“How are they doing, Sorn?” Webber asked, holding has flak helmet firmly down against the relentless bombardment that threatened to shake it loose with earth tremor alone. They had been separated from the rest of Beta squad in the confusion of the rush towards the village, and neither of them had a damn vox caster.
Sorn bellied his way up to the lip of the shell crater and peered out. “There’s a couple of Coburn’s squad heading back our way.”
Webber checked the charge counter on his lasgun. “Do they look happy?”
“Wounded and dirty.”
Webber frowned. “Oh shit, maybe we lost.”
Loose clay slithered down the side of the crater as one of the war-bots lumbered past, venting sparks from superficial damage.
“Heh, not likely with them around.” Sorn quipped, looking up at the machine, then waved at someone up top. “Hey, little sister! Over here!”
Webber cautiously shouldered his lasgun and crawled up until he too could see over the crater lip. Three women were hurrying in their direction, heads down like they were fighting their way through a rainstorm. Two of them wore Teph Min armour - one set noticeably too big on its small wearer - and the third looked like a native, with tousled hair and dust-ruined clothes.
“Well you’re a pretty one.” Sorn observed, before turning to the two wolf pack. “Who’s she, then?”
“A civvie, I think.” Brenna said as she and Sisilia slid down into the crater and hunkered down. “And don’t compliment her. I’m sure I read that Mariochi natives have this weird superstition about it attracting jealous daemons.”
The civilian clearly didn’t speak Teph, because she seemed less concerned by their exchange than by Sisilia, who she was still staring at - or rather, at the symbol on the shoulder of her fatigues that denoted her as a sanctioned psyker.
“You are…?” she asked Sisilia quietly, in stilted Adrantean standard. She flailed her hand for a moment, as if trying to capture the right word from the air, before settling for pointing at her own forehead. “Witch?”
+ + + + + +
Threads of killing light were all around Norin, the green of his squad’s Jager-patten lasguns crossing with imperial red and blue. Lasguns snapped like hungry jackals, bolts glancing off flak armour or punching through to release puffs of vaporised blood. The wolf pack were slowly wrapping around the village buildings like a tightening noose, while the heavily-armoured Nebulas dropped straight down into them. A fire team of Imps tried to break out from a ruined terrace, and were immediately hit by Patriot crossfire. Norin had thought that the prefab base at the centre of the hamlet would have been a tougher nut to crack, until the ad mech war bots turned their guns on it, blowing out chunks of rockrete with the methodical back-and-forth sweep of their plasma cannons. Soon the base was burning just like the other buildings. Norin led his men at a run, anxious to secure the weapons cache spotted by Foxtrot squad before the fires spread.
Ahead of him were a cluster of steel crates stamped with the imperial double-eagle, their lids hastily crowbarred off and lying next to them. Stray power cells and frag grenades scattered the ground where the ammo runners had dropped them in their haste. Only a knot of Imps were still sheltering near the crates, the rest of the guards seemingly having been killed or fallen back. One of the guardsmen saw them coming and clawed at his bandolier for a fistful of grenades, but a burst of lasfire scythed him down before he could pull the pins. Another Imp with some kind of rank stripes on his collar looked up from the vox set that he was busy pulling off the back of a dead caster-man. Still shouting into the receiver, he fumbled for the pistol at his hip. Norin’s lasgun snapped and the guardsman flailed back, dragging belts of stubber rounds after him as his clawing hand hooked around one of the crates. The vox handset thumped to the ground, still crackling with return chatter.
“Hey Yurgen,” Norin snapped, beckoning to one of his squad who he knew spoke the high-falutin’ lingo of Calix standard, “What’s he saying?”
“Something strike confirmed?” Yurgen said, running forward. He pushed the dead officer off the vox set and pressed the caster horn to his ear. As soon as he did so, he paled. “Hail to you, martyrs.” he translated, “Hail to the Emperor.”
Norin nearly fell over himself running backwards as he realised what those words meant. “
Everyone get the fuck down!”
+ + + + + +
The first artillery round smacked the village with enough force to stumble Ruiz even from several hundred metres away. The sound was like a physical force, a punch in the face to match the shockwaves that rippled through the cracked earth, making loose gravel jump as if the ground itself were flinching. Imperial artillery, Ruiz knew from a hundred similar bombardments. Earthshaker rounds, doing exactly what the name implied. A rip and crackle of secondary explosions followed, perhaps one of the ammo caches going up.
Well, he thought grimly.
That’s it then. He hadn’t given lieutenant Carver the order, but if someone had taken it upon themselves to start voxing for an artillery strike within the perimeter, then things were sufficiently frakked that no-one else was coming.
“Go, go!” he urged the last few stormtroopers who were leapfrogging back. He looked at the final Taurox that was revving up in preparation to leave, and struck the angled wheel arch that stood as high as his shoulder for emphasis. Dust and pebbles sprayed from the oversized tyres as men piled through the open rear hatch, and with a dragon’s breath of oily smoke the APC tore away down the switchback road.
Ruiz turned to the commissar, his only companion now while explosions and the sharper whip-crack of lasfire blitzed through the embattled village. The commissar seemed unconcerned, her eyes tracing up the cliffs that flanked the switchback, as if giving the melta charges nestled there one final inspection. Seemingly satisfied, she turned to Ruiz. “You didn’t have to accompany me personally, you know.”
That, Ruiz thought, was true. “Permission to speak freely, commissar?”
The commissar’s eyebrow flickered. “Alright.”
“You scare the hell out of all my Guardsmen, ma’am.”
