When they could not find Marita in their billet, Ladbon and his squad headed straight for the infirmary in the hope that she would be aiding with evacuating the wounded, but they were met with the same result.
‘Do you think she’s already gone to the inner citadel?’ asked Grigori as they headed back onto the streets. Most of the Astra Militarum personnel and the capital’s population had already retreated to safety, leaving the odd straggler or walking wounded slowly making their way towards the inner gates.
‘It’s possible, but I don’t want to take that chance. Once we’re in the inner citadel we’re in. If Marita is still out here then I won’t be able to rescue her,’ Ladbon replied.
‘You there! Why aren’t you with the rest of your regiment?’
The Vostroyans turned to find a bolt pistol trained upon them, held tight in the grip of a commissar’s fist. The man bore fresh wounds on his face and his trench coat was caked in dried blood.
‘We… erm… that is…’ Ladbon found himself lost for words. He had been so intent on finding Marita that he had almost forgotten that technically his – and his squad’s – actions were desertion. On the edge of his vision he could see Allix and Dmitri slowly reaching for their weapons.
‘Everything is in order, commissar,’ said a Vostroyan-accented voice from behind them. Ladbon turned to find out who it belonged to, and discovered it was the last person he expected to see.
Kowalski.
‘These men are out here under my orders. I’ve sent them to retrieve one of their comrades from the infirmary in the next sector over,’ he continued.
The commissar lowered his weapon and holstered it. ‘Well, they had better make it quick. The orks are almost at the gates.’ He gave a salute, which Ladbon and Kowalski instantly returned. After some hesitation, the rest of the Vostroyans did likewise. Satisfied, the commissar went on his way.
‘Thank you,’ Ladbon said, meaning it.
‘I didn’t do it for you, secondborn. I did it to pay my debt to Trooper Ketnemu there. Your wench is assisting in the infirmary over in sector fourteen, or at least she was when I just left there.’ Ladbon noticed that his counterpart was wearing a bandage on his left hand covering up the stumps of two missing fingers. ‘If you hurry, you might get to her before the orks do.’
Kowalski made to leave in the same direction the commissar had headed, but stopped and turned to Allix. ‘If you ever lay another hand on me, trooper, I will kill you. Understood?’
‘I thought you liked it when I play rough, Kowalski,’ Allix said, blowing the captain a kiss. Kowalski walked away shaking his head.
Ladbon and the rest of his squad headed off in the direction of sector fourteen.
‘I didn’t foresee that…’ he muttered under his breath.
Ezekiel blinked back into reality, surrounded by greenskins. Unprepared for a stranger suddenly appearing in their midst, none of them were able to act before the Librarian’s force sword parted their heads from their bodies. Those further away but still posing a threat soon succumbed to covering fire from the two Dark Angels and the skitarii atop the fortress walls. Glancing back over his shoulder, Ezekiel realised that his first jump had been almost thirty metres. If his luck and psychic stamina held out, he would only need to make three more to reach the wall.
In a flash, he disappeared again, reappearing almost twenty metres further ahead and higher up the mound of bodies. The front of the corpse wave had hit the fortress wall and, unable to make any further forward progress, the amalgamation of cadavers and body parts was being compressed upwards, rising ever closer to the battlements. Down below, the noise from the xenos throng grew louder still, their bloodlust reaching a frenzy, the butchery so long denied them by the defenders of Honoria only moments away.
Two more orks fell to his blade before he jumped once more, a killing blow from a huge axe wielded by a third greenskin passing harmlessly through thin air as its intended victim rematerialised fifteen metres up ahead. Ezekiel could taste blood in his mouth, his head pounding from the strain, but he still had the presence of mind to block an incoming blow from an ork blade, reversing the swipe and knocking the huge knife from its wielder’s grasp with the upstroke and bifurcating the brute with the return. Oblivious to the blue-armoured psyker behind them, scores of greenskins stood between Ezekiel and the battlements, eager to be the first to spill the blood of those within the city. Withering fire from the wall did little to thin their ranks, their hunger for violence sustaining them even when their wounds should by rights have killed them.
It was now or never. Though it was still fully twenty metres to the top of the wall, if he waited any longer then it wouldn’t leave Balthasar, Serpicus or Diezen and his skitarii enough time to get off the wall before the green tide engulfed them. Ezekiel closed his eyes, found focus and made the final jump.
In the moment between, that tiny sliver of time when he was simultaneously at one with the warp and anathema to it, the daemon appeared to him, laughing.
When the warp spat him back out, he was hanging in mid-air, one metre short of the battlements.
‘Marita!’
The pregnant woman turned away from the comatose Mordian she was tending to and stood up to meet Ladbon’s embrace.
‘Come on. We have to get out of here,’ Ladbon said, grabbing her hand. Marita stood firm.
