Fallen Angels Page 8

  ‘But you’re also sons of Caliban,’ the noble countered. ‘And this is your world’s darkest hour.’

  ‘Join us, brother,’ Sar Daviel said to Luther. ‘You’ve denied your destiny for too long. Embrace it at last. Remember what it was like to be a knight and ride to your people’s defence.’

  ‘Defence?’ Zahariel said. ‘It’s you who have taken up arms against your fellow citizens. Even now your rebels are fighting constabulary officers and Jaegers all across the planet, and innocent people are suffering in the riots you’ve spawned.’ He turned angrily to Luther. ‘You can see what they’re trying to do, can’t you? If we move quickly our battle brothers can crush this revolt in a matter of hours. Don’t let them play on your jealousies—’

  Luther rounded on Zahariel. ‘That’s enough, brother,’ he said, his voice as hard as iron. The sharp tone brought the Librarian up short. The Master of Caliban glared at him a moment longer, then turned back to the rebels.

  ‘This parley is finished,’ he declared. ‘Lord Cypher will return you from whence you came. After that, you will have twenty-four hours to order your forces to cease all operations and turn themselves in to local authorities.’

  The rebel leaders glared angrily at Luther, all except for Daviel, who shook his head sadly. ‘How can you do this?’ he said.

  ‘How can you think I wouldn’t?’ Luther shot back. ‘If you think I hold my honour so cheaply, then you’re no brother of mine,’ he said. ‘You have twenty-four hours. Use them wisely.’

  Thuriel turned to Lady Alera and Lord Malchial. ‘You see? I told you this was pointless.’ He shot a venomous look at Lord Cypher. ‘We’re ready to leave,’ the noble said, and headed swiftly for the waiting shuttle. One by one, the rebel leaders fell in behind Thuriel and walked out into the pre-dawn darkness. Zahariel felt tension drain from the muscles in his neck as the pain in his head began to ease. He made a mental note to ask Israfael about the episodes. Whatever was causing them, they were clearly getting worse.

  Luther walked along behind the departing rebels, his expression lost in thought. After a moment, Zahariel followed. Part of him wanted to insist that Luther arrest the rebel leaders on the spot – the parley was a convention of Caliban’s rules of warfare, not those of the Imperium, so the Legion wasn’t truly bound by it. But another part of his mind warned that he’d already overstepped his bounds with Luther, and Zahariel was uncertain what might happen if he pressed further.

  The engines of the shuttle rose to a pulsing roar as the rebels hurried to the waiting ramp. Zahariel stopped just outside the hangar, but Luther continued on, escorting the leaders across the permacrete.

  Daviel was the last to board the shuttle. At the bottom of the ramp he turned to regard Luther. Zahariel could see the old knight say something to the Master of Caliban, but his voice was lost in the shriek of the shuttle’s turbines.

  When Daviel had disappeared inside the shuttle, Luther turned and made his way back to the hangar. Behind him, the transport lifted off in a cloud of dust and sped off westward, racing ahead of the dawn.

  Zahariel watched Luther approach and braced himself for a sharp rebuke. The knight’s face was deeply troubled. When he reached the Librarian’s side, he turned to watch the dwindling lights of the shuttle’s thrusters and sighed. ‘We should get back to the strategium,’ he said. ‘We’ve got a lot of work to do.’

  The Librarian nodded. ‘You don’t think they’ll heed your warning?’

  ‘No, of course not,’ Luther replied. ‘But the words needed to be said, nonetheless.’ After a moment he added, ‘Best we kept this meeting to ourselves, brother. I would not want any misunderstandings to impact morale.’

  Zahariel knew an order when he heard one. He nodded curtly and watched the shuttle disappear from sight. ‘What was it that Sar Daviel said to you, just before he left?’ he asked, keeping his voice carefully neutral.

  Luther stared out into the darkness. ‘He said that Jonson betrayed us all. The forests are gone, but the monsters still remain.’

