Fall of Macharius

Chapter Twenty-Three

The shuttle, massive as it was, shook on the way down. Atmospheric conditions were still not settled after the moon-strike. I stared at the faces of my companions. They were all partially concealed by rebreathers but their eyes looked grim.

It seemed to take forever until the shuttle touched down. It hit the ground with a shudder and then vibrated as the ramps were lowered. A moment later we were heading down onto the soil of the world we had vacated what felt like a short lifetime ago.

The first thing I noticed was how cold it was. Loki had never been exactly tropical, but now it was chillier than it had been in the depths of winter. The dark clouds in the sky that obscured the sun might have had something to do with that. It felt almost like night even though dawn had already risen in the east. No stars were visible. Unconsciously I looked for the hurtling lesser moon but, of course, it was no longer to be seen nor would it ever be again.

There was a strangeness about the advance down onto the planet’s surface. This was not an area we had ever reached during our original advance. It was too deep in the enemy heartland, surrounded by a maze of fortified trenches and citadels. Now there was no sign of any work of man. The ground had a crumpled, crumbled look, as if a huge hand had dug its fingers in deep and squeezed. As far as the eye could see were ridges and deep craters and vast blocks of splintered moon-rock. Fires burned all the way to the horizon. Some were distant volcanic eruptions, and others were hive cities venting gas and chemicals in sheets of flame a kilometre high.

Shadows danced everywhere. Our breath came out in clouds. Tiny motes of dust or perhaps disease spores swirled everywhere. The headlights of armoured vehicles caught the dancing particles. Some of them glittered, though I have no idea why.

We hit the ground hard and fast and moved to establish a perimeter. We needed to establish the beachhead as quickly as we could. The heretics had not responded and there was no guarantee that they would, but we could not count on that. Company by company, squad by squad, the spearhead of the crusade dispersed across the shattered landscape, digging in where it could, establishing strong points, guard posts and lines of sight for artillery and armour and heavy weapons.

A converted Baneblade had been made ready as Macharius’s mobile headquarters. It had been requisitioned on Acheron from the defeated remnants of Crassus’s forces and hastily repainted in Macharius’s colours. It was equipped and fuelled and I was to be its driver. It felt good to be back behind the controls of a Baneblade once more, making the invocations, feeling the great beast come to life beneath my hands. It gave me a sense of nostalgia, as if I were back at the beginning of my career and not at its end. Ivan and Anton were my gunners once again. Part of me felt that this would be an appropriate ending, and part of me knew that was not a healthy thought.

I was glad I had my bucket seat. The inside of the Leman Russ was crowded and not just with crew. We were carrying Drake and his bodyguard. It seemed Macharius did not want to be parted from his great advisor at this late stage.

In a way it was a sad sight that greeted us. Where once there would have been thousands of armoured vehicles, now there were barely hundreds and those had a battered, hastily made-ready look to them. Most of the tanks were Leman Russ Exterminators or Vanquishers; the remainder of them were Chimera troop carriers. Once the force was assembled at the bridgehead we roared off across the landscape towards the last standing citadel of heretics on this world.

Macharius wanted his reckoning with Richter and he was going to have it.

It was not a huge distance from our landing site to the citadel, a matter of a score of leagues, a distance that a Leman Russ battle tank was capable of covering in a matter of hours even over this broken terrain.

The land around us was as bleak as the surface of a moon. The sky remained dark save where the clouds were underlit by the eerie glow of distant firestorms. The ground was rough and we bounced and shuddered along. All the time Macharius responded to incoming reports from his commanders.

I listened as he briefed the column commanders, telling them where to go and what to do. So far none of them had met any resistance, which was hardly surprising in the aftermath of the moon-strike. I wondered how long that would last. I doubted anything could live through the colossal impact but then, in the past, on Loki, we had not only fought against the living.

Ahead of us the new ridgelines rose towards the horizon and on that horizon loomed the jagged hive citadel that was our ultimate destination. There was something strange about it, a warped look that was not simply a product of the impact shock. Looking at it I thought the place had always been twisted. It had been built that way or had become so over the long years since it had been constructed.

Things were starting to grow around us. Slimy luminous moulds covered the boulders, like veils of greenish mucus. Large mushrooms glowed spectrally in the gloom. I wondered if they had always been here or whether the impact had brought buried things from deep underground to the surface.

