Kephistron Altis starport, airfield
The questing Patriot fire fell away as the Cadian tanks drove clear, though their hulls continued to hiss and rattle from the sand-glass blowing down from the east. The storm was coming in hard now - the rattle of windblown glass was beginning to compete with the heavy rumble of the tank engines, and every now and then a distant spire would flash into silhouette as the sky pulsed with lightning.
That storm’s going to put an end to the fighting before long. Schenke thought as he dropped one hand from his shotcannon and flagged the tank that was following him to a halt.
But it’ll kill our smoke cover first. Judging by the crash of autocannon fire, the Kriegan assault to their north was already well underway.
“Janie!” he shouted, pointing through the phosphor cloud and the sand that fizzed across it like interference on a pict-screen. To their right, a covered platform marked the start of a grey maglev line that twisted away towards the spires. “That’s the monorail - tell the tankies that the industrial park is just ahead!”
Janie nodded to acknowledge his shout, and monkey-climbed her way round the turret of
Maximum Precision to the external vox. No sooner had she grabbed it, she scrambled back up to rack the slide on the cupola stubber with her free hand.
“The starport fence is right ahead of you, lieutenant!” she said into the telephone, twisting her head away from the sandstorm despite her mask and goggles. “And the enemy’s on the other side!”
She leaned down to repeat the message to the Adrantean legionaries hunched behind the Russ. Inside the tank itself, Ennius retuned his vox caster.
“We are in position, captain.” he reported to Antheia, cupping his mic. “Per-”
“Contact!” his hull gunner suddenly yelled. “Troops dead ahead!”
Cursing the disabled auspex, Ennius put his eyes back to the periscope, and saw dark shadows clustering by the fence, waved forward by a frantic-looking sergeant. Two were taking bolt-cutters to the razorwire barrier, their gloved hands fumbling with the tools. Perhaps they were running a message through the vox jamming, or trying to occupy the monorail station before the Cadian flanking force arrived.
Too late, you bastards.
+ + + + + +
Kephistron manufactury
The northern arm of the Imperial attack was already heavily engaged. The enemy artillery emplacement had vanished in the first seconds of the assault, blitzed by the combined fire of the Chimeras’ autocannons. The Kriegan vehicles were now bulling straight into the Patriot defences with a swarm of dismounted infantry behind, using their own launchers to supplement the rapidly-thinning artillery smoke as they crunched over rubble toward the warehouses. Some of the Patriot artillery had hauled round to face the new threat, and earthshaker shells were landing among both Alpha’s Kriegans and the Adrantean loyalists to their left.
Without a Chimera supporting every squad, the advance of the Adrantean Legion was almost furtive by comparison to the 112th, but it was no less determined. Quintana had sent De Witte’s platoon ahead to sweep for IEDs and winkle out any Patriot pickets from the hab blocks, and the former resistance fighters swiftly cleared the approach to the industrial sector. Missile launchers thumped from Mathys and Nyberg’s platoons, blasting holes in manufactory walls for the infantry to exploit, but for every squad with a heavy weapon team lined up in support there was one without, and those began to lag behind as they hunted for doors and windows to breach with their assault weapons and grenades. At least one had been stopped short, trading fire with a stubborn Divinatory Guard squad in a security block overlooking a road clogged with abandoned cargo-8s.
Gortz’ Conqueror broke the deadlock with its battle cannon as it slewed across the rubble, and the HE shell sent flame and smoke squirting from the building windows. Hunkered beneath her commander’s cupola, Gortz realised that she was chewing her lip. The Adranteans’ shortage of vox casters was making close co-ordination with their armoured support difficult; Gortz and her men couldn’t pick their targets until
after the Divinatory Guard had already started raining hell, and even then only if the tanks themselves had a direct line of sight. It was hampering the Adranteans themselves as well - their line of advance becoming crooked as individual squads met differing levels of resistance and firepower from the stubborn defenders. Through her periscope Gortz saw junior officers braving the enemy fire to stand up and throw hand signals, and some of them even seemed to be blowing on archaic pea whistles to signal between platoon squads. Basilisk fire called in by the defenders shook the ground and added to the confusion.
