Fist of Demetrius

Chapter Twenty

I have the reports from my commanders on the surface. It seems that everything is in place and that the warship in orbit has been drawn out of position to engage my fleet. The signal from the gate tells me that the opening must occur soon. It is almost time to give the order to attack.

And yet something stops me. I am not even sure what it is. Perhaps I simply want to savour the moment, to bask in those last few heartbeats before my plan of attack is implemented and that which was merely a possibility in my mind becomes wedded to reality. Perhaps I am afraid that it will all go wrong as so much has gone wrong during the course of this conflict. I have developed considerable respect for the human commander, which feels like an obscenity when I contemplate it but nonetheless is true. I would not have thought it possible that one of those hairless apes could have caused me so much trouble.

I give myself a few seconds, and then I speak the words that will send my forces into the attack and trap the humans in the Valley of the Ancients forever.

One by one my commanders report back. The assault has begun.

After we returned to the surface, Macharius dismissed us. As the afternoon sun rose over the mountains, Anton, Ivan and I hiked to the northern edge of the valley, directly beneath the great stone face.

Looking up at it from this angle it lost any of its resemblance to humanity, stopped being a face and was just a jumble of lines and stone protrusions. It was like the other cliffs surrounding us, the intelligence that had shaped it in no way evident.

All around us were a mass of boulders, some the size of a pillow, some the size of an armoured vehicle. There was lots of jagged scree. Green moss marked everything. Twin gulleys ran away from the bottom of the rock face. It was set on a separate peak that protruded into the north of the valley like the prow of a great stone ship.

The air was chill and clear, and our breath came out in clouds, like the exhausts of the vehicles in cold climates.

I studied the rocks. There was no sign that a large force of xenos had passed this way last night. There was no sign of tracks or wheeled vehicles. It was as though all the eldar vehicles moved without making contact with the ground. They must have been fiercely manoeuvrable as well. The rocks provided quite an obstacle course for any craft trying to move through them.

I looked up the gulleys and saw green-tunicked Lion Guard at work, laying mines, setting up wire and booby traps and gun emplacements among the rocks. If the eldar came back, they would be noticed and slowed by them. I took a seat on one of the smaller boulders, broke out a ration pack and began to eat. The others did likewise.

Anton let out a long, satisfied sigh. ‘I love work,’ he said. ‘I could watch people doing it all day.’

Anton munched some jerky and looked at the hills through the scope of his sniper rifle. Ivan propped himself up, back against a large boulder so that he had cover, and took out a small toolset. With a hooked implement he began to work at the hinge of his jaw. It was a disturbing sight. It’s a strange world when you can get used to looking at torn apart bodies but the sight of a friend repairing his augmetics is off-putting when you eat.

I pulled out a set of magnoculars and looked down the valley. The end of the valley under the face was somewhat higher than the central part, and I had a good view of the temple complexes, the surrounding cliffs and statues. I wondered how many of the bloody things there were.

I watched the green-tunicked Lion Guard set the perimeter. Elite bodyguard or no, their officers set them to digging trenches and setting up earthworks. Our most powerful vehicles were dug in as strong points at critical areas for the defence. Our tanks were laid out like a wall, anchored on the main temple complex. Some of our artillery had been brought in from the eastern heights and set up within our lines. Macharius had given very specific instructions for the deployment. It seemed he had something on his mind.

‘I don’t like this at all,’ said Ivan. He shaded his eyes. I could tell from the angle of his neck he was studying the heights to the north-west and the south. He pulled out the magnoculars he had taken from the heretic colonel on Jurasik well over a decade ago and studied the heights. I knew exactly what he meant.

‘Too easy to catch us, the way we caught the eldar,’ I said.

‘Precisely,’ said Ivan.

‘To be fair,’ said Anton, ‘I think Macharius probably noticed that too. He does know a bit about generalship. Or are you suggesting that maybe we should start taking advice from the pair of you?’

‘He could always call down an orbital bombardment to clear those ridges.’ Ivan looked thoughtful as he let his magnoculars drop to dangle on the end of their cords. ‘If there is still a ship up there.’

‘Blight’s boys got it right the first time,’ I said. ‘I am not sure I want to risk them managing a repeat performance.’

