Dan Abnett - Know no fear. The Battle of Calth

The Assault Marines shriek down. Their jump packs generate rasping, heat-shimmered forks of blue flame. The brotherhood charges crush the bridge barricades. Part of the top arch of the gate explodes and collapses in a slip of dust and loose stones. The defenders brace.

Greavus curses, blood matting his already red hair.

A Baneblade, a crimson behemoth, looms out of the fog on the far side of the earthwork and lines up on the gate and west wall. Brotherhood warriors swarm around the bulk of the massive tank.

The superheavy tank takes aim with its primary siege weapon. The Demolisher cannon clanks into alignment. Its skirts and side-plating are painted with eight-pointed star designs and what appears to be considerable quantities of scrawled handwriting.

A Baneblade.

Ventanus knows the balance has finally and firmly tipped in favour of the Word Bearers.

The close combat has already begun. There’s no time to think about the tank.

He is too busy fighting off a pair of Assault Marines. One has wounded him in the side. The other is laying in with a power axe. The confines of the gate cramp the full measure of the axe-wielder’s swing, but the Word Bearer has already killed two Army troopers and a skitarii.

Selaton covers his captain’s back, turning aside the power axe with a battered combat shield whose surface decoration has been obliterated into a billion raw metals, nicks and scratches. Ventanus and Selaton fight back-to-back. Ventanus clashes his power sword with his opponent’s kinetic mace. Selaton drives a chainsword across the guard of the axe-wielder.

All the while, Ventanus has half an eye on the tank.

Selaton takes a hit. The power axe gets past his combat shield and hacks into his shoulder guard. It doesn’t bite through to the flesh underneath, but the damage is deep, and it jams the articulation of his arm.

Selaton tries to compensate, but his balance is twisted. He stumbles sideways, lurched by the momentum of the axe wrenching out.

His guard is therefore poor as he takes the second swing in the chest.

The wound is bloody. The force of it knocks Selaton down, and it looks as though he has the entire bite of the axe buried in his chest. In truth, his carapace has absorbed the lethal part of the hit, but the flesh is sliced and – until Selaton’s transhuman biology kicks in to staunch it – bleeds copiously.

Ventanus is too committed to protect his fallen sergeant. The Assault Marine with the power axe closes down for the finishing blow.

Greavus punches him in the side of the head with his power fist, compacting his helm like a foil ration tray.

Greavus hauls Selaton back to his feet. They struggle for a second to free the axe from Selaton’s armour.

Ventanus kills his opponent. Fury directs his hand. He plants his blade through the Word Bearer’s helmet, slicing off the right-hand third of it. Something that for all the galaxy resembles an anatomy scholam cross-section is visible as the Assault Marine sags aside.

Ventanus can feel the heat seething inside him like a fever. Since the fighting broke out, he’s taken about eighteen minor wounds, including a through and through las-hit to the meat of his right thigh, a fracture to a bone in his forearm, and a crushed fifth finger. The others are knocks, scars, and serious concussion-transmitted bruising.

His metabolism is cranking up, trying to compensate, trying to fight or delay pain, trying to maintain peak performance, trying to accelerate healing and repair. The energy debt has raised his body temperature by several degrees. He is flash-burning body fat fuel reserves. He knows he will soon need hydrolytes and additional pain-buffers if he is going to retain his battlefield edge.

He looks at the tank again. Why hasn’t it fired? Why–

The Baneblade abruptly revs its powerful engine plant, throbs jets of black exhaust into the air, and starts a rapid reverse. Ventanus can hear its track sections clattering. Its massive hull rocks tail-to-nose, and its main turret begins to traverse to the left, the battle cannon elevating.

The host of brotherhood warriors mobbing around it has to break frantically to avoid being crushed by its hasty redeployment.

What’s it doing? Is it turning? Is it turning?

There’s something in the oily fog. Something to the north-west.

The Word Bearers Baneblade fires its battle cannon. The muzzle-shock is huge, and the pressure smack puffs dust up from the ground all around it. The shell spits into the fog, creating a corkscrew ripple that slowly dissolves. Ventanus does not hear it hit.

But he hears the response.

There is an oscillating scream of energy and pressure, accompanied by a micro-pulse of electromagnetics. A thick beam of blinding energy shears out of the fog and strikes the Baneblade. The impact shakes the tank, all three hundred tonnes of it. It shakes it. It rattles it like a tin toy. It rocks it off the ground for a second and skids it sideways. Dozens of brotherhood warriors perish under its violently dislodged mass.

The energy beam bangs painfully as it connects. Huge chunks of armour plating eject, some spinning high into the air. Half the turret structure is burned away. Smoke begins to plume, and then gutters and pours up and out of the damaged section. The Baneblade shudders. Ventanus can hear it attempting to restart its main drive, stalled by the body-blow. He can hear the multi-fuel plant gagging and choking.

A second energy beam, bright as the first, scores out of the fog and misses the tank by a few metres. It hits the ground, spontaneously excavating a huge trench of superheated, fused rock, and incinerating two dozen of the brotherhood and four of the Word Bearers. Other cultists caught in the immediate target zones scream as the secondary heat-sear ignites their robes and their ammo.

The third beam, coming just a moment after the second, kills the Baneblade. It hits the hull square, under the throat of the turret, and the tank ruptures and explodes. For a millisecond, it resembles one of the wood-and-canvas vehicle dummies, little more than covered frame tents, are used in basic training exercises by the Army. It looks like a tank dummy where the wind has got up under the hem of the cover tarp and billowed it out off the underframe, lifting it, twisting the painted outline and edges.

Then the internal blast comes, sudden and bright, and hot and vast, and the twisted outline of the tank vanishes, atomised.

Two Shadowsword tanks plough out of the fog, roiling it around their cobalt-blue hulls.

Cobalt-blue. Cobalt-blue, wearing the white and gold heraldry of the Ultima.

Land Raiders and Rhinos churn through after them, then a trio of Whirlwinds, and a walking line of Ultramarines, forty bodies wide. They fire as they advance on the Word Bearers positions from the north, passing the smoking crater-grave of the Baneblade. Two or three bikes and speeders scoot after the massive battle tanks, romping over the churned-up ground.

The brotherhood formations at the head of the bridge baulk, under fire from a new angle. Hundreds are slaughtered where they stand. Some leap into the corpse-choked ditch to evade the hammering fire of Land Raiders. The Shadowswords are already firing into the fog, targeting high-value Word Bearers assets hidden from the palace by the haze. Their main guns screech out columns of energy that cook through the mist vapour. Objects in the blanket of fog explode. Flames gust high into the air over the mist cover. The smell in the air changes, like the turn from summer to autumn. New energies, new machines, new chemical interactions.

Full-scale battle is joined. For the first time since the attack on the palace began, the Word Bearers force is thrown into a defensive mode, prosecuted hard by an unexpected, mobile foe.