The Legion’s commissar, conspicuous in his black storm-coat, was directing a trio of heavy weapon teams to deploy across the street to the rear of Tresnjak’s platoon, where they had a limited view of the enemy strongpoints, but an excellent one of their own men. He was visibly haranguing the gunners, and for a moment Gortz’ thought he was actually urging them to open fire on their fellow soldiers, but a moment later the commissar was up and stalking across the rubble, hunched like a vulture against the sand and the lasfire. He stopped next to an infantry squad firing from cover, and roared what looked like more threats at them, but within a few seconds the men were up on their knees or their feet, and redirecting their fire from the barricaded road opposite to the occupied workshop on their right. The defenders’ fire began to slacken, and as soon as it did so the commissar was up and moving again, urging an assault section to follow him as he unslung a power maul and charged straight towards the suppressed strongpoint. Gortz had to admire the man’s cold-blooded courage.
“We’ve gained the plaza.” a Kriegan voice fuzzed through the vox. Gortz could see them ahead past the burning security post, Chimeras grinding through the maze of pipes and bollard-blocked roads. “Dug-in SPGs ahead, any chance of some heavy support?”
At least two of the Patriot Basilisks had levelled their earthshaker cannons point blank at the attackers. A Kriegan Chimera sprinting between buildings was hit - it bounced, and rolled to a halt, spewing flame.
“En route.” Gortz assured, and cupped her vox headset. “Katze Six, break right, dig out those Basilisks!”
“Copy, Katze One.” Weber’s voice answered, distorted by engine noise. “
Treiber, vor! Los gehts!”
+ + + + + +
Manufactory, right flank
Valkyr and Alpha were in the eye of the storm. As the hab blocks gave way to industrial sprawl, the roads narrowed, switching back and forth as they snaked between the irregular buildings. The Kriegan Chimeras slowed accordingly as they rolled out of the smoke haze. The distant rooftop positions were burning, but the Patriot Basilisks were making up for the destroyed heavy weapon teams, and the warehouses were lousy with the same well-armed and dug-in defenders who had blunted the Casterian rush.
A pinpoint of light bloomed impossibly bright in an upper window, transforming a moment later into a streaming lance of blue fire. The lascannon cored out a Chimera and vaporised several of the men running behind it. Heavy weapons flashed back, targeting windows and load-bearing walls in turn, and the warehouse disintegrated under the horribly methodical bombardment.
Out of the blizzard of exploding concrete, a man managed to leap from the roof. It was only as he fell, pierced midair by several las-beams, that Valkyr saw that he was wearing a bandolier of melta charges. The body crunched down onto the turret roof of fourth section’s Chimera, and rolled off the side before exploding. The IFV lurched, pieces of track and wheel bogies spalling off.
“Watchmaster!” a faceless sergeant shouted across to Alpha. “They’re well dug in around the central cluster! It’s a job for the infantry now!”
Valkyr heard Kulkarni shouting somewhere to her left, haranguing the Loyal Legion into another attack. It made her smile. She wasn’t about to allow herself to be outdone.
Game on.
+ + + + + +
Manufactory, left flank
Cutting through claustrophobic buildings where the enemy could be just a room away, separated by a single door or flakboard wall...it reminded Gerald O'Rourke of the haunted ruins of Schattenwelt. And, to a lesser extent, the Umbra-infested
Governor Seydlitz - a journey through the Warp he would much rather be able to forget.
He knew fine well that they wouldn’t see the Casterians until they were right on top of them. Instead of grenades, he threw yelled pass-codes across every threshold. The first dozen times all he got was the snap of distant lasfire - and, once, the raking burst of a Patriot soldier too slow to abandon his sniper nest. This time the wall ahead of him had been torn open, and the street beyond was full of smoke and the flashing threads of lasfire. In the middle of the road a Chimera painted in imperial grey burned, with a dozen bodies strewn around it.
