THIRTY-NINE

Furnace heat swelled around the foot of the wall. Perspiration beaded Culcis’ face, his sodden uniform sticking to his back. His armour shimmered with reflected discharge from the refractor field. It had the look of something arcane and medieval, a literal mantlet on a wheeled carriage accompanied by six pavisors in red Mechanicus garb. It lit the air, turned it actinic, made it stifling, but held off the deadly rain from above.

Mounted Pact guns hammered the Volpone, massive shells and energy beams battering the aegis generated by the man-portable shield array as the troops ran for the wall and the blind zone, where the heavier weapons lacked the firing arc to target them.

The refractor field was large enough to cover a platoon in close formation, thirty men sweating and swearing beneath a barrier of violent energy. Dozens threaded the front line, swathes and swathes of Imperial soldiers crouched under flickering fields, awaiting the order to ascend.

A horn blast rang out, augmented by a vox-emitter, and a unit nearby threw mag-grapnels to begin their assault. The iron teeth of the grapnels bit, the inertia of magnetic attraction ensuring they stayed that way. Cables tensed and thirty men climbed. Then thirty more further up the wall, and another and another. Platoon by platoon, Volpone grey in abundance, hundreds and hundreds, too many for the naked eye to calculate.

Las-beams snapped up from below, withering in their intensity, herding the wall defenders behind crenellations. Still they returned fire, washing the wall face with energy beams and solid shot, scything down attackers until they fell in an avalanche of bodies.

A secondary cadre of attackers had erected ladders, the rungs spiked so they tugged at stone and held it. Twenty had mounted them as the deadfall of men from above collapsed every ladder, fifty or sixty Volpone plummeting to their deaths, or else crushed by the bodies that crashed over them.

This was but one section. Hundreds more told grimmer stories.

A grind is how the drill-sergeants used to put it, the meat grinder of war, the leveraging of one number of men against another until attrition tips the scale and a bitter stalemate becomes a slaughter. Morbid mathematics, Culcis had often thought of it. From his officer’s training he knew siege warfare was brutal, the trade-off between inches gained and blood shed the meanest and most profligate.

He hunkered down, awaiting the order. Shiller had the vox-horn, and looked up with bleak resignation at the dire scenario they would soon face. His bloodshot eyes told the story of the previous night’s indulgence but no amount of vresk could dull the senses to this.

A shriek overhead had them crouching, shrinking into near-foetal position as the heavy mortars thundered another barrage. It struck a section of the wall, close enough to shake the earth and spill dust clouds ­either side. Culcis choked, pulling up a scarf around his mouth to ward off the worst of it. Greiss had turned white, his eyes wide with barely contained panic.

‘Are we headed up, sir?’ asked Hanmar, voice muffled by the echoes of slowly subsiding ordnance. Rake and Dresk stood nearby, hunched up, promethium canisters strapped to their backs, a flamer hooked to the side.

Culcis held up his palm flat. Wait…

Shiller raised his fist for them to hold, then put the vox-horn to his lips.

Over a hundred men were on this section alone, supported by a cohort of fifty Agrians digging trenches and filling them with seismic charges. The bombs rippled in a daisy chain across the wall mountings, trembling earth, heaving dust, but to little practical effect. The natives would remain under the aegis, sapping and undermining, though none had reported finding the base of the wall yet.

A glance to Culcis’ left revealed a clutch of Agrian auxiliaries over in the next section who, unlike their sapper countrymen, carried lasguns and had no picks or shovels. They would defend the sappers from enemy sorties. He recognised the golova amongst their ranks, Makali giving him that enigmatic look she usually wore.

‘They will come for you when you are unready,’ she had said.

Maybe the cossacks wouldn’t wait for him to be unarmed and alone? Maybe they’d just try to kill him here? He couldn’t see them but soldiers milled everywhere, and the air was foul with smoke and dust. It was controlled chaos.

Culcis looked up instead, the tension like a knot tightening in his chest. He fought to keep his breath steady, though his heart punched like a piston-hammer.

One deadly step at a time…

Another mortar barrage followed the previous one, the seconds in between stretching into hours. It hit the wall section nearby in rapid succession, a decent chaining of explosive shells that sent Pacters reeling from their posts.

This was it.

The vox-horn blared, shrilling like an inhuman scream, and all thoughts of murderous cossacks fled from his mind.

Culcis bellowed the order, though his cries were all but obliterated by the sounds of battle. They ran the short distance remaining to the wall. His mag-grapnel found purchase, like a dozen others, the cable taut in the instant before he began to climb.

Encumbered by lasgun and a grenade bandolier, every step took effort. The soldier ahead of him, Vedris, slipped and nearly took the others with him. They reached almost eighty feet, halfway to the summit of the wall, before the shooting started. It came from enfilading positions, the angle to the assault platoons too narrow for the defenders directly above them to draw a bead. Slanting las-beams whipped in. Seddik fell, the trooper shot through the arm and losing his grip. He screamed all the way down, his body crushing two men beneath him who had been waiting to ascend.

Two more were hit in close succession. Then another and another. One of the dead became entangled, his foot looped around a cable, hanging by the ankle like a butcher’s carcass. Hanmar, on the rope adjacent to Culcis, cut the dead man free and the body fell like all the rest.

‘Climb!’ urged Culcis, bellowing to be heard. ‘Climb!’