Here and there were the broken bubble domes of what once might have been hab-bunkers. Gigantic pipes emerged from the soil like broken and empty veins protruding from an amputated limb.

Black snowflakes swirled around us. Perhaps they were not snow, but that is what they looked like and it was certainly cold enough. I intensified the spotlights so I could see to drive by and kept us heading in the direction we had fixed upon, as visibility dropped to almost zero and I prayed to the Emperor we did not encounter a chasm opened by the fall of the moon from the sky.

Suddenly we emerged from the murk. The black flakes swirled away and I could see ahead once more. The landscape was even more broken, the way forward running through huge gullies over which needles of rocks stood guard like sentinels.

We passed huge drops and chasms and I knew we were slowly gaining altitude as we advanced. In the distance the citadel loomed larger, and appeared ever more twisted. More reports came in telling of figures sighted in the distance. Perhaps they were refugees, perhaps they were survivors, or perhaps they were something different. It did not matter now. The important thing was to reach our destination before the enemy became aware of us.

All of this was part of Macharius’s plan. He knew that all communication on Loki as well as all of the sensor networks would be disrupted at this moment in time. He also knew that our enemies would be much more concerned with dealing with the disaster than with any possibility of attack. The planet had just taken the single most powerful attack it had ever received, something far more powerful than an orbital bombardment, and it was unlikely that even if anyone spotted us that the enemy would be able to respond. It would be far too busy dealing with the disaster.

At least that is what we hoped and believed.

We came to rest on a ridge overlooking Richter’s citadel. The fortress had taken an enormous amount of damage from the moonfall. The great armoured carapace had been cracked and there were gaping holes inside the structure from which greenish fluid poured. Fires blazed in the side of the building and clouds of poisonous-looking smoke rose to mingle with the dust in the air.

The place looked more like a living thing than a building. It had an organic look reminiscent of an insect hive, as if it had been grown rather than built, and it looked diseased. Great bulges emerged from its sides like tumours and long tendrils of living tubing, like veins or intestines, flowed over it. Sphincters as large as city gates pumped out loathsome effluent.

In areas where the external walls had been ripped away by the impact, it was like viewing a body whose skin has been ripped away by a grenade explosion. There was a suggestion of fleshiness to the rockcrete and hints that the internal structure was reinforced with something more like bone than metal. It had the hallucinatory quality of something seen in a drugged nightmare. Looking at it, I could not help but think of the gloating daemon face I had seen leering down in my dreams.

‘What is that?’ I asked. It was a breach of discipline but no one took me to task.

‘I do not know,’ said Macharius. His voice was quiet and calm, but I sensed unease in it, perhaps for the first time in my recollection.

‘It looks like the work of the Ruinous Powers,’ said Drake, very quietly so that no comm-net would pick up his words. I shivered. In my experience those were not things that any sane man would choose to encounter, although its presence here explained a lot of things.

‘Nurgle,’ the inquisitor said, and the word made it sound as if he were clearing his throat and spitting. Once again terror swirled somewhere in the depths of my mind when I heard that name. ‘Lord of Plague.’

He was talking more to himself than to anyone else now. ‘That place will be a disease pit,’ he said.

‘Our men are as well protected as they can be. They have rebreathers and full body covering. We cannot let fear keep us from covering the last kilometre.’ Clearly Macharius was not about to retreat now, whatever Drake said. ‘We have broken the walls, destroyed the defences.’

‘Have we?’ Drake asked.

On the walls some of those great blister turrets were swivelling to bring their weapons to bear. ‘It looks like some defenders are still alive within the place.’

The turrets fired. A great explosion tore the cliff top not too far from our location. The Baneblade vibrated at the shock of the impact. I put the vehicle into reverse gear and pulled us away from the edge. The explosions might set it to crumbling away and send the tank tumbling to its doom in the valley below. Macharius was already giving orders for the remainder of our column to do the same.

We were fortunate that the citadel had been so heavily damaged. If more of those great weapons had survived we might have been destroyed along the ridgelines. As it was casualty reports came pouring in; it looked as if we had lost many men and vehicles.

‘What now?’ Drake asked.

Macharius looked calm, but there was something strange about his voice. ‘We regroup and prepare to advance once more. You saw how damaged the citadel was. We can take it. This is the closest we have ever come to doing so. I will not be denied victory at last.’

