The wall had stood for centuries, a symbol that the citizens within the city of Dinath had been able to look upon and know that they were united, protected, safe. And now, the wall was gone.
Crouched in its ruins, Rask gathered the hem of his jacket sleeve in his hand, quickly scraping away the soot and grit that had collected in the scope of his long-las. The weapon was beaten and singed, a match for the marksman who wielded it. Like Rask it served the Imperium of Man, and like him it had been pushed for weeks without respite. Such was the stark reality of an extended fighting withdrawal against a foe that was as tenacious as it was implacable. He and the other soldiers of the Newfound Expeditionary Auxilia faced an adversary who waged their wars through overwhelming force, who had torn the wall down and now sought to destroy anything that stood between them and the city’s conquest. The fall of Dinath would be one more domino sent tumbling, paving the way for the entire world to succumb to the invading darkness.
Rask ran a hand down his face before checking over the horizon through his makeshift cover. Seeing nothing, he sighed with a relief that brought an instantaneous shame, and then looked across to his left. His eyes fell over a grim line of his brothers in arms, fellow auxiliaries in battered suits of crimson carapace armour. They were struggling to claw a shallow trench line out of the earth with the haste of men whose lives depended upon its safety. They stacked rubble ahead of themselves, primed power packs, and swept belts of stubber ammunition clear of dirt and rock. And they fixed bayonets.
Rask glanced to his right, and allowed a curse to boil in his thoughts in order to keep it from slipping past his lips. Rask’s position had been a central one only a few hours ago, and now the sniper found himself left to prop up an entire flank, exposed. A lot could, and would, go wrong, and he wouldn’t have anyone at his elbow to lend fire support when the next engagement started.
A tremor rattled through the blackened earth. As far as this planet’s hellish tectonics were concerned it was a slight one, yet it was still enough to send many of the men jumping. Fear was dragging morale lower with each fitful beat of this cursed, hollowed-out husk of a world’s heart.
Rask stacked another chunk of rubble in front of himself. He set it into a pitted section of collapsed wall, making it flat enough to rest the stock of his lasrifle against and grant his aim some measure of stability. Fatigue turned the chunk of masonry to lead, bringing it close to falling out of his hands. They were all so tired.
‘Rask?’
He didn’t respond to the voice right away. Toyver had taken shrapnel to his neck when the last bombardment had brought the wall down. Rask had propped him up to man one of their stubbers after they had regrouped, knowing that this shallow ditch was as far as Toyver’s life was going to take him. Whatever scraps of cloth they had scrounged to try to contain the bleeding had fallen away, and each of the man’s breaths issued a cluster of dark bubbles from the gouges of his ruined throat.
‘Don’t talk,’ said Rask, sighting once more down his rifle. A wet hacking finally brought his head around. ‘Medicae said it’s keeping the wounds from closing.’
‘Yeah,’ Toyver wheezed. He failed to cover a retching cough, his face smeared with blood and soot. ‘And not ten minutes later that fool gets pounded flat by the wall coming down. Think his is advice worth taking?’
Rask didn’t answer. It was growing harder to look at Toyver, at anyone at all. Even the demigod.
Five armoured giants had come to help the auxiliaries hold the line, angels cast in crimson and shining gold. Four of them had fallen with the wall. The last of their number stood at the centre of what remained of their line.
His armour had been the white of flawless pearl edged in scarlet, now scorched black and stripped down by the violence to match the iron grey of the skies above them. What remained of the white lacquer, and the unusual accoutrements bulking out a frame already inhuman in size, marked him out as a member of the Chapter’s medical cadre. The warrior’s broad, heavily riveted plates clattered with armourglass vials, each containing a fist-sized gland suspended in amniotic fluid. They were all that remained of the demigods who had stood beside him.
Rask had seen the vials, and his thoughts – as they had more and more often of late – had taken him back to Newfound. This time, he had remembered the feast day of the Imperial Redeemer. Rask saw his fellow citizens lighting candles for each of the year’s departed, before setting them into paper lanterns to lift upon the winds and fill the night sky with their soft, flickering light. An offering of lost souls, sent up into the waiting arms of the God-Emperor Himself.
Rask shook his head, forcing the memory away in exchange for focus. He checked the horizon again, looking out across a burnt ash plain sprawling beneath the leaden sky. The land was black with the strength of the enemy, just beyond sight, gathering in their multitudes to take whatever skeleton of the city they had not flattened in their whirlwind bombardments.
He whispered a prayer to the Emperor, and drew his mind back to his training. It forced away the melancholy for a time, a brief reprieve that Rask used to focus his thoughts upon a tactical analysis of the battlefield. Their defensive position stood with nearly a full kilometre of flat land ahead of it. Across its length and breadth it was devoid of meaningful cover. Here and there the ground was pockmarked with blast craters, but they were shallow. None of them offered sufficient depth for the enemy to utilise for shelter.
