[M] War in the Dirt - Patriots IC

[Azazeal849]

Spoiler: Teph Min Militia, Destruction Maniple Alpha Rho Phi, the Damned 88th - Marioch 

An artillery salvo thundered, painfully close, and threw up shockwaves of brown smoke as the high explosives smashed down a rising Valkyrie and the squads of stormtroopers below it. Most of the imperial drop troopers had closed quickly to nullify the artillery threat, but those fire teams had hung too far back and now they paid for it.

Vox-man Keller whooped despite his ringing ears.

“Aegis One this is Wolf Pack, salvo effective!” he shouted into the caster handset, his own voice sounding dull and distant. “New target, grid sq-”

He was cut off by an awful screech from the other end of the line, followed a moment later by the channel going dead.

“Aegis One?” he repeated, fiddling with the dials, “Respond?”

Captain Grimm had raised his head above the trench and was peering south, before ducking down with a curse. Keller followed suit, just in time to see a ball of flame mushroom on the horizon, silhouetting the dart shape of an imperial Thunderbolt as it peeled away. Smoke rose from the skyline at several points, like a fan of crooked fingers.

“Ah, shit.” Keller cursed. “That was their target.”

+ + + + + +

Vox operator Irving was one of the few Siculans who had held his post when the fall-back order was given. Up in the grain-mill tower, he had both the view and the clear signal to coordinate the next move when major Hancock relayed it - even if it meant squatting in an elevated target, surrounded by the horrific Rho Phi skitarii with their screaming weapons and their beeping, chittering tech-cant.

He peered through a hole in the brickwork to see more stormtroopers swarming down into the north bank trenches, and fumbled for his caster. He flinched as the handset squealed a white wall of noise at him. He cycled the frequencies, getting no change, and cursed as he belatedly looked up and saw the Rho Phi enginseer in the centre of the room, circling his hands in one of those tech-incantations he had seen them use. The damnable noise from the vox seemed to be rising and falling in time to the enginseer’s somatic gestures.

“What the Horus are you doing?” he shouted at the enginseer.

The Martian turned his cowled head, favouring Irving with a horrific visage that had glowing red coals instead of eyes and a slatted metal grille for a mouth.

“Jamming vox frequencies.” he rasped through the grille. “Enemy infantry are attempting to call in artillery support.”

“You’re jamming ours as well, you dumb fucking toaster!”

The enginseer regarded him with his smouldering eye-lenses. “Affirmitive. A necessary sacrifice.” He turned away, resuming his haptic spell-casting.

Irving roared his frustration and scrambled to his feet, hurtling down the stairs to find his comrades.

+ + + + + +

The room around dominus Krypter was filling with acrid smoke, and chips of brick rained down as another missile thumped into the mill. As an obvious strongpoint, they were taking more than their fair share of fire.

The magos’ partitioned datasphere was following several threats at once: the trenches where he had sent one of his beloved Castellax wading in to support the baselines who were engaging the enemy drop troopers at murderously close range; the perimeter where he was allocating precisely enough fire to dissuade and delay a full assault from the northeast; and now the distant woods where his Sicarians at last saw the faces of their targets.

He saw imperial scouts, overflown by skull probes and supported by Sentinel walkers, picking their way carefully after being bloodied by the crude but effective Jotunhel traps - only to be assailed once again as skitarii infiltrators rose from the ground or dropped from the trees to land among strung-out squads and smash through Sentinel cockpits. The initial casualties were three to one in Krypter’s favour, but the Sicarians began to falter as armoured units they were not optimised to fight began to roll up, sweeping the trees with multilaser fire. As combat units began to wink out at an unfavourable rate, he pinged the order for them to retreat and disperse, and set to planning the next phase of the defence.

The predictive algorithms of his blessed implants were not as confident of victory as the magos would have liked, but dominus Krypter enjoyed a challenge. Adversity was, after all, the mother of invention.

+ + + + + +

Droplaug’s leap frog retreat brought her within the comparative safety of Endurance’s outer homesteads just as the fire of the imperial drop troopers was beginning to suppress and buckle the hastily-formed line in the drainage ditch. Pinned in place, the scouts’ rearguard were fighting like tundra wolves as the enemy pressed in with grenades and lasfire. Up ahead, however, they had a new problem. Seeking to pincer the Endurance bridge from both sides, the imperial landers were tightening the noose on the hamlet’s western quarter.