There was a note of almost maniacal obsession in his voice. He wanted victory and he was prepared to pay any price to get it.

We may have been out of line of sight of the citadel’s batteries but we were not out of range. Shells arced down out of the sky to raise new craters all along our line.

The enemy gunners did not know where to aim but sometimes their shots hit home anyway, churning the landscape, raising new dust clouds to add to the fug in the air. Looking back, I suppose they had no real idea of where we were. It was most likely they were simply firing in panic, but at the time it did not feel like that. When a shell smashed another Leman Russ to pieces, it was as if we were being personally and individually targeted by foes who knew exactly where we were.

‘They let off a thousand shots for every one that hits,’ Macharius said. He was right, of course, but it did not make me feel any better. It was always possible that we would be the ones that sheer random chance selected to be the next victims.

‘That will not matter if they have enough shells,’ said Drake.

‘Then we shall just have to hope they do not,’ said Macharius. He began to give orders to the force. As ever he did not really need a holo-sphere to be able to envisage a battlefield. He carried the information in his head.

A vast explosion lit the sky.

‘Take us forward and let’s have a look,’ said Macharius. I obeyed his command and began to edge the Leman Russ back towards the crumbling ridgeline. I peered hard through the gloom, all too aware that the ridge might have disintegrated under the impact of all those explosions.

As we reached the edge I saw that more gaps had appeared in the side of the citadel and a few of the turrets had gone.

‘A magazine explosion,’ Macharius said. I could picture an eruption in an ammunition dump with the huge explosion tearing through the loading tunnels built to feed those huge turrets with shells. Of course, it might not have been any such thing. It might simply have been a power-core exploding. In any case, the citadel looked dead. The turrets in its sides did not swivel. Many of the visible lights had failed as if the systems had collapsed. Even as that happened the comm-net kicked back in and we could hear the chatter of reports coming in through the static.

‘It looks as if we might have got lucky,’ said Drake.

‘It is a trap,’ said Macharius.

‘You think they staged a magazine explosion to lure us forward?’ There was obvious disbelief in Drake’s voice.

‘No, I think Richter is taking advantage of the explosion to do that,’ said Macharius. ‘I know how he thinks.’

‘Can you lead us into his trap and out again?’ Drake asked.

‘Let us see,’ said Macharius.

We rumbled down into the huge crater valley left by the aftershocks of the moonfall. A piece of the shattered satellite loomed over us like a fallen mountain. It still steamed despite the cold of its surroundings, or at least it looked that way.

Long lines of armoured fighting vehicles made their way down narrow ridgelines into the chasm. Ahead of us the shadowy bulk of the great hive citadel rose like a hungry ogre. It felt as if a vast hungry daemonic presence was looming over us, waiting for us to fall into its clutches. I wondered at Macharius’s confidence. He seemed totally untroubled, even though he knew we were driving right into the teeth of an ambush.

In my mind’s eye, I pictured the huge daemon I had seen during my fever dreams. I told myself I must still have a touch of the fever, but that was not it. There was a very real fear in my heart, and a terrible sense of foreboding in my mind. My mouth felt dry, my heart hammered against my ribs. I made myself concentrate on keeping the drive treads pointing in the wrong direction. Having the Baneblade slide off the ridgeline would kill us all just as quickly as any shell-blast or manifesting daemon god.

Macharius gave the order for the tanks to fan out as soon as they completed the descent. He did not want a vehicle being taken out along the ridgeline and blocking our advance, leaving us helpless prey trapped on the approaches. Once we were in the area between the ridges there was space to spread out so that individual vehicles did not make such tempting targets.

Looking ahead I could see the slope rising to the side of the hive. Once there had been roads and mono-rail tracks there, but now the roads were worn away and the rail-lines were just tangles of twisted girders. The land up there was broken by great menhirs of tumbled rockcrete. Rivers of burning chemicals flowed down the sides of the hive and polluted slime trails bubbled out of broken vents. From close up, the hive looked less like one vast monolithic structure and more like a collection of jumbled features on the landscape. Its sides were pitted and fissured. The great gaps loomed ahead of us like enormous chasms.

Some of the tension had drained out of Drake. He looked almost relieved. Perhaps Macharius had been wrong about the trap. ‘We need to get inside and begin to cleanse this place of the last of the heretics,’ he said.

