Dan Abnett - Know no fear. The Battle of Calth

The shock passes, the auto-lock relaxes. Discipline wavers for a second. No fear, just bemusement. A tank doesn’t just fall out of the–

A second one does. A Baneblade, this time. It’s tumbling end over end. It hits the company shelters a kilometre west, and causes an impact blast that splits the ground and triggers a landslip on the facing hill. Then two more, both Fellblades, in quick succession. One crushes a pair of parked Thunderhawks. The other hits just off the trackway a split-second later and punches a crater, but doesn’t explode. It actually bounces, disintegrating. It bounces and tumbles through a scattering line of battle-brothers, mowing them down, shedding torn plate and wheel assemblies.

More fall, all around. Like bombs. Like impossible hail. Like playthings tipped out of a child’s toybox. Some explode. Some fracture on impact and bounce. Some bury themselves in the open ground like bullets in flesh.

Braellen looks up into the sky. It’s almost blue apart from the smoke stains from the city. It’s full of falling objects: tanks, armoured fighting vehicles, troop carriers, cargo pods, lumps of debris. They turn in the air, catching the sunlight, glinting, spinning, some fast, some slow. Ash and metal-fibres rain down with them. Strands of cable. Wire. Optical leads. Pieces of haptic keyboard. Pieces of data-slate. Glass and brass splinters. Flakes of ceramite.

Somewhere, far above, a low orbit depot has broken up and the packed contents have spilled out like treasure from a sack. Enough war machines and equipment for a full division have been thrown down to be smashed by gravity. They’re too low to fully burn up. Air friction is simply heating them.

To his west, amongst the impossible skyfall, Braellen spots the flashing delta-shape of a Stormbird, rotating as it falls.

Then he sees falling bodies too.

They have not endured the drop as well as the machine parts. They have scorched and cooked. They land like bundles of wet branches, and burst.

They do not gouge vast craters and explode like the falling armour, but their impacts are somehow far more devastating.

The Watchtower sensori start shrieking in anticipation. Even half-blind, unplugged and shock-numbed, they can feel the immensity of the material objects sweeping towards them, the radiation flood, the momentum, the displacement of atmosphere, the distortion of gravity.

The Antrodamicus looms through the tortured sky, electrical discharge clinging to its hull like a neon spiderweb. It comes through the vast palls of smoke spreading horizontally from the burning starport, and parts the bright plumes of volcanic flame that are suddenly emanating from a fusion plant on the estuary. Coming through the thick and wallowing smoke, it looks like a galleon from Old Terra running aground, a great barque of the sea, gilded with fretwork and figureheads, coasting through foamy breakers onto the foreshore.

It fills the windows of the Watchtower. It is as tall as them, as high as them. It is like a city swinging towards them on a slow pendulum arc. Shooting-star chunks of falling debris streak down around it, tiny bright specks, fast moving compared to the starship’s slow descent. Some debris meteors strike the ship, producing flowers of flame. Others whizz past and hit the ground, the city, the river.

Tawren knows each one of those strikes would, on another day, be a civic disaster, a hab block or a street area laid waste by a massive impact blast.

Today they are minor and extraneous injuries.

‘Arook!’ she yells. She holds up a stretch of Hesst’s permanent MIU link like a coil of mooring rope.

The skitarii looks at her. One red eyeslit fizzles.

His tulwar is drawn in a second. The blade slices clean through the plaited cables. Sparks crack and spit. Hesst goes into a grand mal seizure.

Arook sweeps the server up, flops his jerking body over one massive shoulder. He grabs Tawren’s left hand in his right fist and starts to run. Around them, on the server’s platform, the sensori and magi are shrieking and weeping. Some are fleeing to the stairs. A few have jumped to their deaths from the shattered tower windows.

The massive engine ducts of the Antrodamicus, cold and dead-black, their fires unlit, dwarf the windows, growing bigger and still bigger.

Hesst is dead. He has stopped spasming. Bloody matter is streaming from his mouth and nose and down the master of skitarii’s burnished back plate. Tawren scoops up her skirts so she can run. Arook is so fast.

Where does he hope to escape to? She trusts him, but she has no idea. She has no idea what she was hoping he could do when she got him to cut the MIU. There’s not enough time. Not enough time for anything. Is he trying to reach the tower-top landing pads? A shuttle? A lighter? There isn’t enough time to unseal a hatch, let alone fire its engines and lift off.

No. No. He’s making for the escape pods. There are concussion caskets in bays around the tower-top. They are intended to let senior magi descend to the armoured bunkers under the Watchtower’s foundations. They’re crude things, just counterweight mechanisms.

Would they be enough? Is there even enough time left to reach the bunkers? The bunkers might protect from an air raid, but this? A starship is falling on the city!

Arook yanks open a pod hatch. He throws Hesst in, then hurls Tawren after him.

The Antrodamicus hits. Its dipped tail strikes first, biting into the land just short of the north curtain wall of Kalkas Fortalice. The keel and hull are designed to withstand the stresses of the empyrean. They only slightly deform on impact.

They dig in. The starship, all twelve kilometres of it, continues to move, sliding backwards, cutting a groove in the planet’s crust five hundred metres deep. The keel splits the earth like a giant ploughshare, turning it up on either side of the immense furrow. Soil and subsoil rip open. The furrow rips across arterial highways and a memorial park. It hits the curtain wall, annihilating it. Still sliding, the Antrodamicus demolishes a path through the teeming city of Kalkas Fortalice, a path two and half kilometres wide. Meteoric debris is still slicing down from the sky all around it, bombarding the city and the landscape. The starship’s impact is lifting a wall of dust higher than the Watchtower, a smog of particulates from atomised buildings.

The planet’s crust is shaking, a long, drawn-out vibration of the most apocalyptic sort. There is a tearing, screeching shriek in the air as hull and city grind each other apart.

Now stress fractures win. The Antrodamicus starts to crumple. Its entire mass lands, belly down, splitting its massive frame across the waist and the prow. Hull skin rips. Command towers and masts buckle and topple. The remnants of the drydock cage, wrapping it like a garland, slough off.

Internal explosions begin to riddle it. Upper plating sections blow out. Ribs are exposed, backlit by nuclear coals in the starship’s stricken heart.

It is still moving. It is still grinding backwards, disintegrating, ploughing the city in half, uprooting hab towers and hive stacks, flattening steeples and palaces. The quake-shock of the impact is levelling parts of Kalkas Fortalice that the ship hasn’t even touched.

The orbital Watchtower shivers as the mounting vibrations begin to overwhelm its structural integrity. Pieces of it start to splinter and fall off. It begins to sway, like a tree in a typhoon wind.

When the sliding tail-end of the starship finally reaches it and rams it down, it is starting to fall anyway.

The Antrodamicus ploughs it into the ground so hard that no trace of its proud structure remains whatsoever.

At Barrtor, they can feel the earth quaking under their plasteel boots. Aftershock. Calth’s tectonic system shivering from the appalling blow. The forest is thrashing, shaking loose leaves.