Their remaining arsenal stood at three light mortars, six stubbers and a pair of functional heavy bolters, alongside the lasrifles of nearly seventy of the Chapter’s chosen auxiliaries. Every one of them had been broken upon the anvil of the trials of ascension, yet even after such failure each of them still answered the call to serve the Genesis Chapter in defence of mankind. Their training rivalled any in the realm of Ultramar, a force capable beyond the massed juggernauts of men and machines fielded by the Astra Militarum.
Nothing, not defeat nor casualties nor even their present circumstance, could unmake the strategic reality of such advantages. Rask and his unit would draw a butcher’s bill upon any assault rush before they broke through. And if the enemy lacked armoured support, they could even potentially turn them away.
Thunder rang out, as though in response to Rask’s thoughts. The crash caused them all to draw back reflexively into the trench’s meagre protection. The sniper waited. An isolated burst could simply be nature: a groan from the tortured atmosphere as the vast banks of poisoned cloud formations above them ground against one another. Such a noise would not be the herald of artillery, unless it was joined by others.
It was joined. A ripple of dull roaring issued far in the distance ahead of Rask. Within a heartbeat it both filled the air above him and radiated through the ground beneath his boots. It was a sound he and his comrades had become all too familiar with, since the day their enemy had arrived.
‘Bombardment!’ Rask heard someone call out, as though there were any amongst them who had failed to grasp what was coming. ‘Brace! Brace!’
Thunder became screaming as shells slashed the sky. For a moment, Rask saw the incoming fusillade as a shimmering veil of tiny black shapes, like a mass of birds disturbed from their perches. Their combined shriek was swallowed by detonations as the ordnance fell back to the earth and exploded into fire and smoke. A disjointed and unending crescendo killed all sight and sound. Rask fought against his dazed senses, against the overwhelming animal impulse to draw back, dig himself further into the earth, and hide from his duty.
A wall of flame rocketed skyward, filling the horizon of their kill zone close to half a kilometre out with a solid line of exploding ordnance. Rask’s hand shot to cover his stinging eyes. Great fountains of black rock vomited into the air, flying in every direction. Balls of bright flame raged and burst with each overlapping blast. Had he been anywhere else, were he not its target, Rask would have marvelled at the sheer synchronicity of the battery bombarding him. The accuracy, the organised precision of it, was as awesome as it was terrifying.
For seconds that stretched like hours, the wall of death raged immobile, seemingly content to visit utter annihilation upon that strip of land alone. Bracing himself against the shuddering earth, Rask peered over the rubble. His senses strained against the fire and noise, and he saw that the barrage had begun to move.
The destruction was advancing forward in unity and order, rolling like a tidal wave. It had become a living thing made of fire and smoke and burning metal shards, consuming the ruined stretch of no-man’s-land metre by shattered metre. Slowly, inexorably, like fate itself it came on, shrinking the distance between itself and the Imperial defenders.
The Space Marine had not moved. He stood over the trench, silent but for the wracking growls of his damaged war-plate. He raised his chainsword, its crimson paint stripped away and its track nearly devoid of teeth, into the air. Rask could barely make out the sacred icon of the Chapter upon his massive shoulder plate, the stylised alpha overlaying an inverted white trigon. The very same iconography adorned his own carapace, as it did for all those who served the Genesis Chapter.
Rask strained to look upon him, rather than the concussive maelstrom fast approaching. He fought to use the demigod as an anchor against the advancing tempest, and the blood and terror and death it would surely bring.
The immense warrior bellowed into the face of the bombardment, his inhuman voice rendered even more harsh by the mechanics of his blunt-faced helm. It came out in blurts and scratches of static. He stopped after a few words, his broad shoulders shifting fractionally as he realised none of the mortal soldiers could understand him. The demigod looked down over them all before uncoupling the helmet from hissing seals at his collar and pulling it free.
Rask cringed at the face that emerged from beneath the war helm. The Space Marine was singularly brutal to behold, his every feature slab-like and riven with scar tissue. Blood covered much of his face, dried and congealed into a rust coloured crust. His blunt nose was broken to the point of ruin, mashed flat against his left cheek. It was a cold, strange sensation, an odd mixture of fright and something Rask could not define, to see a warrior of the Adeptus Astartes so bloodied. Just like the rest of them.
The Space Marine’s eyes were wide, yet focused; calm yet brimming with an unfathomable violence. His was the countenance of a warrior god, in every way the very image of the God-Emperor’s avenging Angels of Death.
His was the face of something so close to human, and yet so impossibly divorced from it, that one could not help but be filled with the warring sensations of reverence and dread simply by bearing witness to it. But that was not truly why Rask had recoiled, why he could not meet his lord’s gaze.