‘We can’t just leave these men here. We have to get them to safety,’ Marita scowled.
Ladbon looked around at the half a dozen occupied gurneys, each of them filled by an unconscious Guardsman. A Vostroyan medic, his bushy moustache slick with sweat, was examining one of the patients, assisted by an Honorian orderly. The infirmary was eerily quiet, like a morgue, the low crackle from a portable vox-unit the only sound other than the medic’s footsteps as he went from patient to patient, administering injections.
‘If they cannot move themselves then they are dead already,’ Allix said coldly, looking over at the medic. He simply shook his head and continued about his business.
‘We can’t leave them. I can’t leave them, Ladbon,’ said Marita defiantly. It was this intense compassion that had helped draw Ladbon to Marita in the first place. Forcing her to abandon the wounded while they still had a chance of survival, no matter how slim, was not going to be easy.
The vox fizzed to life, making his decision for him.
‘The orks have breached the walls!’ called out a panicked Mordian struggling to make herself heard over the roar of an onrushing greenskin army. ‘The orks have–’ The vox died, presumably the owner of the voice too.
‘That’s it. We are leaving,’ Ladbon said, authoritatively.
Marita looked to the medic.
‘He’s right. All we can do now is save ourselves.’ He plunged a syringe into one of the unconscious Guardsmen’s necks, emptying clear liquid into a vein. ‘Don’t worry. These men are beyond the reach of the orks now,’ he added solemnly.
Ladbon looked upon each of the gurneys, at the look of absolute peace on the face of each dead Guardsman. Marita put her hand to her mouth, stifling a sob.
Ladbon put his arm around Marita’s shoulder guiding her out of the infirmary, following the rest of his squad, who were heading back onto the streets of Aurelianum, weapons raised.
For a moment, Ezekiel hung there, unable to react, his psychic reserves overdrawn. Then, just as gravity was about to reinforce its rule, servo-arms and mechadendrites gripped him around the waist and shoulders, plucking him from the air and pulling him roughly onto the battlements. As he landed on his feet, Serpicus and Diezen relinquished their grips, the Techmarine passing the Librarian a bolt pistol as he did so.
‘You can thank me later,’ Serpicus said, gruffly. ‘If we live that long.’
He raised his bolter, firing off a volley that took down the first of the orks to make it over the wall.
In perfect unison, half of the skitarii dropped to one knee and fired off a synchronised fusillade, their comrades behind them able to shoot over their heads. As they retreated backwards, they alternated, maintaining a wall of suppressing fire and holding the rapidly growing force of orks at bay. Diezen and the Dark Angels took out targets of opportunity, any of the larger greenskins or those carrying anything more potent than the average ork weapon. Reaching the top of the narrow staircase, the three Space Marines had to descend in single file, the weakened Ezekiel going first, followed by Balthasar, who was still struggling for mobility on his injured leg. The skitarii, smaller in stature than the Dark Angels, could make it down two abreast, which inhibited their capacity to lay down covering fire. The first of the orks reached the top of the steps only seconds after the last of the Mechanicus warriors, leaving scant yards between aggressor and defender.
What happened next, under normal circumstances, should never have happened. Had Ezekiel still possessed his powers of foresight, had he not been in a diminished state due to his psychic exertions, he might have been able to avoid the bullet, to raise a shield and deflect the shot.
Had the laughter of the daemon not still echoed in his mind.
The shot itself was innocuous – the final act of a dying ork, finger spasming and loosing off uncontrolled fire in all directions. One round struck Serpicus around his midriff, cracking open the crimson ceramite of his armour but leaving the flesh beneath unscathed. Another hit a skitarii square in the throat, the gaping wound spewing a mixture of blood and oil, slicking the stairs as the warrior fell forwards hard onto the near-white stone. The third shot hit the fortress wall and, by rights, should have embedded there – but, its trajectory a thing of coincidental perfection, instead it ricocheted.
And hit Ezekiel squarely in the left eye.
Morning had broken over Aurelianum but at street level it was impossible to tell.
Ork and Imperial flyers filled the skies, airbursts and explosions bathing the city in an orange glow. High above, fires raged where the turrets of the outer gates had been destroyed whereas those perched atop the inner citadel continuously fired their huge lascannons, the bright energy discharge causing a strobe effect that lent an unnerving edge to an already unreal situation.
Confident that the orks had not yet made it to the ground, Ladbon’s squad ran as fast as they could towards where one of the inner gates had been opened to allow the defenders access. With the xenos now within the city, none of them were even sure that would remain the case for much longer.
Ladbon and Marita trailed behind the rest of the group, the pregnant Honorian unable to maintain the same pace as the Guardsmen. The medic and the orderly bridged the gap between the two groups, the Vostroyan doctor occasionally glancing back to check that Marita was able to keep up.
