Punishers had gone down in the first instance, and more had collapsed as they took rounds in arms and legs. These were crawling, yowling like fiends until another round was sent through their brain.

Ten more down. But they had scattered now; the target was dispersing, returning fire and feeling out around March’s squad for a flank.

‘Primus, break right. Terciel, cover fire,’ March barked.

The Space Marines got up and sprinted down the street some fifty metres. Even as they ran, they let off short bursts and single shots, all aimed at the targets they had logged into the auto-senses in their suit systems.

But one Punisher got lucky. A champion of their kind with the head of a human soldier hung lifeless and staring round his neck for decoration, he stood firing his plasma pistol after the running Dark Hunters in endless bursts until Brother Terciel cut him down.

One of those energy bursts caught Brother Arrun in the back of his leg, blasting through the ceramite and burning through fibre-bundles, flesh and into the bone. The Space Marine dropped, cursed, got up again and his leg buckled under him, the burned bone fracturing like charcoal.

The others dragged him into cover, bolter-rounds splashing up dust in the street at their feet, a few sparking and screeching off their armour. Brother Fallon took one in the side of his chest and merely grunted as it went through his armour and found a lung. Then he kept firing.

‘Terciel, join us, we will give cover,’ March said tersely.

The Dark Hunter from Novus Company got up at once, hefted his heavy weapon, and sprinted down towards them while the rest of Primus – even crippled Brother Arrun – kept the Punishers occupied with well-placed fire.

Terciel joined them. ‘They’re still working on the gates, brother-sergeant, and a fresh company is coming up from the south.’

‘Captain,’ March said on the vox, ‘this is Primus, do you read?’

Nothing. ‘Damn them and their jamming,’ March said. ‘I’ve never known it so bad, and I fought these scum first time around. Arrun, how is the leg?’

‘Healing, sergeant.’

‘Can you run?’

‘I will.’

‘Good. Fallon, what of you?’

‘Round in the lung, sergeant. It’s all right, I brought a spare.’

Finn March considered. His squad had slain perhaps thirty of the foe, but there were as many more still working on the gate, plus another company – say eighty – coming up on them.

Against six Dark Hunters, two of whom were wounded.

Good enough odds, March thought.

‘We are going to attack,’ he said.

Brother Terciel set down a base of fire, streaming rounds down the street and peppering the gatehouse. The enemy had gone to ground there now and a veritable storm of bolter fire was streaming from their positions, most of it wild.

March and his brothers kept moving. In the flashlit dark, with the cameleoline blending them into their surroundings every time they stopped, they could make staggered dashes through the ruins and then fade into near-invisibility again.

Arrun was dropped off to cover the approaches from the south, where they could already see a crowd of the enemy making their way up what had once been one of the main thoroughfares leading out of Sol Square. They were bunched up, firing at every shadow, yelling and bellowing like beasts in rut.

‘Delay them here,’ March told Brother Arrun. ‘Use grenades. When your bone has reknit, or they are within a hundred metres, join us. Remember what First Sergeant Fornix told us, brother – this fight is not for glory.’

‘Acknowledged,’ Brother Arrun said.

The rest of the squad moved up towards the gate, approaching from the south while Brother Terciel kept a heavy fire down on the enemy from the east.

March pulled back the cocking handle of his bolt pistol to peer into the chamber. He let it go forward again quietly, hefted his chainsword, and thumbed the power-button.

‘We go in hard. Grenades out first and then in close, brothers. We clear the gatehouse, set up there, and call in Brother Terciel. Then we make a stand. The enemy must not open this gate. Brother Kass has told us that they are forming up outside the walls in vast numbers, with vehicles and all manner of other filth. The longer we keep them out the better it will be.’

Not a word. March smiled bleakly inside his helm, and lifted the whirring chainsword. ‘Then let us be at it.’

He turned and sprinted across the open space leading up to the gatehouse, a tall, bulging pillbox of a building which guarded the lock mechanisms. The rest of the squad spread out to his flanks and began clicking grenades off their belt-dispensers. As they drew near, they were finally noticed as dark blurs of motion, and a shout went up from the enemy.

The Space Marines did not pause, but flicked out the grenades before them. Some arced with unerring aim into the gunslits of the gatehouse; others exploded so close to the charging Dark Hunters that the shrapnel kissed their armour.

They opened up with bolters from the hip at five metres, while March leapt in as silent as a ghost and with one swing decapitated a Chaos champion who had risen in his path.

A hedge of fire erupted around him as his brothers came up on either side. Above their heads, broken rockcrete began to rain down as Brother Terciel shifted the fire of his heavy bolter to the gunslits further up the gatehouse.

They cut down eight of the enemy, and then were inside, firing at point-blank range, booting the bodies of the dead aside, changing magazines again, tossing grenades around corners and then hurtling into the smoke and dust and hot shrapnel like weariless angels of slaughter. The enemy were startled, confused, but also numerous, and as the dead piled up, so more leapt forward to take their place.

