Dan Abnett - Know no fear. The Battle of Calth

Ventanus attempts to slide the blade out, but it’s stuck. Nor is his opponent dead. He swings for Ventanus again, and Ventanus is forced to evade as the chainsword mutters towards his face. He has to let go of his sword, and leave it impaling the warrior’s abdomen.

The Word Bearer lunges at him, set on finishing the contest. He’s wielding the massive chainsword two-handed, stroking left and right in an attempt to catch the now unarmed Ultramarine. A skitarii warrior leaps to Ventanus’s defence, but the Word Bearer cleaves him in half in a swirling red haze.

Open-handed, Ventanus leaps at him, tackling him bodily to the ground while his chainsword is still tearing through the Mechanicum soldier. Pinning the Word Bearer’s right arm so the brute can’t make a swing across his body, Ventanus punches his confined enemy in the head repeatedly. After three blows, the helmet buckles slightly. A fourth fractures part of the gorget. A fifth crazes a visor lens.

The Word Bearer roars, throwing Ventanus off him. Ventanus allows himself to be knocked clear.

He has regained his grip on the hilt of his power sword.

He wrenches it out of the Word Bearer. Sideways.

Greavus, his head streaming gore, isn’t finished. He has risen again, throwing aside his ruptured, ruined helm. He has recovered a bolt pistol and is firing it past Ventanus. The fourth of the assaulters is cleaving his way through Army regulars and skitarii.

Arook and the largest of the heavyweight skitarii have retrenched. They open up with their plasma inbuilds, and slice the traitor apart. Ventanus hears Greavus yelling tactical commands to rally the head of the bridge and drive back the storm force. They’re holding, but the line’s going to break. Hundreds of cultists and Word Bearers are on the bridge, and some are actually swarming up the slopes of the ditch. The defenders on the walls can’t get an angle of fire steep enough.

Selaton arrives with several more of the Ultramarines contingent. He moves in to support Greavus at the bridge. Ventanus reloads his boltgun, and takes a place in the line.

The force of fire now being directed at the palace gate and frontage is immense. Men are being felled by the hail. They are even being hit and killed by the stone shrapnel kicked up by shots striking the wall.

‘I have a signal!’ Arook yells to Ventanus over the din. ‘A new signal.’

‘Relay it!’

‘Inbound force of XIII Legion requesting position specifics.’

‘Challenge them,’ Ventanus orders. ‘Ask them the number of the painted eldar!’

Arook sends the message.

‘Reply,’ he says. ‘The number is twelve. Message continues, “As anyone will tell you”.’

He looks at Ventanus. Droplets of blood from dozens of bodies bead his golden armour. His defective red eye ebbs and flares.

‘Captain?’ he asks. ‘Response?’

‘The correct answer is thirteen,’ says Ventanus. He takes a deep breath. ‘Supply them with the coordinates and tell them that time is not on our side.’

The daemon has a beak. It has a beak and feathers, and hundreds of vestigial limbs that end in hooves. But its body, all thirty tonnes of it, is that of a serpent, a fat, bloated constrictor. A Space Marine could stand with his arms outstretched and not match the diameter of its scaled girth.

It emerges from the vault shadows to the side of the prep chamber, spooling its vast, swaying bulk up through a massive deck hatch that leads into a magazine store. Thiel realises how the crushed carpet of victims was manufactured.

The vast beak clacks. Thiel sees that secondary snake bodies, dozens of them, form a beard, a frill under the chin of the beak. They writhe like tentacles, like pseudopods. The daemon is a hundred giant snakes fused into one titanic abomination, sharing one beaked head.

Bormarus rakes with his heavy bolter, and Zabo spears scalding flame. The daemon-snake rears back, and then lashes out with its frilled head. The beak catches one of the squad, a battle-brother called Domnis, and shears him in a line from the groin to the left shoulder.

Empion wades in, unflinching, circling his thunder hammer to gather momentum. The daemon-snake strikes at him, and he meets the strike, turning its beak aside with a staggering blow. The impact shakes the chamber and causes a pop of overpressure.

The beak is cracked. Ichor trickles out. Thiel strides in to support the Chapter Master, and when the daemon-snake strikes again it is greeted by the hammer and the electromagnetic longsword.

The hammer connects above the bridge of the massive beak, and deconstructs a brittle, avian eye-socket. Simultaneously, Thiel runs his longsword’s razor edge up the rising belly and throat under the beard of secondary tails. The sword parts white scaled flesh, and opens bright pink meat and transparent bone. Internal pink sacs, swirled with white fat, burst and an alimentary canal ruptures.

The daemon-snake rears, its beak wide. Its secondary snake bodies and vestigial hooves thrash and spasm furiously. Partially digested, dismembered parts of human beings and Space Marines spatter out of the deep, gutting wound Thiel has delivered. The body parts spew wide in an outrush of gastric fluid.

The Ultramarines can all hear a colossal booming noise. It is the daemon’s immense tail end, still coiled in the magazine below, thrashing in pained frenzy against the metal walls of the compartment.

The daemon slides back through the hatch to escape its tormentors.

‘The hatch! Close the hatch!’ Zabo yells. He has a locked string of ten frag grenades in his hand. As Empion punches the hatch control, Zabo arms one and lobs the whole string into the deck hatch.

The hatch is almost shut when the grenades go off. The blast jams the hatch a few centimetres from full closure, and the narrow slit focuses the contained blast pressure into a tight, extreme geyser of flame and debris that jets up and burns out across the chamber ceiling.

The booming stops.

Empion glances at Thiel.

‘Every door, a new horror,’ he says.

‘And every moment a moment lost,’ Thiel replies.

It is not the last time they will echo this call and return.

It is not the last compartment of the flagship they will have to clear a path through.

The Word Bearers launch a third wave of Assault Marines at the palace.

Ventanus, Selaton and Greavus have held the defence force together, and kept the gate and the bridge, though the bridge is chewed down to shreds of its former majesty. The second wave almost pushed them out of the gate into the inner yard, but for serious counter-fire from Arook’s skitarii.

The third wave, Ventanus knows, will be the critical phase. He sees it coming: one formation of jump troops swooping for the bitterly contested gate, another veering south to hit the wall further around the perimeter. Their intention will be to break in on Sparzi’s artillery positions.

Remus Ventanus is resolved to endure whatever he must endure, but he knows that resistance must crumble eventually. It is a calculable inevitability. It is a matter of numbers. It is a solid practical.

He clings to one hope. He clings to the whispered, relayed message from his home company. Let it not be a lie or a trick, he thinks. I’ve had enough of tricks this day. If it isn’t a lie, let them be fast enough. Let them be fleet of foot and tread. Let them get here while being here still matters.

He knows the wave is coming. There are precursor signs. The brotherhood cultists swarm yet again at the gate and ditch. The chanting becomes so loud that Ventanus imagines the pulse of it, the massed breath of it, will blow away the fetid smog. The enemy strikes at the walls with more rockets, with mortars, and with medium artillery. Shells punch holes in the old walls, or drop long into the gardens and compounds, scattering gun-crews and reserve positions. Selaton reports hearing tracks clattering in the fog, suggesting that the shelling is coming from enemy tanks or self-propelled guns. Ventanus doesn’t hear anything: his hearing is dulled by the sheer pitch of the intense combat in which he has been locked.