Through the smoke of buildings pounded to rubble by the supporting Valkyries, Droplaug caught snatches of armoured men, teeth gritted beneath the black eyeshields attached to their helmets. They were moving in squads, hugging crumbled walls and battering fire back at the houses the defenders were using to turn the open spaces of the village into a killbox. The Siculans who had abandoned their trench works had inevitably come off worst as the demo charges and gunship missiles rained down, and their dead and wounded were scattered across the ripped, bloody earth. Nevertheless the survivors who had hunkered down in knots around the smoking, impact-stippled houses were now actually saving their comrades’ arses by keeping the imperials from crawling up and posting grenades through the windows.

Kost was fighting with their looted vox, but for the last sixty seconds or so the fucking thing had only squealed static at them.

Jarn, you grox-fucker, where are you?

Smoke hung in the air in a thick haze, heavy and choking, fed by burning buildings and the fumus grenades the imperials had dropped to cover their advance. A shadow flickered through the reek as another Valkyrie dipped its nose and buzzed away north to take cover in the woods, its ammunition expended. A Siculan officer crouched against a drystone wall, coughing and shouting for his absent squad to rally to him. Off to the Jotunhel’s right an imperial flamer team had worked itself into position, and there was a whoosh of red that engulfed one of the brick homesteads. Black smoke and piercing screams surged above the collapsed roof.

A Mariochi child sat bizarrely in the middle of it all with his hands over his ears, no doubt one of the locals who had stubbornly ignored the army’s order to evacuate, though Horus only knew where the rest of his family was. Two imperial drop troopers must have seen him too, breaking from cover and running towards the boy only to catch a burst of heavy stubber for their trouble, which punched them into the air and threw them down on their backs, coughing blood.

[dakkagor]

"Gods fucking damnit!" Droplaug screamed, in rage, pain, and, though she would never admit it, a little fear.

They were all going to die here. They were all going to die in a pissing Imperial standard issue hamlet, huddling behind rocks and blown out walls.

It was pointless issuing orders, the vox was dead, even inter-squad was fried at anything less than 20 yards. Visibility was gone, and cohesion was collapsing as they were forced back, room by room, into the hamlets centre. Every instinct was screaming at her that this was it.

But she would be damned if she didn't take a few of the bastards screaming with her to hell.

She'd picked up a pistol from somewhere, and was leaning out of a first floor bedroom window, snapping shots of at the shapes in the smoke and dust, not sure if she was hitting, not even really sure if she was shooting the enemy.

Even if they somehow held on, even if they somehow won, the Jotunhels scrambler corp, the cream of their elites, was dead as a formation. The rational part of her mind was telling her that, trying to figure out how they could reorganise, retrain, get back some capability, and it kept coming up blank. They had no homeworld to recruit from, nowhere to retire to retrain and rearm.

But it was a decent enough distraction from the dull ache in her arm. Because thinking about some impossible future kept her from thinking about the narrowing problems of her present.

Her laspistol whined empty, and she fumbled with it, one handed, to change out the power pack. Down below, she could hear her men snapping shots at advancing imperials, and she risked a look out the window. Stalking forwards, hugging the cover, were black and gold armoured figures in heavy carapace, with hellguns cabled up to backpack power packs. Scions, stormtroopers, whatever you wanted to call them. She saw one take a centre-of-mass shot, fall onto his arse, then pick himself up and return fire, the overpowered las-bolts chewing through the wall below her position.

She tossed the laspistol aside, and reached into her kit. She took out two red ampules, and braced.

They breached like the trained, deadly professionals they were, hosing down the buildings front with penetrating las-shots, following up with grenades that made the wooden floorboards under her feet jump. The first one smashed the door of its hinges and swept in as she jammed the ampules into her neck.

The second. . .

She fell out of the window like a hunting snowcat, hull axe in one hand, long bayonet knife in another. The Slaught/Frenzon burned through her blood, banishing the pain, fatigue and fear. The bayonet knife sank into the second mans collar seal, spraying arterial gore into the air as she swung the hull axe with a banshee shriek, taking the first mans head of and sending it sailing away.

Two hotshot bolts punched through her stomach and sternum. She threw herself at her killer, smashing the axe down, taking of a limb in trade as she threw the bayonet knife to sink into the helm-lense of trooper four.

Trooper five smashed her in the side of the head with his rifle, and she spun away. A lasbolt cut through the meat of her leg, and she stumbled, surged up, and swung the axe in an upper cut that smashed helmet, jaw and skull, scattering ceramite, bone and teeth.