The Hunters were grappling at close quarters now, fighting with bolter butt and blade, the fight slowing down. Warrior for warrior, the Punishers were almost as physically strong as the Dark Hunters Adeptus Astartes, and it took March and his chainsword to break the threatened stalemate. He slashed the enemy to the ground here, there, wherever one of his brethren was struggling, breaking up the fight again. The Punishers seemed stunned by the ferocity of the assault.

A grenade at his feet. March was blown to one side, red sigils flashing in his helm display. He saw that Brother Moshiri was down, badly wounded, and he clambered to his feet again and slew the Punisher warrior who stood over the fallen Dark Hunter, a snarl of pure hate leaving his mouth as he hacked the enemy warrior almost in two at the neck, the chainsword carving deep into the ceramite and flesh, finding the hearts within and tearing them to gobbets.

Then it was done. On the vox he heard Brother Fallon in the chamber above him.

‘Locking mechanism secure, brother-sergeant. Eleven enemy dead up here. A good accounting.’

‘Get back down here,’ March said. ‘Terciel, on my location. Set up in the lower chamber. Help Brother Moshiri. Brother Arrun, sitrep.’

The clatter and crack of close-range fire came over the vox, along with Brother Arrun’s voice.

‘Full enemy company about two hundred metres short of your position. All grenades gone.’

‘Can you exfiltrate, Arrun?’

‘Negative, brother-sergeant. They’re teeming around me like ticks. I will hold them here as long as I can. Mark my location for gene-seed retrieval, brother. Faces change, names change–’

‘But the flesh endures,’ March said, completing the ancient Hunters proverb.

‘Continue the fight without me, brother,’ Arrun said. ‘I mean to make them pay before they get by. Arrun out.’

March remained staring at the bloody floor of the corpse-strewn gatehouse for perhaps two seconds. Brother Arrun had been in his squad for thirty years.

Then he rose, and shook the congealed meat out of his chainsword.

‘Firing positions,’ he said. ‘Enemy company approaching. Let us be sure and welcome them, brothers.’

Primus Squad, or what was left of it, took up position at the firing slits of the gatehouse, while Brother Terciel barged through the doorway and then turned at once to set up the heavy bolter.

‘Three belts left, sergeant,’ he said.

‘Use them well, brother,’ Finn March said. ‘Make sure every bullet has a home.’

The firing began again.

All across the city vicious firefights erupted, exploding like novae in the ruins, burning a while and then sputtering out: as though flint were clashing with steel at a score of spots within a darkened room.

The human defenders of Askai fought where they stood, lacking the superlative night-fighting capabilities of the Dark Hunters. But the warriors of the Adeptus Astartes ranged the streets in small groups, inflicting mayhem here and there and then drawing back into the shadows, unbalancing the enemy even as the Punisher companies were trying to coalesce after the harried and chaotic manner of their insertion.

One thing became clear as the night went on, though. The Punishers might have landed many thousands of warriors within the unbroken circuit of the city walls in the aerial assault, but the main body of the enemy was being set down outside the city, on the plains to the west where the Dark Hunters Thunderhawks had destroyed the airstrip upon their own arrival.

The gates of Askai, those indomitable bastions of adamantium, therefore became key to the city’s initial defence. In the first war they had been bypassed and left intact, then ignored; the city had fallen without the need to cross the walls.

But this time around, there were Adeptus Astartes defending the city, and it would seem that the Chaos commander, whoever he was, wanted to bring heavier metal to bear within the perimeter. To do that, the gates must be opened.

The anti-aircraft fire from the citadel had taken a huge toll on the Stormbird squadrons, and these were now withdrawn. The fighting rolled out along the ground in waves of death and fire, while on the western plains the heavy vehicles of the Punisher armoured companies formed up for attack.

All across the city, companies of the enemy assembled and began fighting their way to the western gates. And as they struggled westwards through the night, the Dark Hunters were waiting for them.

‘Dawn in an hour,’ General Dietrich said to Von Arnim.

They looked out from the heights of the citadel to the ruins below, where half a hundred firefights were flaming in the dark, and columns of smoke were lit up from below like hatchways to hell; and out to the west they could see where the fiercest fights were going on at the three tall gates.

‘They cannot hold forever,’ Von Arnim said. He took off his cap and wiped his pale forehead. ‘Even warriors such as these cannot stem this immense tide of hate.’

‘He knows that, Ismail. He knows that at some point he will have to pull them back. But he means to make them pay for it first.’

‘Have you ever fought alongside the Adeptus Astartes before, Pavul?’

The general shrugged. ‘Once, in my youth, I saw them from afar as we relieved them at the end of the Dundarron campaign. They were giants in the distance, no more.’

‘Giants indeed. I give thanks to the Emperor for his wisdom in creating them – else I think mankind would long ago have been wiped from the stars.’

‘They are not invincible,’ Dietrich told his commissar. ‘Their blood is as red as ours, Ismail.’

‘But it takes a lot more to spill it.’