Ruiz had never seen the commissar smile, but at that moment her face did something close to one. “Okay that’s fair.” She reached inside her flakweave coat and pulled out a detonator, flicking back the plastek cap that covered the ignition button. “Shall w-?”
She never finished the question as her chest exploded, spraying Ruiz’ face with splinters of bone and spalled pieces of her armourplas cuirass. As she stumbled into him and fell, he caught a glimpse of a woman pointing a long-las directly at him while lightly-armoured soldiers scrambled down from the rocks behind. The captain reflected that it was probably the commissar’s additional layer of armour that had saved him from the overcharged lasbeam as he shoved the falling corpse away from him and dived to the side, rolling behind an abandoned Tauros scrambler that lay upside down on its roll cage, engine block still smoking from the mortar round that had flipped it. He could hear other traitors shouting - Tephanians, judging by the hissing staccato language they were calling out to each other. He had drawn his automag pistol on reflex as he dived for cover, but from the number of voices he knew exactly how much good it would do him. He looked at the crumpled body of the commissar, and at the detonator that had fallen next to it. The corpse’s face was turned towards him, glassy eyes seeming to command even in death.
You’re the only one left. Do your duty, captain.
Ruiz cursed under his breath, and lunged for the detonator.
The lasgun burst caught him in the hip, below the ablative plates of his armour vest. It burned through the flakweave and sliced an agonising line through his gut, from left to right. He stumbled and collapsed with a gasp, on top of the dead commissar.
Garlan Ruiz had made his peace with death when he joined the Guard. He had accepted that it was likely the minute he had decided to stay behind, rather than leave one of his men to the task. But now he felt like cursing the island and its airfield, so meaningless in the grand scheme of things. The Guard were already in retreat from the beaches to the south. This was not the stuff of a hero’s death. Neither was the pain burning a red line through his abdomen, making him retch and whimper and squeezing tears from his eyes. Was he supposed to think of the Emperor? Of home, and the two little brothers he had waved off before leaving Konor forever? Of the men he was supposedly buying time for? All he could think about right now was the pain, and the fact that, in the end, he didn’t really want to die.
Frak you, he thought at the sniper, and at whichever traitor had just shot him. Frak you all.
The Patsies were moving up, shouting in their mongrel Gothic. One of them pointed at Ruiz, which reminded him of the detonator still in his hand. Well, he might as well finish it now. He pressed down, but the searing boom of the melta charges was eclipsed by the screech of a lasbolt snapping his head back.
+ + + + + +
Objective secured: Eliminate remaining imperial forces
By the time Hassek and Grimm had moved up to the remains of the village, the bombardment had ceased, and so had the gunfire. Smoke still bled from ruined buildings, and the grainy red clay thrown up by mortar strikes had settled over everything, like a bloody shroud. Krypter’s war-bots stood idle now, like ugly statues, indifferent to the troops who were policing bodies and corralling the few Imp survivors who were stumbling out of the ruins with their hands on their heads. The rest of the Imps had retreated, and it would likely be a while before the Patriots could follow, thanks to the demo charges they had detonated to bring down the cliffside across the evacuation road. A plume of black smoke climbed from the tumbled rockslide like an exclamation mark. Pursuit was hardly needed - orbital track from the Nebulas’ home ship indicated that the remaining Imp units were clustered on the southern beaches and being ferried out to the transports standing offshore as fast as their Sky Talon lifters could manage - but it would have been gratifying to trap and destroy the Imp expeditionary force, instead of no doubt facing them again on some future battlefield. Still, the two commanders knew, they had done enough. More than was expected of them, given the punishing climate and the gauntlet run that had been the assault on the village.
The command Chimera creaked to a halt next to a knocked-out imperial Taurox, whose roof had been peeled back like a tin can by a direct hit. The interior was still belching yellow smoke, its guns cocked brokenly into the air. Lieutenant Beck was nearby, poring over what looked like a captured code book while two of his men turned over a broken imperial vox set. He nodded acknowledgement to the two company commanders as they climbed down from the hatch of their dust-fouled Chimera transport.
“Some of your wolf pack found this.” he smiled thinly at Grimm as he rose to meet them. “Sounds like the Imps are planning to regroup on the mainland. Tarran’s asked the aeronautica to buzz it with a recce aircraft, so hopefully they won’t know we’ve got all their codes for a little bit longer. One more small step towards victory.”
The Tephainian sighed, though the way he cuffed sweat from his face suggested he was thinking in terms of one small step towards getting away from this island and its damnable heat. Hassek could sympathise. His own brain was fried, and now that events were winding down it had left a thick, grey grease across all his senses.
“And then peace,” Beck added. “Emperor willing.”
“There won’t be peace.” an even wearier voice interrupted. It came from one of Tarran’s Nebula soldiers, who was breaking down his oversized autogun to scour the clay and brick dust from its barrel. His hands were steady thanks to the counter-stimms injected through his powered suit, but the abrasive mix of combat drugs had left his eyes bloodshot behind his visor.
“What are you talking about?” Beck asked, torn between his Patriot fervour and his respect for the legendary Nebulas.
The Nebula gestured slowly towards the few Imperial prisoners being marched out of the village. “They can’t let an order other than the Imperium survive. They can’t let people see that there might be another way.”
Beck looked towards the dishevelled knot of imperial prisoners and pursed his lips. “Lets pray the ordinary Imps aren’t so close-minded.”
The Nebula
hmm’d hoarsely in agreement. “You’d
better pray for that. We might have the moral high ground...but in a war this brutal, the side whose soldiers have fewer doubts, ask fewer questions...that’s the side that’ll win.”
MISSION ACCOMPLISHED
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