Three more lasbolts caught her, and threw her backwards into the wall. She slid down it, choking on her cooked lungs.

"Fucking patsie." The shadow snarled. "Sir, we've got an officer here."

"Can she be saved?" She stared up at the trooper, in his fancy fucking armour, edged with gilt, and snarled. She could hear a corpsman running over to tend to her kills.

"No sir." The warm barrel of a lasrifle pressed into her forehead. "Traitors can't be saved."

"Not. . ." she whispered. The man paused, and bent down. "Not. . .not a traitor."

"Not from where I'm standing, girly." The impassive helm snarled. "Don't think I'll waste the shot. Let you bleed out."


"Big mistake." She smiled as her bloodslicked hands relaxed, dropping the pins to her remaining grenades to the floor. The blast was big enough to knock the crumbling house the rest of the way down.

+ + + + + +

Jarns reinforcements bit into the Imperial formations flanks. Their quick march had got their forward squads, with their heavier weapons ditched, in time to stop the scout being completely obliterated. But it wasn't a sure thing, Jarn noted bitterly. Vox was still down, and the Imperials were still pressing forwards.

"Get squads into the hamlet and get the scouts out and behind the main body!" He roared, sending runners. "Reposition our strength along this axis so we can cut through their line of advance. If we can cut of their spearhead, we might have a chance."

Aslong as they don't throw heavy armour at us for the next 20 minutes. With only a few tube launchers to his companies name, and a double handful of cookers, an armoured push would see this company as chewed up and spat out as the scout company.

[Highland Sniper]

Gast shoved some rubble off himself. His ears were ringing as people ran every which way, shouting, trying to get those who were unconscious into cover.

He looked over to see most of the guns were destroyed.

Another ran up to him and looked him over. Curse his ringing ears, he couldn't hear a blasted thing.
The man shook him.
Gast tried to say something, but he couldn't even hear himself.
He pulled him up and dragged him over to cover and laid him down with some others. One or two people tending to the wounded as best they could.
Other people were digging at a caved in doorway as others moved the few remaining artillery guns into position, one at the main door to the compound with people on the walls, engaging people on the outside

===========================================

"Frick!" the thunderbolts peeled off after they successfully dropped their payload.
They were in disarray.

"Vox is down! I ain't gettin' nothin'!"

"The ammo cache is buried!"

"They dropped the shock troops!"

"Well don't just stand there! They'll be knocking down the door any second!"
"Yeah, we still got 2 good guns! Swing one of them around at the door!"

anyone still on their feet scrambled to make the best of it.
The way things were going, they'd not survive the shock troops barging in. But they'd make them pay for it.

"Vesta! Get over that wall! Tell the others that we're alive, and we'll hold out as long as we can! Take someone with you!"

"Right! Braidy, let's go!"

===========================================

Sisilia was nearly knocked off her feat with that blast.

"Bloody hell, they took out the artillery!"

Sisilia had just helped unbury a few people who had gotten trapped by rubble on the first run. And things had just gotten much worse.

"Sisilia, you might want to get up to the trenches. We got this lot. Frank, go with her."

"Alright. I'll follow you, lil' sis." Franck said, shouldering his las rifle.

===========================================

Calvan shot blast after blast as another militiaman unloaded his ancient heavy bolter into the trench line in front of them as the imps advanced.

Men ran past him setting up at a choke point in the trenches, in hopes to catch some of the imperial troops in a closed trench corridor.
Putting a heavy bolter in place with a quick makeshift barricade and a crate of grenades.

Calvan shot at one of the shock troops in the chest 3 different times.
"These guys aren't going down!" He called.
Benton on the heavy bolter punched through a few of them after nearly 5 rounds a piece before running out.
"We'll be out of ammo before we get all of them!" He said.

The shock troops advanced.
"Frick!"

A rocket slammed into one of the shock troops and knocked them all back into the trech.
And Calvan only had enough to think to toss a grenade over in the direction were the shock troops disappeared to before looking behind him to see who fired the rocket.

"Bren, I couldn't be happier to see you!"
"Save it!" Brenna shouted as she hopped into the trench line and reloaded the launcher. "you're lucky I was even able to find one of these in this mess!"

Benton worked to reload his heavy bolter "perfect timing." He said, "how many more rockets do you have?"

"only two!" She said, unslinging her las rifler and joined in the firefight "Don't count on me finding any more!"

Fighting broke off to their right, and Calvan turned to shoot at some lighter armored imperial troops that had managed to push up.