‘I know what you mean,’ said Ivan. ‘Any mistake and they hit the valley and us along with it.’

We shared the ground soldiers’ mistrust of those who fought their wars from high orbit.

In the camp, Lion Guards with spades and entrenching tools flattened earth that had been cleared by vehicles with bulldozer attachments. They were raising ramparts between the temple complexes, creating an improvised fortress out of rubble and dirt and barbed wire. I was not sure how much it would slow creatures as agile as the eldar had proven to be, but it was better than nothing.

Some of the Leman Russ crews were sunning themselves on the side of their battle tanks. Others were making field repairs with the sort of loving care I could remember Corporal Hesse lavishing on Old Number Ten, the Baneblade on which we had started our careers.

More vehicles were flattening an area around the plinth atop which huge eldar deities cavorted. An officer looked up into the sky and studied an opening in the clouds as if he expected to see a supply shuttle coming in right away.

‘Supply drops from orbit,’ said Ivan sourly. ‘What could possibly go wrong there.’ He glanced at the ridge lines to the north-west and south again. He was thinking about how difficult it would be to bring shuttles down in the teeth of fire from the surrounding hills if the eldar could take command of those heights. If there were still a ship up there to make the drops.

‘By the Emperor,’ Anton said, ‘you two are in a sour mood. We’ve already driven those torturing eldar bastards out of this place. We’ve got tanks. We’ve got Macharius. We’ve got a company of Space Wolves. What more do you want – a couple of Chapters of Space Marines?’

‘I would not say no,’ I said. ‘I don’t like this place. I don’t like those statues. I don’t like the fact we’ve got a few of the xenos buried beneath those temples. I would bet a bullet to a battle tank that some of them are sharpening their flaying knives in preparation of an evening’s entertainment.’

‘If they show their ugly faces we’ll blow them away,’ said Anton. His voice was gruff but his expression was worried. I could tell he was thinking about what might happen if the eldar below us emerged in the night. The ruined temples were surrounded by men and vehicles and barbed wire, but we knew how fast and agile the xenos were and they spooked us.

Our covering batteries on the eastern heights opened fire. There was the distinctive roar of Basilisks. All motion in the valley seemed to stop for a moment. It was as if every single eye were suddenly turned in the direction the guns were aiming at. The observers had obviously spotted something. I glanced up the gulley. Our sentries were alert but there was no sign of any enemy coming down on us.

‘I don’t like the look of this at all,’ Ivan said. He gestured upslope. Xenos landships were starting to appear on the ridges to the north-west of the valley. Wind billowed in their sails, their wings flexed like those of living things.

‘Looks like the eldar are back,’ said Anton.

‘Looks like they brought a few friends,’ I said. It was true, too. Hundreds of landships were there and other things, hovering monstrous scuttling things, large as tanks with long, lashing limbs that reminded me of tentacles mixed with the pincers of scorpions. Their vehicles were silent. Their weapons opened up in counter-battery fire. Suddenly a flight of their attack craft soared overhead to engage with our batteries on the eastern heights. They spiralled in like great evil bats and their weapons tore into our guns, silencing them. More eldar vehicles appeared on the ridgeline amid the twisted wreckage of the artillery.

‘We’d better get back,’ I said. I was uneasy. The eldar had simply reversed positions with Macharius. We were trapped in the valley and they surrounded us.

We had just risen when I heard the sounds of weapons opening up nearby. Down the gulley, a wave of eldar were moving. Xenos flickered between the rocks, closing with a speed that was inhuman, overrunning the outlying positions. The mines did not stop them. Only a few activated. Duds, perhaps, I thought, or maybe something about our opponents prevented them from detonating. It was not my job to figure this out. I lengthened my stride and clutched my shotgun close.

‘I think it’s time we reported for duty with Macharius,’ said Anton. Agonised screams drifted on the wind, mingled with mad, mocking laughter.

‘Pull back,’ shouted the Guard officer.

Looking at the monstrous thing scuttling in our direction I felt very inclined to run. It was enormous, and there was something alive about it. Something so huge had to be a vehicle of sorts, but this one had the strange, semi-living look of a great deal of the eldar technology we had seen.

Just in case we had any doubts we had been spotted, shots started to ping off the rocks around us. At least the Lion Guard were in good cover, which probably saved a few lives.