The words had no sooner left his mouth than lights flickered on once more in the hive citadel and the great turrets on its side began to swivel on their mounts.

‘Indeed, we do,’ said Macharius.

The batteries opened fire, tearing chunks out of the landscape around us, sending the shattered metal remains of main battle tanks hurtling into the sky. Wreckage rained down all around us along with dust and soil and broken rockcrete. New craters appeared where the munitions struck.

I could feel the vibration of the explosions through the hull of the Baneblade. The darkness around us was shattered as our forces returned fire. Battle-cannon shells sleeted down on the enemy position. They had no effect on the huge armoured structures.

‘Forward,’ Macharius ordered. I wondered if he had gone mad. His intention was clearly to get us under the arc of fire of the enemy batteries into the dead zone that they could not reach, but I doubted it would work. The turrets were set at measured distances to each other so that they could cover each other’s blind spots. We might get below the angle of fire of the forward turrets but the ones further up the hive’s sides could still shoot at us.

Huge shells thundered down from on high. They destroyed more of the Leman Russ. Because of the formation’s dispersal they could not get them all or quickly.

‘To the left,’ Macharius said. ‘Lemuel.’

It took me a moment to realise he was speaking to me but I did as I was ordered. A shell hurtled by overhead and tore up the rockcrete to our right. I did not ask how he had known. Macharius could read a battlefield like no man ever born. Perhaps knowing where the shell had been about to descend was just part of his talent. I had seen him do similar things before.

‘Keep moving to the left,’ he said. He spoke a string of commands into the comm-net, telling other vehicles to follow more or less our path. The shells continued to hurtle over us, tearing up the terrain to our left and behind us and it slowly dawned on me as I followed Macharius’s instructions what he was doing.

The turrets had been set up to be able to cover all of the approaches with multiple redundancies set in. Under normal circumstances there would be no way through without being hit by an inferno of shell-fire, but these were not normal circumstances. The hive citadel had been badly damaged, with the bulk of the turrets taken out already. There were blind spots in the enemy’s arcs of fire and there was a pathway through. With one view of the hive side from the ridgeline Macharius had plotted it. There were still terrible killing zones but they could be avoided and once through we were relatively safe.

At least I thought we were, then I noticed that there were lights moving on the side of the hive, things were coming out through the gates and taking up position on the citadel’s sloping sides. I upped the magnification of the driver’s periscope and saw that they were Basilisks and something that looked like a Hydra modified for anti-tank service with an open turret mounted on the chassis. The fixed turrets might not be able to hit us but the mobile artillery was moving into position to attack. It seemed Richter had anticipated Macharius’s move. We had merely exchanged one form of killing ground for another.

The enemy opened fire. Explosions once more lit up the sky, shattering the darkness. All around Leman Russ burned, reduced to heaps of slagged metal. We returned fire at the enemy hull down on the ridges above us.

It was impossible for me to tell exactly what was going on. I had a very limited perspective of the battlefield from my driver’s position. I knew only that Macharius calmly continued to give orders and respond to the enemy’s attacks. From what he was saying I sensed that some of our drivers had panicked and left his carefully chosen route up the hive side. I thought I could hear screams and explosions over the comm-net.

Even as that thought occurred to me the hail of fire intensified around us. A shell impacted on the side of the Baneblade. I felt that moment of sheer stark terror you always get when you’ve taken a heavy impact in an armoured vehicle.

This is it, I thought. I am dead. I’ve seen too many nasty brew-ups in tanks, far more than enough to get my imagination working overtime. Sparks flew around the cabin and a terrible clanging sound of repeated impact on the side of the vehicle all added to my panic.

‘What the…’ I heard Anton say.

A smell of burning filled the inside of the cockpit along with gouts of smoke.

‘Everybody out!’ Macharius ordered. I undid the harness holding me in the driver’s seat and scrambled for the evacuation hatches. All around me things sparked and burned. An army of evil possibilities invaded my mind: I saw us stuck within the burning tank by hatches that refused to come unsealed, the magazine might detonate at any minute if the power-core went up, and another hit might come lashing out of the darkness as the enemy concentrated their fire on the crippled tank. I held my breath against the smoke and the possibility that each breath might be my last.

I flipped open the escape hatch and tumbled out into the cold night of Loki.