"We're fricked! We gotta move back!" Benton said, sliding the heavy ammo belt across his shoulders and hoisting the heavy bolter. "Move!"

Calvan and Brenna, along with several others laid down some suppressive fire, using their experience in the field to execute a tactical withdraw back to the next trench line.

"This isn't what I had in mind!" Durock said as they approached his position.
"Well, none of us had this in mind either!" Was the response.

They continued to hold as best they could, friends falling around them to close grenades, and las bolts to the face.

===========================================

"We got it!" Someone called. They had finally made a small hole you could crawl to get to the ammo cache.

"Well hurry up! That door ain't gonna last!"

Two men slipped into the hole and formed a short ammo chain, passing out rockets and shells, most being passed to the people who would be holding the door with one of the big guns and a hastily made barricade constructed of mostly rubble.

One man, crouched on top of the wall, was going to act as a spotter amidst the hair of fire.

"Alright, load her up!"
The men manning the one remaining peace of artillery not being used to hold the door was loaded.

"alright, fire on grid 233, 475, 926!"

"233, 475, 926!"
"got it!"

"fire!"

[Azazeal849]

Spoiler: Teph Min Militia, Destruction Maniple Alpha Rho Phi, the Damned 88th - Marioch 

Aslong as they don't throw heavy armour at us for the next 20 minutes. With only a few tube launchers to his companies name, and a double handful of cookers, an armoured push would see this company as chewed up and spat out as the scout company.

A heavy thud trembled the ground under Jarn’s feet, and far ahead of them a cone of black smoke jetted up above the village.

“That’s ours.” Herkja said, having paused a moment to cock her ear towards the explosion. She cuffed sweat from her forehead with a flame-inked arm. “One of our guns is still firing after the airstrike, at least.”

Jarn grunted tensely. The Adrantean sub did use a different calibre of field gun from the ones the frakking Imps had hauled in from Scintilla, and if anyone was going to be able to tell them apart by the sound of their shell-fall alone it was probably Herkja - but with the vox swamped with jamming, whatever artillery they had left would be firing blind. It wouldn’t be stopping the Imps except by some outrageous luck. It was down to them.

The Patriot garrison had cut the trees back some distance from the north bank of Endurance, but to the friendly south they had left the trees in place, and that was to their advantage now. Travelling light, the Jotunhel rushed out onto the ploughed-up fields and were within a hundred metres of the Imperial picket line before the latter realised the danger. The picket was a few strung-out squads of drop troops, lying flat against the furrowed earth while the bulk of their comrades had pressed on towards the village. First they met the Jotunhel charge with snapping, snarling bursts from their lascarbines, and they were effective. The man four metres to Jarn’s right was drilled through the thigh in a puff of vaporised blood, and he tumbled to the ground spitting curses. At Jarn’s roared order the Jotunhel pressed on, firing back with bayonets fixed and hull-axes drawn.

In Jarn’s experience there were some things that even the bravest men turned and ran from. Flamethrowers were one. Naked steel baring down on you at close quarters was another. The prone Imperials began to scramble up and try to back away, spoiling their own aim, and making them easier targets. Jarn saw one cupping his ear and shouting frantically into his vox-bead, but whatever was jamming their communications cut both ways, and Jarn buried his hull-axe in the man’s clavicle as he tried to backpedal away from him. Then they were through, running through mud and blood and the overturned bikes of Droplaug’s scrambler company.

There’s no damn cover out here, they’ll have gone to ground in the village. Jarn clung to that thought as they plunged on into the smoke-shrouded hamlet and saw lasbeams hissing back and forth through the murk. Heavy stormtroopers and lightly-armed drop troops were pressing in towards the centre of the hamlet, and they turned too slow as the Jotunhel came blazing in from behind.

The killing began again.

+ + + + + +

On the north bank of the river, the mill that had formed mangos Krypter’s anchor point had finally collapsed into rubble, but red-clad skitarii were still occupying the ruins, and stalking the trenches. The Castellax war-automaton, surrounded by corpses, swatted at a thrown melta bomb and lost an arm in the explosion. It staggered, recovered, and swung its remaining mauler cannon to bear, sweeping a storm squad out of existence in an eyeblink. Vesta and Braidy heard the bangs and shrieks of the robot’s handiwork as they scrambled for the safety of the second trench, hard up against the riverbank.

“Oh shit!” Braidy shouted, pointing. “Look!”