  FIVE

  INTO THE CAULDRON

  Diamat

  In the 200th year of the Emperor’s Great Crusade

  NEMIEL REACHED THE midships ordnance deck at a dead run, his helmet locked in place and counting the seconds he had left until the battle barge entered Diamat’s atmosphere. Already he could feel the rhythmic thunder of the ship’s gun batteries rumbling through the deck plates beneath his feet, which meant that the battle group was trading fire with the enemy reserve squadron. Jonson was racing forward with his ships as quickly as he could to deploy his Astartes onto the beleaguered forge world, and Nemiel had no intention of keeping the primarch waiting.

  Thick, heavy steel hatches were clanging shut in rapid succession along the length of the cavernous drop bay as the assault pods were sealed into their launch tubes like oversized torpedoes. Only one pod still sat in its loading cradle, poised above the last of the portside launch tubes. A single hatch was still open, red light spilling down the steel ramp from the cocoon-like re-entry compartment within.

  A single, heavy blow rang sharply through the bulkheads; an enemy shell had penetrated the flagship’s armour and detonated on one of the decks above. There was an ordnance crew waiting for Nemiel at the foot of the open pod; they followed him up the ramp, ensured he was locked into the re-entry harness and fitted a series of data cables to interface plugs set into his armour’s helmet and power plant. They completed their tasks in just a few seconds and retreated from the pod without a single word. Nemiel barely noticed; he was already tapping into the fleet command net through the pod’s vox array.

  Readouts flickered coldly across the lenses of his helmet. Icons of red and blue flared to life, silhouetted against the curve of a planet. At first he struggled to make sense of the torrent of information, but within a few seconds a coherent picture of the orbital battle took shape. The reserve squadron had formed a wall of steel between the heavy cargo carriers and Jonson’s onrushing ships. The Dark Angels’ Stormbirds, however, had already raced past the rebel cordon and were even now launching strafing runs on the largely defenceless transports. With the Duchess Arbellatris out of action, Jonson was left with just six ships against eight undamaged enemy cruisers, but the rebel ships were caught at anchor, with little room to manoeuvre against the fast-moving Astartes ships. A salvo of torpedoes was already speeding towards the rebel cruisers’ flanks, and the battle barge and her strike cruisers were well within range to open fire with their devastating bombardment cannons. So long as they were committed to protecting the transports, the cruisers were practically stationary targets for the battle group’s combined firepower.

  No sooner had the ramp sealed shut over Nemiel’s re-entry compartment than the whole pod gave a grinding lurch and began to descend into its launch tube. Kohl’s gruff, sardonic voice reverberated from Nemiel’s vox-bead over the squad net. ‘Good to have you join us, brother,’ he said sarcastically. ‘I was beginning to think you’d gotten lost.’

  ‘We can’t all spend our time lounging around in a drop pod, sergeant,’ Nemiel said with a chuckle. The pod jolted to a stop with a loud clang, then came the thud of the hatch sealing overhead. ‘Some of us have to do proper work so you can live this life of leisure.’

  A chorus of deep voices laughed quietly over the vox. Nemiel smiled and glanced over the status readouts of Kohl’s Astartes. All nine of the warriors showed green on the display, which was no less than he expected. He had fought alongside them for so long that he’d come to think of them as his own squad, and much preferred their jibes over the deferential respect that most other members of the Legion afforded him.

  Kohl began to growl a retort but was cut off by a priority signal over the fleet command channel. ‘Battle Force Alpha, this is command,’ Captain Stenius called over the vox. ‘We are thirty seconds from orbital insertion—’ a hollow boom echoed through the battle barge’s hull and the signal broke up into squealing static for a second ‘�
�are now in contact with Imperial forces on the ground. Inloading new drop coordinates and tactical data to your onboards now. Stand by.’

  Seconds later the schematic of the orbital battle disappeared, replaced by a detailed map of a battle-scarred city and the outlying districts of a massive forge complex. The city – identified in the image as Xanthus, Diamat’s capital – was built along the shore of a restless, slate-grey ocean, and stretched for dozens of kilometres north and south along the rocky coastline. Twenty kilometres east of the city outskirts, far inland along a desolate plain of black rock and drifts of red oxide, rose the conical slopes of a massive volcano that lay at the heart of the Adeptus Mechanicum’s primary forge on Diamat. Many hundreds of years in the past, the scions of Mars had bored into the corpus of the dormant volcano and tapped the geothermal energies within, fuelling the vast smelters, foundries and manufactories that surrounded it. At the far edge of the great plain, the city sprawl and the forge’s warehouse complexes met. Squalid subsids and reeking shanty towns fetched up hard against a towering permacrete wall that separated the orderly world of the Mechanicum from the haphazard lives of ordinary humans.