‘First squad, cover us. The rest fall back. By unit and in good order.’ The officer was using his parade ground voice now. It was pointless using anything else. I saw heads turn as the members of the first squad looked back in our direction. Their commander had just pronounced their death sentence and they knew it.

In their heads they were doing the same calculations I would be making in their position. They were working out the odds of getting back to the camp if they turned and fled now. The fact that they would be shot for deserting their posts and disobeying an order would only be a small part of the reckoning. When death taps you on the shoulder even a few more minutes of life suddenly becomes very appealing.

Against the urge for self-preservation other things warred. Working against that impulse to flee were other ones, some of them coldly rational, some of them steeped in primal emotions. There was the knowledge that if they turned and fled all of us would most likely die anyway as the enemy swept over us from behind. If they stayed they would have a chance to take some of the foe with them, and their lives might at least buy the lives of their comrades. It’s hard to communicate the sort of loyalty that gets built up towards your fellows in an Imperial Guard company, but it exists nonetheless. You see men lay down their lives for each other more often than you would think and more often than a cynic would believe.

And they were proud too, of themselves and of their unit. They would stand their ground and die because they were the sort of men who could, or at least they wanted to be. They were brave, they believed in Macharius and they believed in the Emperor. They could die as cowards or walk into His Light as martyrs. One had meaning. One had not. In either case they would die.

I could see all of this pass through their minds in less time than it takes to tell. I read it in the way slumped shoulders squared and lasguns were suddenly raised to the firing position. One or two of them saluted. The one or two who wavered, seeing their companions’ resolve to stay, gave bitter smiles and hunkered down to sell their own lives dearly.

It’s at moments like this that the quality of a single man can make a difference. All it takes is one soldier deciding to flee to provoke a rout. One soldier determined to hold his ground can keep an army pinned in place if he is the right soldier at the right time. These men were the right men. It made me proud and sad at the same time, even as I turned to move off down the hill with Anton and Ivan. Behind me lasguns fired.

The slope was dark and strewn with obstacles. Ahead of us I could see the walls of our camp. I think every man present had the same idea in his mind that I had, the sensation that doom was swiftly approaching in a particularly nasty and messy form.

Behind us, the covering force were selling their lives dearly and doing their best to avoid being taken prisoner. They saved us. In the teeth of their covering fire, the eldar could not be sure of exactly how large a force they faced so they held back until the monster arrived.

Casting a glance over my shoulder, prompted by some ancient instinct, I saw a scuttling form loom, a gigantic arachnid figure with clicking claws. It reminded me of a Titan, although it was smaller and there was an obscene suggestion of something living and evil about it. There were men in the grip of those claws, screaming and shouting and still firing their lasguns. Looking at the gigantic beast and one of those tiny-looking figures, I swear I caught sight of something horrible.

The man seemed to be shrinking, dwindling, like a deflating balloon filled with blood. I don’t mean that the blood was being squeezed out of him, either. I had an image in mind of hundreds of tiny sucker mouths, leech-like, draining all life from him, all vitality. The man’s screams became thinner, more wretched, more filled with pain; and then the strangest thing of all happened. His flesh just crumbled, as if all life, all fluid, all animation had been drained out of it. It turned to dust, like an ancient corpse suddenly exposed to light and air when its sarcophagus is opened. I was filled with an ominous sense that not just the man’s body had been devoured, but his soul.

A barrage of shots hit the great monster, exploding against its side, blasting great holes out of it. The beast thrashed as though it were in pain, but it did not drop the soldiers it held. It gripped them like a drunk holding his last bottle even as the Baneblade and Leman Russ within our camp sent blast after blast stabbing into its body. More of the monsters appeared now and began to lumber down the slope. They were followed by shark-fin sailed landships loaded with eldar.

We moved as fast as we could downslope away from the great stone face carved in the cliffs back towards the lines of our main camp. The eldar on the north-west heights aimed desultory fire at us. It was as if they were not really trying, or simply wanted to terrify us rather than kill us. It suited their crazed humour.

I had strange crawling sensation between my shoulders. It would only take one of those cruel xenos to suddenly change its mind and my life would be over. If you’ve been on as many battlefields as I have you have a fine appreciation for the sort of mischances that can end a man’s days.