There were Imperials at the south end of the bridge. Some of them were on their knees, blazing fire back towards the burning hamlet. A few others spotted the two running Teph Mins, and Vesta and Braidy rolled into the trench just in time as the earth above them detonated in showers of burning mud.

In the trench with them were a few of the Wolf Pack, and a depleted squad of skitarii, calmly reloading.

“Tell me you’ve got orders.” one of the Pack implored them as lasbeams hissed back and forth across the river, some knocking chunks out of the bridge, others smacking the water and puffing up steam. “Or at least an idea of what the frick’s going on out there.”

+ + + + + +

"Grab some gear, boys!” Starolf shouted as he kicked over a crippled stormtrooper and confirmed the kill with a brutal stab of his blade. “The Guard get better stuff than us!"

Moving through the village, they had finally made contact with a few survivors from the scrambler company. Kast was kneeling next to Droplaug, having dragged her free of the collapsed homestead. Jarn’s second in command was torn up almost beyond recognition, but her eyes were open - all of the capillaries in them burst red from an overdose of combat stimms. Jarn wondered how many of them she had killed before going down. Not quite enough.

“Sir?” asked one of the Siculans, speaking up for a knot of his dusty, smoke-blackened comrades who had banded together from whatever was left of Hancock’s peacekeepers. “What do we do now?”

“What do you think?” Herkja answered harshly, and pushed a dead drop-trooper’s lascarbine into his hands. The agri worlder flinched at the sight of her flame tattoos and blood-streaked face, but he took the gun and checked it over competently enough.

Without vox, the fog of war never ceased to amaze Jarn. They had raised hell a few hundred metres behind the remaining Imps, up to and including detonating a flamer operator’s tank in a fireball that reached higher than the buildings, and most of the enemy ahead of them were still facing north across the river as they slunk forward round a half-collapsed church wall. Drop-troopers on the riverbank were laying down covering fire while a few men slipped and slithered down towards the bridge foundations, no doubt hoping to cut the wires to the explosives they had spotted there.

+ + + + + +

Calvan could feel blood trickling from his ear.

The sudden artillery strike might have been fired blind, and from a single functioning gun, but it had been enough to make every Imperial within a hundred metres of the trench line go to ground for a moment. Now the panic of the first trench settled into a lull of sniping and lobbing grenades - their own grenades, Calvan thought ruefully as he spotted a distinctively spherical Tephaine-pattern frag bounce over them and explode harmlessly outside the trench. Probably from that crate he’d been forced to abandon. Some reinforcements would be great round about now - maybe Jarn’s Jotunhel, or maybe even Tanaka’s vaunted Tephainian Rangers would get off their arses and come help.

Sisilia and Frank had somehow survived, and came stumbling along the trench towards them. Frank spied a periscope on a dead skitarius, and extended it over the lip of the earthworks. Whatever he saw made him curse.

“What do you see?” Calvan asked urgently, fearing the answer.

“More Imps coming.” Frank reported, ducking back down. “And they’ve got tanks.”

“Tanks?” Durock blurted. "The artillery at Prospect was supposed to stop them!"

"You're an idiot.” Benton told him bluntly. “They know artillery can't give up their prepared position and fight them in open ground. The bastards just bypassed them."

"Are we getting anti-tank support, at least?"

"Yeah, up your arse. If they'd got AT guns to spare they wouldn't be sending us, would they?"

“Only got two of these,” Brenna wriggled up to the firing step and hefted her rocket launcher. “Might as well make ‘em count.”

The crosshair icons on the targeting monocular pulsed, beating like a frightened heart as she trained it on the enemy emerging from the tree line a kilometre away. The infantry came first, sweeping cautiously ahead of their camo-painted Chimeras. She also spied a couple of Sentinel walkers and a low-slung Salamander scout car, but they were keeping well back. The Jotunhel traps and Krypter’s ambush must have spooked them.

As she tracked potential targets, a trio of Leman Russ tanks with stubby conqueror cannons mounted to their turrets rumbled forward, keeping within the concealment of the tree line. Brenna saw the turret hatch on one open, and a woman with some kind of black bionic visor appeared, tapping the side of it as she scanned the town. No doubt she was just assessing the situation, though Brenna couldn’t shake the feeling that the tank commander was looking right at her.

“Now?” she asked Calvan, “Or when they get closer?”

[Highland Sniper]

"Whatever you're gonna do Brenna, make it count." Calvan said tensely.

"Wait." Sisilia whispered.