Vedris got a better grip and, hand over hand, clawed back a few feet. A shot to the neck ended him, blood spattering Culcis’ upturned cheek like rain. Then the dead man tipped back as gravity exerted itself, and the lieutenant pressed his body flat against the wall, and shouted, ‘Incoming!’

Vedris took out one other on the cable, a corporal too slow to react. They tumbled groundwards, embracing like lovers.

Culcis climbed.

After nearly three shoulder-burning minutes, he gained the battlement at the summit of the wall. Hanmar had got there ahead of him and Greiss, the two men helping their fellow troopers over. Several more died in this moment, shot as they were leaping onto the battlements. Skirmishes had broken out across the length of it. An explosion a few sections over lifted men of both sides into the air, bodies flung outwards in ungainly parabolas. Billowing smoke occluded the rest.

Culcis scarcely had time to react as a hooked blade swept in for his neck. He turned it, his sabre unsheathed on instinct, and shot the Pacter through the heart with his pistol. At his side, Hanmar killed two others, his blade-work as economic as it was deadly. Greiss blasted another, the burly sergeant burning ammo on rapid fire as he fought to make a space to exploit. They were hemmed in, Archonate fighters ­either side. Sporadic gunfire cracked left and right. A bullet buzzed close by, hot and loud. All sound disappeared behind the tinnitus whine in Culcis’ ear before rushing back. The fighting grew close, hand to hand. Sidearms predominated. Somewhere a chainblade started up.

Until Rake gunned the flamer and turned the air in front of him into burning promethium. Men became candles in its rippling light, smeared brown smudges lost to haze and fire. They collapsed, surrendering to smoke and heat. A few, blind and panicked, leapt to their deaths. Culcis morbidly watched them flailing as they hit the ground.

A momentary efflux of enemies bought by Rake’s flamer gave a few seconds of relief.

‘It’s a bloody cauldron, sir,’ shouted Greiss, slamming a fresh clip into his lasgun. ‘I think they’ve been saving themselves for this fight.’

Culcis nodded to his sergeant. He glanced to the side, several sections east to where Darian and his cohort had just climbed the parapet. He led them like he was born to it, which, the lieutenant supposed, he was.

‘Bring us victory,’ he uttered, returning his attention to his men. ‘Leave them, corps,’ he said to Hanmar, the field medic having crouched to tend to one of the wounded. ‘We need to push on.’

Hanmar made the sign of the aquila over the stricken trooper’s chest and retrieved his sword, wiping it across his uniform until it shone.

‘It’s a heavy damn price,’ he said.

Scattered throngs of Blood Pact troops milled in the courtyard, which was strewn with half-raided ammo caches and supplies. Most of their strength was on the walls. They were throwing everything into this defence, a last-ditch effort to hold the Imperium at bay.

‘They know they’re beaten,’ replied Culcis, ‘and are testing our resolve.’

His gaze strayed to beyond the wall and, not so far away, the grim shadow of Rakespur. It was an isolated and decrepit ruin, like a dead man’s hand reaching from the grave. On the Imperial side of the wall, flickering with grainy bluish luminescence, stood a hundred foot hololith of Darian Deviers. Banner upraised, sword unsheathed, it had been carefully crafted by Rensaint and his propaganda machine.

Perhaps the truth would live up to the story. Seeing Darian on that wall, fighting as he did, made Culcis dare to believe it. Men cheered for it, either way, a ghost rendered in light.

A las-burst yanked Culcis back to the moment as a trooper in front of him took a hit and peeled away, turning and then falling into oblivion. Reinforcements were moving up, peppering the Volpone attackers with heavy stubber fire, wielded by gene-bulked Pact heavies. A platoon was driven off the wall, men flung outwards, some pushed, some jumping like sailors abandoning ship. Fire chased them as the enemy pushed their own burner teams to the front.

A pair latched on to Culcis’ platoon, a masked sirdar jabbing an order towards Greiss and a squad of Bluebloods. The sergeant had taken a knee, lasgun braced into his shoulder, and was hammering shots into the burners, but they advanced like human tanks, armoured head to foot, ponderous but inexorable. Their flame units were crude things, long-necked and with flared muzzles, black streaks across their heavy plate like warpaint, the grotesk doubling up as a breather mask.

Shiller was bellowing, the words lost in the tumult, fighting like a red-faced devil. He was trying to forge a path away from the burners, hewing down Pacters with his sword and showing Culcis how he came to be a decent captain despite the fact he was a wretched man.

It wasn’t enough.

The flame spurt plumed, expanding from a thin spit to a wide swathe. Screaming followed, Volpone burning then falling. Greiss had thrown himself flat, the heat searing his back before Culcis put a las-bolt through the burner’s fuel intake and the tank went up in a fireball. It took out the second burner too, the explosion shaking the entire wall section. Several Pacted died in the blast, including the sirdar, bones turned to kindling, their bodies spread across a scorched black smear.

Hanmar ran to help Greiss, who was staggering back, singed but otherwise alive. The dead lay everywhere, their uniforms almost indistinguishable from one another, a growing hecatomb.

‘Bloody Throne…’ gasped Shiller, his breathing laboured as he took a pull from a flask hidden beneath his breastplate. He snarled as Culcis’ eyes fell upon him. ‘I’ll let the Emperor be my judge, lieutenant,’ he said, and added sadly, ‘may He protect us all.’

The captain stormed off, barking and cajoling the men, asserting order.

They were losing.

Culcis caught his breath, but respite was fleeting. A discordant clarion ripped through the air. More of the Pact were coming.