Rask saw the aspiration of his youth embodied, the goal that he had bled and strived towards and hoped to become himself. A warrior king of Newfound, a brother of the Genesis Chapter with the blood of venerated Guilliman flowing through veins that were no longer those of a mortal man. Rask felt every one of the mathematically cut scars that scored his flesh, from the day when his aptitude was found lacking and the Chapter forbade him the destiny he yearned to achieve. Rask had failed, but seeing the brother of the Genesis Chapter, standing in the face of oblivion undaunted, lent Rask the strength he needed.
‘Courage!’
Somehow the voice of the Space Marine cut through the din of incoming shellfire. The smoke and shrapnel and grit hurled out by the cannonade seemed to part around his armoured form. He was a beacon of the God-Emperor’s strength, defiant in the centre of his enemy’s wrath.
He reached into the hearts of each of the auxiliaries. Jaws became set. Snarls of encouragement echoed between comrades. Hands slowed in their trembling, and tightened around weapons.
The bombardment’s tide was almost on top of them. The earth bucked and heaved. The detonations now reached near enough to buffet the men with concussive force. A storm of rock and twisting shrapnel descended, scything down into the line. Men cried out as they were wounded and cut down. A soldier clutched at the stump of his arm, face drained by shock, oblivious to the howls of the man beside him fighting to keep the slick spools of his intestines within his lacerated stomach.
Men were screaming, wailing out prayers to the God-Emperor for deliverance, for strength. Others, especially the wounded and maimed, screamed for death. Rask felt as though he were drowning in a roaring ocean of fire, poised to be swallowed by the next tsunami it hurled. The shelling was less than fifty metres from the trench when it stopped completely.
For whole seconds, Rask simply fought to remain conscious. He held onto the lip of the trench with a white-knuckle grip, trying to steady himself. All he could hear was his heart hammering through his armour.
Slowly, the world ceased spinning. Rask’s senses returned in a throbbing tide, still dulled and reeling. He stared at the dense pall of smoke climbing into the sky ahead of him, his mind struggling to process it all.
Why cease their shelling now? Why not simply grind what few of us still remain into the ground, as they had with the city behind us?
His mind cleared only slightly, but enough for Rask to remember what he was fighting. An enemy that had walked in the wake of the firestorm they made between them, using it as a shield to render the Imperial killing ground and its emplaced weapons useless. One who wanted to be up close when the killing started anew.
Shapes started to resolve from out of the rolling field of smoke and high smouldering flames. Rask saw one, then five, then more. They strode forth in a calm, metronomic march. The figures detached from the aftermath of their barrage, like nightmares hauling themselves free from the darkest night.
The sun’s occluded light revealed them as brutal giants of jet and pitted iron, none of their number standing less than three metres in height. Pairs of eye-lenses glowered like jade slit windows into roaring forge fires. Horns breached the crowns of their ancient war helms at irregular intervals, neither wholly metal nor natural in composition.
The bulky, curving plates that armoured them were trimmed with brass and slashed with chipped and weathered hazard striping in black and gold enamel. The other surfaces, bare metal burnished to an oily sheen, were covered in whorls of barely perceptible runes. The symbols shivered and twitched, sliding over the plates with a frightful fluidity, as though they were alive.
Soldiers that had withstood countless hardships and endured wilted at the very sight of them, raving and vomiting into the trench. Some simply sat, eyes unblinking, mouths working silently in a madness begun by the bombardment and now fully realised.
For one who had lived his life in the shadow of the warriors of Genesis Chapter, they were as horrific and revolting to Rask’s sight as they were uncanny. They were what he had aspired to become, cast in a twisted, broken reflection. They were Space Marines, in thrall to the Archenemy.
There were but twelve of them. All of the shells of the hurricane creeping barrage, all of the destruction and terror of the cannonade, fired to shield just twelve beings. But fewer Space Marines of Genesis Chapter had swept whole worlds of life. Rask had seen such with his own eyes.
Against what remained here of the Imperial line, twelve were legion.
‘Contact!’ a man barked. The panicked urgency of the shout was enough to dislodge most of the auxiliaries away from their shock, and the levy of Newfound raised their weapons.
A barrage of las-fire lashed out into the advance of the enemy Space Marines. The thin beams of white hot energy snapped as they made contact with their grey armour, scoring the whorls of runic blasphemy but failing to cut or penetrate. Rask heard panicked voices behind him as the mortar teams urgently attempted to realign their tubes with almost no distance separating the warriors of Chaos from the trench.
The enemy responded. The deep bang of bolter fire filled the air. Soldiers died, blown apart. They targeted the crews operating the heavy bolters first, killing them and blasting the guns to ruin before any of the others were able to take up their operation. The cannons’ ammunition stocks detonated, bursting amongst the soldiers in clouds of smoke and steel.