Brenna hesitated, "Are you sure?" Brenna asked, staying tensely trained on the commander's tank.

"No I'm not. But I... I have the feeling you should wait." She said

"Sis's normally right." Frank said a little hesitantly.

"Keep it trained," Calvan said through gritted teeth, "fire on Sisilia's mark."

Everyone else in the trench kept their heads low as more grenades and lasblasts flew over head.

Brenna saw the commander mover her head, and saw some more obscured movement, troops shifting.

Sisilia twitched, and blinked. "Now," she said, very insistently.

Brenna blinked before double checking her target, and pulled the trigger.

===========================================

Sisilia could never really explain her feelings. They just happened.
During the course of her younger life she had had them. And she learned quickly to trust them.
Some were almost soft, as if it might be a better choice, but it didn't really matter. Some were a lot stronger.

When Calvan and Brenna talked about firing the launcher, she couldn't see. But she had the strongest sense that it wasn't time. This was strong enough she couldn't ignore it. Hold fire.

She spoke up. In moments, it went away, and something in the air... felt like it went from really tense, to... a little relaxed. And the strong urge to wait stopped.
Sometimes she was surprised by how strong these were, and never knew until it had come and gone. She was almost a little disoriented from the relief, she had to collect herself.
This must be a really good time to fire. She put a little more force into what she said next. More than she intended to.

"Now."

===========================================

A lazblast flew over his head as he observed the shell drop.

he cursed. Not only was the shot close, but he saw the imps hunker down. And more advancing.

"3 degrees down, 10 to the left!" he called out.

"3 down, 10 left. Got it!" came the reply. "Come on, get that shell over here!"

Getting the berried ammo out of the hole was slow. But they weren't about the stop now.

"We got tanks!" came a call from another wall.

"locked and loaded!"

"hold!" The spotter called as he rushed over to the other walls to find the tanks lightly obscured by trees.
He looked though the binoculars and consulted the map.
"Swing her around!" he called, and rattled off grid numbers. He double checked land marks, run the rough estimated calculations again. Good enough.

"Ready!"

"Fire!"

===========================================

Zen and the rest of Goffer were farther back out of the trenches.
The approaching enemy was way too far away at first. But with the fighting moving to the trench lines and hamlet, they opened fire.

Voxes were down, so they had no orders except the ones previously given before everything went the way of the warp. Hold the line. Take out high value targets.

Now they didn't find much. But whenever they found any form of officer, they were first to go, along with any heavily armored troopers, or anyone with special weapons.
But they were only so many, and couldn't take out every target at once.

"Tanks coming from the trees" someone muttered.

Zen looked over at the tanks and saw the officer before spotting another patriot with a launcher. Colors indicated part of the Pack.

"Defend the that trench line." Zen said, "She's keying up for a shot."

And 3 of them focused on taking out anyone who might even remotely be aiming at Brenna while the others continued shooting at others.

===========================================

Norin spat out some blood before pulling the bayonet from the trooper he just skewered.

He looked down the trench at the scattered corpses.

The close explosion of a grenade brought him back quickly to the battle at hand. And more Imps were trying to come up the trench line.

"Keep your heads low! Only peek over enough to see your sights!" Norin called and started returning fire, "We will not lose this line!"

He cursed himself for the flashbacks in the guard days.
This was all too familiar. He even remembers receiving similar orders.

More grenades were tossed, and the heavy bolter rattled off the rounds.
Norin felt a sting in his leg and cursed as he hobbled over to a new position.

[dakkagor]

Jarn sighed, heavily. He suddenly felt very old, and very tired. A strange lull had fallen over the battlefield around the corpse of his second in command. Just an hour ago, she had been alive and invincible. The idea that Droplaug would let something as mundane as a Guardsman kill her seemed impossible.

"Whats the play?" He looked up, and Starolf was standing above him. He didn't remember sinking to his knees next to Droplaug. He turned away from the scout, and gently brushed Droplaugs eyes closed, before he took in a deep, shuddering breath.

"We get across the bridge. As many of us as we can."

Something unspoken passed between them. It was the decision Starolf would have made, not Jarn. Retreat to preserve the company, not fight like cornered animals to claw a few more hated imperials into the abyss with them.

Jarn got to his knees, and started to bellow orders. First, clear the banks, then that knocked down church. Then rally with the Patsies, and manage a withdrawal over the river. Then, send the bridge straight to hell.