  Nemiel took it all in, absorbing every detail with his keenly-trained mind. Icons blinked into life across this grey zone between the city proper and the great forge: blue for the units of the Tanagran Dragoons, and red for Horus’s traitors. It took only a moment for the Redemptor to realise that the situation on the ground was desperate indeed.

  Xanthus proper had been subjected to prolonged orbital bombardment over the course of several weeks. The city centre was a burnt-out wasteland, and the great, artificial bay of the harbour district was dotted with the hulls of hundreds of broken or capsized ships. To the southeast of the city, connected by tramways to both the city and the great forge complex, lay the planet’s primary star port. The port was firmly in rebel hands. Nemiel counted six heavy cargo haulers landed at the site, surrounded by rebel support units and at least a regiment of mechanised troops.

  Rebel ground forces had been advancing up the tramway towards the forge complex with four infantry regiments and approximately a regiment of heavy armour, and had apparently managed to break through an Imperial strongpoint covering the forge’s southern entrance. There was no data on enemy troop strength or Mechanicum defence forces inside the complex itself. Nemiel suspected that the data had all come from the Imperial forces on-planet, and they had no idea what was going on behind the walls of the Mechanicum preserve. Blue icons were driving south and east through the grey zone towards the rebels along the tramway; two under-strength regiments supported by a battalion of armour, trying to hit the rebels in the flank and drive them away from the forge. It was a valiant attempt, but the rebels had already stymied the Imperial counter-attack along a rough front some five kilometres north of the tramway.

  ‘Ten seconds to orbital insertion,’ Captain Stenius said over the vox. ‘Battle Force Alpha, stand by for drop.’

  Glowing blue circles appeared on the tactical map, showing the landing zone for the drop. The two companies would come down in a chain of foothills that bordered the very southern edge of the plain, some two kilometres south of the rebel-held tramway. The strategy from there was obvious: the Astartes would advance north and strike the rebels from their other flank, cutting access to the tramway and trapping them against the Imperial forces further north. The elevated terrain south of the tramway provided excellent fields of fire and ample cover for the Dark Angels, allowing them to target the rebel forces at will. Once resistance along the tramway had been eliminated Nemiel reckoned that one company would remain to hold the road against reinforcements approaching from the star port, while the other company would enter the forge complex itself and hunt down any rebel forces operating there.

  ‘Five seconds. Four… three… two… one. Begin drop sequence.’

  A massive impact hammered into the Invincible Reason’s port side, hard enough to slam Nemiel against this re-entry harness, and everything went black.

  JONSON HAD BROUGHT his battle group into Diamat at a fairly steep angle, intending to close with the rebels as rapidly as possible and deploy the landing force. Since the cruisers and the transports they guarded were in geo-synchronous orbits over Diamat’s main forge complex, this brought the two forces into point-blank range. Weapons batteries and lance turrets blazed away at the Imperial ships, which responded with a spread of torpedoes and the deadly bombardment cannons of the flagship and her strike cruisers.

  The battle barge was wreathed in a hail of explosions as she drove ever closer to the enemy battle-line. At the last moment, the Invincible Reason and her strike cruisers slewed to starboard, almost paralleling the enemy cruisers as the flagship prepared to release its drop pods. Less than fifty kilometres to port – appallingly close range for a naval engagement – a rebel Armiger-class cruiser raked the battle barge’s flank with its heavy lance batteries. Torpedo impacts had gouged deep craters in the Armiger’s hull, igniting fires deep in the bowels of the stricken cruiser.

  The flagship’s bombardment cannons fired a rolling volley into the Armiger. At such close range, each and every shell found its mark. The giant rounds – five times the mass and explosive power of a standard macro cannon shell – punched through the cruiser’s armour and touched off a chain of catastrophic explosions inside the hull that overloaded the ship’s plasma reactor. The huge warship disintegrated in a tremendous explosion, hurling molten debris in every direction.