With each step they took, the bestial roars from above grew louder and as they rounded a corner, human cries joined the xenos dirge. The orderly stopped abruptly up ahead, a body identifiable only by its blue Mordian tunic hitting the ground just in front of him and bursting open upon impact, spraying the pale stone with blood and viscera. A moment later it was the orderly’s own blood and viscera decorating the streets of the capital, the man too slow to avoid one of the dozens of bodies – many still alive – now being thrown down by the orks.
Still the roar grew closer.
Whispering encouragement into Marita’s ear, Ladbon picked up the pace.
Balthasar grabbed the Librarian by the robes and spun him over onto his back. A single, lifeless eye stared back at him, the other a bloody ruin. The first sergeant could not tell whether Ezekiel was still breathing, but it mattered not; he had to get him down to the inner citadel and into the care of Rephial.
Balthasar put his arms under the Librarian’s shoulders and lifted him, ready to drag him the rest of the way down the stairs. He looked up to find that Serpicus had grabbed Ezekiel’s feet.
‘Quicker if there are two of us,’ the Techmarine said. ‘Go!’
Behind them, the skitarii put up a spirited resistance but the flow of orks onto the stairs was now a torrent threatening to engulf them. Diezen, positioned between his Mechanicus fighters and the Space Marines, used every weapon at his disposal to hold back the greenskins, flames, las-fire and other unidentifiable weapons systems making short work of any xenos that got within range. But it was still not enough.
A trio of skitarii fell to a single blade, their twitching cybernetic corpses blocking the route down and causing the front ranks of orks to stumble, tripping the brutes immediately behind them. Had the circumstances not been so horrific, it would have been comical: a handful of oversized aliens desperately trying to regain their footing but slipping back down thanks to the blood and oil underfoot, those following growing impatient and throwing those causing the blockage from the wall. Regardless of the grim humour of the situation, it had bought the Dark Angels and Mechanicus valuable time.
‘Arch Magos Diezen,’ Serpicus called out. ‘You and your skitarii should brace yourselves.’ He pulled something from a compartment on his belt. The arch magos issued a coded command through the noosphere, his troops responding instantly by crouching and shielding their still-flesh parts with the bonded metal of their body.
Higher up, the steps gave way under the force of the explosion, those orks in the direct vicinity of the blast disappearing into nothingness, those further away finding the solid stone beneath their feet collapsing, sending them to the ground far faster than they had expected. Those who avoided instant death lingered warily at the precipice, unsure if the gap could be cleared by leaping across. The first orks to try proved it was impossible.
‘I had some explosives left over from the mission at the Annantine Gate,’ Serpicus said, lifting the Librarian again. ‘I rigged it on my way up here to slow the orks down. Didn’t think I’d be so close when I blew it though,’ he added, noticing the chunk of ork thigh bone embedded in his pauldron.
With the immediate threat from the orks quelled, they carried on downwards.
The vision hit Ladbon like a fist to the face, halting him in his tracks. His grip on Marita’s hand tightened.
‘What is it?’ she asked.
‘Get back!’ he shouted. ‘Doctor, you too!’ he called out to the medic, but his warning came too late.
One moment, the Vostroyan was sprinting along the narrow street, the next he was buried under a cascade of rubble and dead orks, just as Ladbon had foreseen.
‘Are you hurt?’ Kas called out over the wall of debris that separated him from his captain and Marita. It was stacked so high that even he could not see over it.
Ladbon turned to Marita, frantic concern in his eyes. She nodded and embraced him, tears of relief soaking through his dishevelled tunic.
‘We’re both fine,’ Ladbon replied.
‘Stay where you are. We’ll get this cleared,’ Allix said, projecting to be heard over the blockage and the encroaching sound of the ork horde.
‘Even if you can move it, that’ll take too long,’ Ladbon said. ‘Get yourselves to the inner citadel. Marita and I will have to find another way around.’
‘None of us are going to leave you out here at the mercy of the orks,’ Allix said. ‘Besides, there isn’t any other way around.’
‘And I’m not prepared to have you throw your lives away when there’s nothing you can do to help us.’ Ladbon’s response was measured but authoritative. ‘You have command now, trooper, and you are to lead your men to safety. Understood?’
Allix said nothing.
‘Did I make myself clear, trooper?’
‘Crystal,’ Allix said coldly. ‘You heard the captain. He’ll find another way into the citadel and we’ll see him there. At least we’d better do or he’ll have me to answer to.’
‘Don’t let command go to your head, Allix,’ Ladbon shouted towards the footsteps he could hear heading off into the distance.
‘Don’t let the ability to see the future go to yours,’ Allix hollered back.
When Ladbon turned back to Marita she was staring at him hard, mouth agape.
‘I’ll tell you all about it later, promise,’ he said, grabbing her hand. ‘Come on. I think I know how we can get into the citadel.’