I noticed the turrets of our sentry vehicles were elevating their weapons to concentrate on the heights behind us.

My knees felt sore as we pounded downslope. I kept my head down and studied the broken ground with care, knowing that tripping up now might be the death of me. I did my best to weave through the low boulders and shards of broken rock, as they would provide at least some cover to the lower half of my body. Driven by a sudden premonition, I threw myself flat behind a rock and risked a look back upslope, I saw the ground crowded with silent, swift-striding eldar soldiers and their equally quietly moving vehicles. Shots were going off all around. They were moving much faster than we were, and I knew that they would soon overtake us. That was the last thing I wanted.

The rocks made a kind of cave. They had tumbled together so that a slab of stone formed a roof over some more. I wriggled in underneath out of sight. I heard heavy breathing and noticed that Ivan and Anton had slipped into place beside me. They had come back for me. It was kind of touching.

‘Planning on making a heroic last stand in these rocks?’ Ivan asked. ‘Just you and the hordes of eldar…’

Anton said, ‘Bastard! I thought maybe you had twisted your ankle or something and needed to be carried as usual. There doesn’t seem to be anything wrong with you. You’re just getting lazy.’

‘I thought I would cover your retreat,’ I said. ‘You were making very good time as you ran away.’

‘Get your head down and have some kip while we did all the fighting more like,’ Anton said. He was studying the eldar along the ridgeline carefully. Any moment now he was going to unlimber the sniper rifle and start taking potshots. ‘As usual.’

‘What are you thinking?’ Ivan asked. His metal face was impassive, but he knew how desperate our situation was. We were stuck here in this little island of rocks while all around us the eldar moved forwards to assault our position. Our force at the gulley mouth beneath the face had already been overrun, and there was no way just the three of us could fight our way back through the xenos.

‘I’m thinking we’re stuck here with those xenos bastards commanding the heights above us. It’s not like Macharius to make a mistake like this.’

‘What else could he do? He wanted to hold these temples. We don’t have the force for defence in depth.’

‘Who would have thought there would be so many of those eldar?’ said Anton. He was looking through the scope of the rifle now. I reached out and grabbed his ankle and pulled him back down. The last thing we needed now was the glint of his scope giving us away to some watching eldar. For all we knew some of them on the heights might have noticed us and be reporting our position to their comrades even now. It was not a reassuring thought. Anton dropped back into cover.

‘There’s more of them than I count,’ he said.

‘So more than five then,’ said Ivan.

‘Ha-bloody-ha!’

‘He can get to twenty if he uses his toes,’ I said.

‘If he takes his boots off,’ said Ivan.

‘When you two have finished your sad attempt at comedy you might want to consider how we’re going to get back down the hill without getting shot.’

‘They weren’t trying to hit us, Anton,’ I said. ‘If they had been we’d be dead now.’

‘Then why–’

Another long scream drifted down the wind. It sounded like a soul in torment. It rang ever higher until it broke on a horrible insane gibbering note, as if the mind of the man screaming had been broken by whatever torture he was enduring.

Anton shot me a scared look.

‘I think they wanted to take us alive,’ I said. ‘Though we might not stay that way for long afterwards.’

‘Any time might be too long,’ said Ivan.

‘What we going to do?’ Ivan asked. As usual, when the chips were down, the other two were looking to me for guidance. I turned our options over and over in my mind. We could not stay here. We had very little water in our canteens, and sooner or later we were bound to be spotted by one of the eldar. If they had not already spotted us and were just letting the suspense build before they took us…

‘We wait until it’s dark and then we try and sneak through their lines,’ I said.

‘You mad?’ Anton asked.

‘You got a better idea? If we stay here, it’s only a matter of time before they find us.’

‘Our own sentries will shoot us,’ Ivan said.

‘We’ll just need to risk it. It would be better than falling into the hands of those xenos scum.’

‘No arguments from me there,’ said Ivan. More screams sounded, echoing down the valley. They appeared to be amplified. Maybe the eldar were broadcasting them to break the morale of our men. Maybe it was just something they did for relaxation.

Anton looked me right in the eye. His face was pale. ‘If it looks like they are going to take me alive, shoot me…’

‘It will be my pleasure,’ I said, but the joke did not seem so funny any more.