As he stormed off, rallying the Damned 88th, Herkja sank to her knees next to the mangled corpse. She gently pressed a frag grenade into the dead womans hands, and then rolled her over, setting up a wire and pin combination that would see the grenade detonate the moment someone shifted her body.

"Hope you get a couple more, you leathery old bitch." Herkja muttered.

+++++

The order flowed by word of mouth and squad vox, runners carrying the news. A leapfrogging advance to the bridge, each company relieving the last. Starolf was on point, leading his scouts into ferocious combat with the lead Imperial elements from their rear, pressing them against the defenders in the trench. Jarn held the hamlet, using it as a point of reference to rally his squads, and send them to the bridge, effectively bowing the defensive line outwards, but ready to collapse back at any moment.

+++++

Herkja slipped down the muddy bank and slammed into an Imperial combat engineer, bowling him over before putting an axe into his face. Her squad laid about them with tools and pistols as one of Starlofs squads cut down the covering drop-troopers, freeing her up to act.

"I was just frakking here." She muttered. She had a few minutes to check the wiring was still good on this bridge span, then her and her engineers had to get across and assume command of the demo box. The last thing they wanted was a jumpy Patsie blowing half the Damned to kingdom come thinking they were a guard unit that had broken through.

[Azazeal849]

Spoiler: Teph Min Militia, Destruction Maniple Alpha Rho Phi, the Damned 88th - Marioch 

"I was just frakking here." Herkja muttered. She had a few minutes to check the wiring was still good on this bridge span, then her and her engineers had to get across and assume command of the demo box. The last thing they wanted was a jumpy Patsie blowing half the Damned to kingdom come thinking they were a guard unit that had broken through.

“If only the fraggin’ vox wasn’t jammed…” one of her engineers voiced her thoughts for her as he shook the portable caster and then slapped it against a bridge pillar in frustration. The handset merely continued to hiss white noise at him.

“Wish into one hand,” his wingman said mildly, as if he was imparting some profound wisdom, “Shit into the other, and see which one fills up first.” He cracked a lasbolt across the river, and on the far side a Guardsman clapped both hands over his face and went rolling down the bank into the water.

+ + + + + +

"Defend the that trench line." Zan said, "She's keying up for a shot."

“Aye.” growled one of the Pack, and pivoted smoothly to follow Zan’s pointing arm. Down in the foremost trenchline, which was by now almost entirely in Imperial hands, a Guard sharpshooter had climbed onto an empty ammo crate to take aim over the rear lip. He had seen Brenna pop up once with a launcher in hand, and was waiting for her to do so again. The Pack’s lasbolt caught him in the side of his armaplas helmet, and Zan saw the Guardsman’s own shot scythe wide of Brenna’s location as he fell back down into the trench, cursing.

Down in the second trench line, Sisilia whispered, "Now."

+ + + + + +

Frank was almost freaked out by the resolution on the skitarius periscope he had stolen. He could make out the snarling feline painted on the turret of the lead Conqueror. Horus, he could even make out the rank pins on the commander’s fireproof overalls as she shouted across to the commander of the neighbouring tank - it seemed that the Imps were being screwed just as hard by the blanket vox jamming as the Patriots were. The commander touched a dial on the side of the aug-visor that covered the upper part of her face, and pointed to her ten-o-clock, towards the ruined mill from which some of Krypter’s skitarii were still stubbornly shooting.

To Frank’s left Brenna’s missile launcher thumped, and then there was a whoosh of igniting rockets as the missile flipped vertical and soared skyward. The tank commander saw it then. She started waving an arm frantically at the other tank. He could see her mouth shouting a warning beneath that weird black visor welded across her eyes.

The commander disappeared as she pulled down the cupola hatch. The tank tracks began to turn as the driver below revved the Conqueror into reverse. Smoke grenades flew from the turret, cartwheeling through the air and veiling the tank in a thick bank of fog. None of which saved it as Brenna’s missile came smiting down like the fist of the Emperor. A yellow flash backlit the smoke, followed by a secondary explosion that lofted the Conqueror’s turret above the height of the smoke plume. It drifted almost gracefully for a moment before crashing back to earth, the painted cat’s head beside the barrel now upside down.

The two surviving Conquerors let fly their own smoke grenades. An infantry officer kneeling among the trees started screaming, signalling violently towards the trench line. “Go!” Frank could imagine him shouting, “Go, go, go!”

“Hey Brenna!” Frank shouted, eye still pressed to the periscope, “The good news is, you got the lead tank. The bad news is, the rest of ’em are real pissed!”