Rask pressed his eye to his scope, setting the sight of his long-las upon the foremost of the traitors. He had studied his lords in the Chapter long enough to know the material shielding their throats was flexible, and thus his crosshairs settled on the narrow gap between the helm and breastplate. He held his breath and squeezed the trigger. His lasrifle thrummed as it fired with a sharp crack, linking him and the enemy for a fraction of a second with a beam of crackling energy.
A curse hissed from between Rask’s teeth as the high-powered las-shot connected low, taking the warrior high around the dense armour of his collar. The strike staggered the Space Marine for an instant, before he snapped up his boltgun towards Rask. The sniper swung down behind cover as a burst of bolter fire ricocheted and exploded over the top of him. Chips of metal and rock slashed his face and arms. Rask rolled to his side, his arms withdrawing from his face as the heretic shifted his fire away. He looked up into the trench.
The stubber beside him was silent.
‘Toyver,’ shouted Rask over the cacophony, flicking out a panicked kick into his fellow’s leg. ‘Get into the fight. Fire the stubber, now!’
One of the Chaos Space Marines stepped forward, bearing the bulk of a twin-barrelled cannon that was as long as the warrior was tall. He stopped, bracing his boots in a wide stance as he levelled it at the Imperial line. Rask threw himself back down into cover instinctively. A base fear overtook him, seeing a weapon so powerful that even a giant needed to steady himself before firing it.
‘Autocannon!’ Rask called out, but the din swallowed his words.
Even from forty metres out, Rask felt every round fired like a clubbing punch to his chest. The mass-reactive ammunition utilised in boltguns shredded and dismembered a body, separating heads from shoulders and limbs from torsos. The autocannon, a weapon designed to unmake the armour of heavy vehicles, dealt a whole other kind of damage entirely.
It did not simply kill men. It pulverised them. Soldiers simply vanished, leaving nothing behind to mark their existence save a thin cloud of aerosolised blood that quickly fell to meld with the ash and grit on the ground. Even to those near its field of fire it was devastating, deafening and rupturing the veins and organs of those who managed to avoid being hit directly.
‘Fire, Toyver!’ Rask kicked at the man beside him again. The blow caused his comrade to slump to the side heavily. Rask crawled beside him, his hand gripping the gunner’s arm.
It was already cold. Toyver had likely died some time during the shelling, before the fighting had even started. Rask cursed himself for the involuntary stab of envy that welled up inside him, and shoved Toyver’s body aside.
Rask seized hold of the stubber and clenched the firing stud. The weapon made a sound like tearing parchment, stitching out a flickering line of tracer fire across the battle. He managed to strike one of the advancing Traitor Space Marines, but the high calibre rounds did nothing save for beating out a disjointed clash against the eye-aching runes that covered every surface of his arcane war-plate.
Training dictated that the firing of a heavy stubber be done in short, controlled bursts. The reasoning behind such doctrine was sound. It enhanced accuracy, maximised the efficient use of ammunition and avoided disabling the weapon by overheating its barrel.
The terrible and furious reality of battle at close quarters allowed for none of the conditions enjoyed by those upon the training field. Rask fired the stubber until its barrel glowed and smoky steam leapt off it in hissing wisps.
Such volume of automatic fire would have wiped out an infantry platoon, yet none of the traitors were felled by it. Rask accomplished little save attracting the enemy’s own fire towards himself. Bolt-rounds crashed around his position. Blood splashed his face, hot and blinding, as the soldier fighting beside him was struck in the head. The man’s body was thrown back into the shallow trench, everything gone from the lower jaw up like an abused medicae cross section.
The firing mechanism of the stubber chattered impotently as the ribbon of shells within its ammunition drum ran dry. A metallic thump in front of the emplacement sent Rask diving as a frag grenade exploded. Shards of scalding iron raked the carapace on his back and sliced across his neck and arms.
Rask felt plodding footsteps come to a halt over him, and he twisted to face it. It was with no small amount of pride that Rask found his combat knife in his grip and a battle cry on his lips. He refused to go to his end craven and weaponless.
It was the Genesis Marine. He stood over Rask, firing a boltgun with one hand while he primed a beeping cylinder with the other. He hurled the blind grenade into the advancing enemy, placing a billowing cloud of smoke and interference particles between them and those few of the auxiliaries who were still alive. The giant spoke a single word as he turned, still firing his weapon.
‘Withdraw.’
There were fewer than twenty left in Rask’s unit who were able to do so. The sniper scrambled away from the stubber, finding his long-las and taking it up again. Gravel sprayed from beneath his boots as Rask followed the demigod in withdrawal. In retreat.
It was an act of survival, yet another committed today that clashed against every axiom of Rask’s training. Another defeat that would haunt him for every day that was left to him. However many that was, he could not know.