“
Damnatus est!” O’Rourke roared.
Behind the knocked-out Chimera, a soldier in grey carapace armour raised his head. “Go around!” he shouted, sweeping an arm for emphasis. “The whole plaza’s a killzone!”
O’Rourke unhooked one side of his respirator mask and spat into the dusty rubble. “Up the stairs.” he growled to lieutenant Ventura’s men who were following him. “Get some fire on those Patriots so that poor bastard out there can move. Rana, you’re with me.”
They crawled left, through the twisted ruins of a boiler room, and found a pile of rubble where the adjoining workshop had been. A dozen more carapace-armoured Casterians were flattened against the reverse side of the single standing wall. One of them had silver rank flashes on his armour, though he had lost his respirator and visored helmet. His olive face and shaved-down hair were covered in powder-white brick dust, which made him look half a corpse, but he offered O’Rourke a sardonic smile when he saw him..
“Captain Reider, Casterian 85th.” the officer introduced himself, his gothic short and clipped. “I assume there’s been a change of plan?”
+ + + + + +
Gortz lurched sideways hard enough to strike her head on the cushioned turret ring as her Conqueror shunted aside a burning ground-car. They were chewing up a main street, blasting buildings as the Adranteans on the ground marked them, but the Kriegans were effectively fighting alone, and the enemy Basilisks were still firing.
Where the Horus is Weber? She toggled the vox selector in front of her, just in time to get a blurt of Corrisul gothic as Weber’s gunner made a target lock.
“
Ziel erfasst!”
“
Feuer!” Weber’s own voice snarled in answer, and Gortz actually saw the pillar of flame lift above the buildings, debris raining like snow across her greyscale bionic vision as the enemy artillery fire slackened by one.
“Good shot, Six! I think they saw that one from the spires!”
When Weber replied, time itself seemed to skip a beat.
“Katze One, LR-V sighted.”
LR-V. Vanquisher. The noise within her own tank seemed to drain away into buzzing silence.
“Confirm, Six?”
“Saw the barrel sticking out, One. It’s probably the same bastard the Cadians ran into at the railhead.”
And one shot from its archaeotech cannon would core Gortz’ Conqueror out like an apple, to say nothing of the Kriegan Chimeras, or the Cadians coming in from the south across totally open ground.
“Where?” Gortz snapped.
We’re faster. In this urban sprawl, we can outmanoeuvre it.
“Proteus Square north, I’m manoeuvring for a flank shot!”
“Copy Katze Six, we’re moving to support. Quintana, we’ve found an enemy Vanquisher, Proteus Square north - we have to relocate to secure the flank. Katze Three, echelon right, move out!”
Gortz’ second tank bumped down onto the road over a scree of shattered brickwork, and fell in beside them.
“This is Katze Six,” her vox roared. “They’ve spotted us, engaging target!”
She heard a metallic crash, and then shouts, picked up faintly over Weber’s vox-mic.
“Shit, it glanced off! Reload!”
“Target maneuvering!”
“Back up!” Weber was yelling. “Back up!”
With a hellish screech, the connection went dead.
“Halt!” Gortz yelled. “Load AP!”
The warehouse ahead collapsed, and a steel monster rolled through, a bow-wave of shattered brickwork cascading down over its long-barrelled turret.
“Back up!” Gortz barked sharply at her two remaining tank crews. “Fire at will!”
The two Conquerors churned backwards, splitting to either side. Their guns thundered as they went, and plumes of debris fountained to either side of the Vanquisher.
“Target miss!” Gortz’ gunner bawled over the intercom vox. “Reload!”
“Hard left!” Gortz ordered, seeking the cover of a half-ruined energy centre whose water tanks had been holed and drained by flying debris. She mashed her vox caster to the open channel. “Antheia, Alpha, we’ve found your Vanquisher! I need a killzone to lead this beast into and I need it now!”
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