+ + + + + +

Imperial Chimeras gunned forward towards the trench line, banks of white cover smoke pluming from their exhaust grilles. One struck a mine and slewed to a halt, hatches popping as the surviving passengers staggered out. Some scion or drop-trooper had the presence of mind to light up a signal flare and send blue smoke spewing above the captured trench line to mark it as friendly. Some of the Chimeras halted and dropped their ramps, allowing the Guardsmen inside to roll out and sprint for the torn-up breastworks.

At the eastern end of the trenches the Patriots were still stubbornly defending, anchored around one of Krypter’s castellax war-bots. The hunchbacked shape of a Hellhound flame-tank rolled to a stop and elevated its turret, spewing a twisting, burning arc of dragonfire over the trench line. It enveloped the castellax, sending the machine into spasms as its actuators roasted, and then it vanished as black smoke boiled up to smother the screams of the skitarii and Wolf Pack defenders caught in the inferno, as well of those of several imperials who had been trying to push along the trench.

One of the surviving Conquerors surged forward past the wreck of the command tank, turret tracking, and fired. Up in Goffer squad’s vantage point the screech of the passing shell made Zan wince, but then the burst of flame off to his right made him realise that the high explosive had been aimed at the ruined mill. A dirty yellow fireball mushroomed skyward, carrying pieces of skitarii and tech-priests with it.

+ + + + + +

As Starolf and his scouts stormed across the bridge, the voxman running with them heard a squeal from his set as the destruction maniple’s jamming abruptly cleared.

“...anyone at Endurance, repeat, this is colonel Tanaka, Tephainian Rangers. What’s your Throne-damned status?”

“Boss!” the voxman piped up. Starolf shushed him with a flapping hand as he took a knee by the bridge wall to cover the next squad moving up. Forward of them was a hell of smoke and flame. The mill was a burning ruin, and he couldn’t even see the forwardmost trench line. The second still seemed to be held though, as the furtive heads of Patriot soldiers popped up to greet the advancing Jotunhel.

“Hey, Calvan!” Benton hailed, squeezing past Frank and Sisilia to tug on his fellow Teph Min’s arm. “The rest of the Damned 88th’s here, looks like they took back the village!”

Along the trench one of the skitarii turned his head just long enough to get a precise count of the approaching Jotunhel, then returned to firing north into the imperial advance as he reported the intel to magos Krypter and awaited further orders.

+ + + + + +

“Hey captain! Captain!” Herkja’s engineer shouted, “Vox is working again!” He waved the handset for emphasis. Then he focused over Herkja, past her. “Oh, you gotta be fucking kidding me…”

Herkja turned, and was just in time to see a Guard chimera skirt round the ruined mill, its forest-green puzzle camo stained by mud and smoke. It chewed a path down the north bank and plunged into the water, its nose digging in before bobbing back up. It thrashed round, treads churning the river, and started crawling upstream towards the bridge, shooting water-spray from one end and streaks of burning light from the other.

Its turret multi-las raked the bridge side, sending Starolf’s men stumbling and sprawling for cover as the stones exploded around them. Herkja’s engineers instinctively ducked down among the bridge pillars. Behind the chimera’s spitting turret, some over-eager Guardsmen popped the top hatch and leaned out to add their own fire, sending las beams and bolts of plasma bursting along the bridge supports.

“Stop that fucking waste of bullets!” one of the engineers howled back with a kind of absurd bravado, returning fire with his own lasgun. “There’s demo packs on those struts, you fucking psychopaths!”

+ + + + + +

The roar of the flames had sucked the breath from Norin’s lungs, and suddenly he had found himself pinned down by a burning hand that pushed him flat from behind and kept on pressing. When he staggered back to his feet the heavy bolter was gone, and so were the Imps who had been trying to push up the trench. All that was left in the dugout were a handful of twisted black mannequins, one of whom was still shrieking horribly. Norin’s eyes were watering from the smoke, and he felt like he was choking on ash. All he could smell was promethium and roasted flesh.

Somewhere far behind him, the lone, defiant artillery piece spoke again. The open ground between the trees and the trenchline quaked and blew upward. With all the smoke, Norin couldn’t see where the shell landed, but he did know that any imperials caught within a hundred metres of it would now be dead.

“Norin!”

Norin turned to see a young Wolf Pack soldier staggering towards him. His face was black with smoke but his eyes were shockingly white, wide and terrified.

“Norin, we gotta go! The Imps are all over this trenchline, we gotta get back to the bridge!”