  One piece of the destroyed cruiser – a hunk of armoured superstructure as large as a city block – smashed into the flagship’s port side just as she began her drop sequence. The Invincible Reason lurched to starboard under the tremendous impact, throwing off the precise manoeuvres directed by the ship’s Ordnance Officer. But it was too late to abort; the automatic sequence had activated and the pods were firing at a rate of two per second. Within ten seconds all two hundred Astartes had been launched, their pods scattering through the atmosphere over the battle zone.

  THE DROP POD’S onboard power plant restarted a second after launch. Data displays flickered back to life and attitude thrusters fired, correcting the pod’s corkscrewing tumble through the atmosphere. It juddered and shook like a toy in a giant’s rough hands. Tortured air howled past the drop pod’s rudimentary stabilisers, but their vertiginous spiral finally ceased.

  The flagship had been hit hard, Nemiel reckoned, which meant that they had likely been knocked outside their deployment envelope. He scanned the readouts quickly while the pod’s logic engines read its trajectory and projected its new landing point.

  A yellow circle pulsed on the tactical map. Nemiel frowned. They were going to come down a few kilometres north of the tramway now, right into the middle of the rebel forces who were holding off the Imperial counterattack. That was going to complicate things. Nemiel checked the command frequency, but heard only static. Between the atmospheric ionization and the thick hulls of the drop pods, he wouldn’t be able to speak to Force Commander Lamnos until the Astartes had reached the ground.

  The Redemptor switched over to the squad net. ‘Everyone still here?’ he called.

  ‘You were expecting us to go somewhere, brother?’ Kohl replied at once.

  A new voice came over the vox, mellower than Kohl but just as amused. ‘I don’t know about the rest of you, but I could stand to stretch my legs,’ Askelon, their Techmarine, said with a chuckle. ‘All this lying about is bad for the circulation.’

  ‘Says the one who spends all his time with his head and shoulders buried in a maintenance bay,’ Kohl retorted.

  ‘Which makes me an authority on the subject, wouldn’t you agree?’ Askelon replied.

  ‘That’ll be the day,’ snorted Brother Marthes, the squad’s meltagunner. ‘The day Sergeant Kohl stops being disagreeable is the day he stops breathing.’

  ‘That’s the stupidest thing I ever heard,’ Kohl grumbled, and the squad laughed in reply.

  The turbulence of re-entry
rose to a bone-shaking crescendo and then held steady for a punishing nine-and-a-half minutes until a warning icon flashed on the display and the retro thrusters kicked in. The Ordnance division aboard the flagship had programmed the pods to deploy their thrusters at the last possible moment, just in case there was a significant anti-aircraft threat over the drop zone. The jolt was akin to being kicked in the backside by a Titan, Nemiel mused.

  An ear-splitting roar swelled up from beneath their feet as the thrusters flared to full power for three full seconds, right up to the point of impact. Nemiel felt another, much lesser jolt, and dimly heard a rending crash, then a series of small, sharp impacts reverberated through the pod’s hull before it finally came to rest.

  Nemiel’s display blanked, flashing an urgent red. ‘Disengage and deploy!’ he shouted over the squad net, and hit the quick-release on his re-entry harness.

  There was a hiss and a rush of hot, reeking air as the ramp in front of him began to deploy – then stopped at roughly a sixty-degree angle. The hydraulics whined insistently, nearly shifting the pod’s bulk with the effort, before the safety interlocks kicked in and aborted the process.

  At the back of his mind, Nemiel sensed that the deck beneath him was angled slightly. He growled with irritation, took a step forward and planted a foot against the ramp. He heard a crackle of masonry; the ramp rebounded slightly, then lowered another half a degree.

  Acrid smoke and waves of heat were starting to penetrate the inside of the re-entry chamber. Nemiel heard muffled cursing over the vox-net as other members of the squad tried to force their own way out of the pod. He took hold of the entry frame with one hand and the ramp’s edge with the other and clambered up and out, then saw at once what had happened.

  The pod had come down squarely atop a multistorey hab unit, punching like a bullet through at least four or five floors before finally coming to rest in the building’s decrepit basement. Faint sunlight filtered down through the gaping hole of the floor above, all but occluded by clouds of increasingly thick smoke. The pod’s retro thrusters had set the building’s upper storeys ablaze.