Dan Abnett - Know no fear. The Battle of Calth

Teth’s men are scattering. He yells an order.

‘Support! Support!’

There’s a fugging Ultramarine coming at them. Coming out of cover. Coming like a blue blur. The bastard’s huge.

They open fire. Five lasrifles find the giant, clip him with zagging neon las-bolts. The impacts chip his dusty blue armour. They check him, but they don’t stop him. He’s got a fugging sword in one hand, and a battered golden standard in the other.

He puts the sword through Forb, clean fugging through, and then carves Grocus. Grocus rotates as the sword catches him. He spins like a dancer pirouetting, twirling blood like an outflung cape, then falls.

The Ultramarine kills Sorc, then Teth’s world turns upside down as he gets knocked flat. The Ultramarine isn’t stopping. He’s going for the heavy support. He knows that’s the real threat.

Teth rolls over, spitting out blood, dust and the part of his tongue he bit off when the Ultramarine smashed into him.

‘Kill him! Kill him!’

The support unit’s coming up. The men are firing, some kneeling to steady their shots. The Ultramarine’s running right at them. He’s brandishing the fugging standard pole. Idiot. Autocannon’s going to fug him up.

The speeder spurs forward. Why the fug isn’t it firing?

Teth realises how clever the Ultramarine has been. That’s why he came through them, head on. He wants to take the speeder. If the speeder opens up at him, Teth and the others are in its field of fire.

You idiots, Teth thinks. You idiots. What the fug’s the universe going to look like with you ruling it? I don’t matter? I’m fugging immortal! Gene-named! Remember? We’re gene-kin! They’ve taken our blood. They’ll bring us back. That’s what the Word Bearers promised us if we served them. If we die for them, they bring us back. they can do that. They have gene-tech.

Forget me! Fugging shoot the bastard!

The speeder kicks forward to meet the bounding Ultramarine. The fugger’s so fast. Something that big and heavy ought not to be able to move that f–

Teth realises something.

Garel got ruined by a bolter, but the Ultramarine hasn’t got a bolter. He hasn’t got a bolter, so–

The second giant in cobalt blue shows himself. He has got a bolter.

He comes off the roof of a fab-shop twenty metres back. A running jump off a six-metre drop. Transhuman muscle puts some real distance on that. His feet stride out as he sails down. He was waiting until the speeder passed under him. He was waiting for it to come to meet his partner.

The newcomer bangs down on the lid of the speeder, both feet planted, denting the roof panel. The landing is as loud as a bolter round hitting. The speeder bounces on its grav-field, soaking the impact.

The newcomer, feet braced, bends over and fires his boltgun through the roof. Thud. Thud. Two shots. Two kills.

The first Ultramarine reaches him, running head-on into the support squad’s frantic small-arms fire. Teth sees point-blank las shot flecking clean off his armour. More sword work. Arterial blood hoses the side of the speeder. The Ultramarine swings the standard like a club, spading one of the Kaul clean out of his boots.

The second Ultramarine jumps off the speeder’s roof and joins the melee. He’s put the bolter up. Saving ammo. He’s laying in with his combat blade. Eight of the twelve are dead in fewer seconds.

Teth shouts. He shouts so hard he feels like he’s going to turn his lungs inside out.

Ventanus hears the yell. He turns. The battered golden standard in his hands is dripping blood.

‘What did you bring that for?’ Selaton growls, withdrawing his blade from his last kill.

Ventanus isn’t listening. Some of the enemy foot troops are still alive. The leader is yelling.

‘We should shut him up,’ says Selaton. He’s opened the side hatch of the speeder, and is dragging an exploded body out. The cabin interior is painted with blood. He needs to find the levers to adjust the seats.

The Word Bearer appears. Cataphractii. Terminator.

‘Zorator! My watcher! Kill them!’ Teth shrieks.

The Terminator is massive. The enhanced armour, cumbersome, is also as solid as a tank. The lorica segmentata of the huge shoulder plates rise up above the crested helm. The bulky gorget is part snarling mouth, part cage. Studded leather pteruges and mail skirts protect the weaker joints. He looks like a Titan engine: the vast shoulders and upper body, the stocky legs.

Lightning crackles around his left-hand claw. He starts to fire his giant combi-bolter.

Mass-reactive shells rip up the concourse. They explode and kill two of the Kaul Mandori that Ventanus had subdued but not slain. They knock Ventanus off his feet, driving armour splinters into his shin and thigh, and rip a considerable bite out of the speeder’s nose plating.

Selaton throws himself down in rolling cover, using the speeder as a block. He tries to return fire. His aim is good, but the cataphractii soaks up his rounds. Flames from the mass-reactive impacts gout around the reinforced carapace.

The Word Bearer heavy fires at Selaton. The speeder takes more serious damage, including a bolt that scalps the crew bay, peeling the metal skin of the cabin roof up like the tongue of a shoe.

Ventanus is hurt. His leg is punctured. The bleeding’s already stopped. He churns to his feet. He’s got the speed the hulking Terminator lacks. It’s a blood-red beast, maned with crimson horsehair. He rushes it.

It swings its aim back to him. Ventanus is transhuman fast, but he can’t outrun shells of a combi-bolter, and his armour won’t stop them either.

There’s a ping of tearing metal, of bolts popping. It’s the sound Selaton makes as he wrenches the speeder’s autocannon off its mount. He’s standing on the speeder, half inside the cab, one foot on the seats, one braced on the nose plate, the cabin roof peeled back as if to reveal him like a theatrical surprise. He’s got the multi-barrelled cannon wedged against his hip, the metal snake of the munition feeder coiling back, fat and heavy, into the crew bay.

He fires. The heavy weapon makes a grinding metal noise like bells being crushed through some kind of mill. A jumping lick of burning gases flickers around the rotating barrels.

The storm of shots brackets the cataphractii and rips across him. Fragments of metal flake off his armour in a puff of abraded smoke. Rubble on either side of him explodes. Pieces of the gorget and visor fly off, along with scraps of leather pteruges, shreds of horsehair, and broken mail rings. The shots penetrate in four places, allowing blood to glug out of the bare metal craters.

The Terminator stays upright for a long time, staggering backwards under the hail of fire. Finally, he goes down on his back with a crash.

Ventanus stands over him. Smoke, blue and pungent, streaks the air. The Word Bearer, gurgling the blood that is filling his helmet and throat brace, stirs. He’s dying, but he’s a long way from dead. He starts lifting the oil-black combi-bolter.

Ventanus brings the blade of the standard shaft down through the visor slot with both hands, driving it and turning it and screwing it, until it meets the inside back of the armoured helmet. Blood wells out over the eye slits and gorget lip, and runs down the sides of the helmet to mat the horsehair broom of the crest.

Ventanus steps back, leaving the standard planted there, crooked. Selaton approaches.

‘We must move,’ he says.

‘Is the speeder functional?’

‘Just about.’

Ventanus pulls out the standard and carries it towards the shot-up vehicle.

‘That’s why,’ he says.

‘What?’ asks Selaton.

‘That’s why I brought this,’ Ventanus replies, raising the bloody standard. ‘Precisely for things like that.’