Dan Abnett - Know no fear. The Battle of Calth

Thiel sees his opening. His practical. It is infinitesimal, a tiny chink in the Word Bearer’s guard. It lasts a microsecond, and it will not be repeated.

He puts his sword through it.

The longsword shears the right side of Tchure’s helm away. Cheek, ear and part of the skull separate with it. Tchure stumbles, bewildered by the pain, the shock, the disorientation.

For a moment, Tchure thinks it is Luciel. He thinks it is Luciel who has risen up to punish him for a trust so miserably betrayed.

Thiel shoulder-slams him aside into one of the other Word Bearers, spattering blood over them all. He ducks the sword slash of the third, and decapitates him.

He is the first to break clear and rush to Guilliman’s side.

Guilliman looks Kor Phaeron in the eyes. Kor Phaeron’s lips quiver. He blinks hard and bubbles of saliva form around the corners of his trembling mouth.

Guilliman wrenches the claw out. It is clutching Kor Phaeron’s heart.

Kor Phaeron crashes to the deck, bitter black blood coursing from under him in all directions. He retches, and covers the floor with a vile lactic spatter.

Guilliman throws the mangled heart aside.

Thiel steadies him to stop him falling.

‘Never mind me, sergeant,’ Guilliman rasps. ‘Kill the damned systems. Do what we came to do.’

Thiel races to the system consoles. The brass cogitation banks of the data-engine chatter and clack in front of him. He doesn’t know where to start.

‘In the name of Terra,’ Guilliman snarls. ‘Thiel, shoot the bloody thing!’

Thiel is out of ammo. But he has his sword. It has one more job to do today.

The control codes release. Tawren sees it happen. She sees the digital sequence suddenly shift across the noospherics. Control suspended (engine failure). Control suspended (engine failure). Control suspended (engine failure). Control suspended (engine failure)...

It is like a moment of data-revelation. A profound data sequence change. All values alter. All authorities reset.

She doesn’t hesitate. Hesst would not have. She runs the killcode directly into the suddenly open system, and watches as it burns through the corrupted numerics of the Octed scrapcode.

The killcode is her vanguard. Her praetorians. Her Ultramarines kill squad. Her Ventanus. She follows it in with her authority codes.

She takes control. She selects the discretionary mode. Thousands of automatically generated firing solutions instantly present themselves. She sorts them using subtle haptics, code-forms and binaric cant.

‘Server?’ Selaton is addressing her. ‘Server?’

Tawren ignores him. She opens a vox-link.

‘Server Tawren, addressing the XIII Legion Ultramarines, and all forces allied to their standard. Brace for impact. Repeat, brace for impact.’

The first beam-weapon strikes hit Lanshear. They come straight out of the sky, columns of dazzling vertical light. They stream from orbital weapon platforms, platforms that the Word Bearers left intact for their own use.

The beams, generated by lance batteries, particle tunnels and meson weapons, strike with surgical accuracy. They cauterise the city-zone around the guildhall in the northern depot area. They obliterate Titans, dissolve armoured vehicles, and reduce brotherhood and Word Bearers formations to ash.

Sheltering, in some cases, less than half a kilometre from the impact sites, Ultramarines and Army forces are untouched. Their eardrums burst. Their skin burns. They are half-blinded by the light, and hammered by the concussion, e-mag pulse and violent after-pressure, but they endure.

The negative pressure causes the rain to swirl cyclonically around the zone, a whirlpool of smoke and ravaged climate.

Ventanus looks up, dazed by the blast. Hot ash has plastered their wet armour, covering them all; ash that was Word Bearers only seconds before.

The Ultramarines around him look pumice grey, gun metal grey, the colour of the XVII’s old livery.

Tawren has not finished. She deploys the grid elements available to her, she hits other surface targets. Simultaneously, she retasks orbital platforms, and retrains lance stations. She begins to systematically exact punishment on the Word Bearers fleet.

For the first time since the cataclysmic orbital strike, it’s the crimson-hulled warships that explode and die in nearspace. Cruisers and barges detonate in multi-megaton conflagrations, or are crippled by devastating impacts.

This is a dynamic combat shift. This is the game changed. Hesst would approve. Guilliman would approve.

On the auxiliary bridge of the Macragge, Marius Gage sees the first of his enemy’s ships sputter and torch out. He watches as phosphorescent green and white beams stripe out from the orbital grid, spearing Word Bearers vessels.

He looks at Hommed.

‘Statement of yield, please?’

‘We are currently at fifty-seven per cent yield, Chapter Master,’ says Hommed. ‘Enough to transport Empion’s kill squad.’

‘I intend to take rather more direct action than that. Engage the drive and move towards the yards. Raise the shields.’

‘Sir, there are three enemy cruisers clamped to our hull.’

‘Then I imagine they will suffer, shipmaster. Raise void shields. While you’re at it, shoot them off our back.’

The titanic flagship lights its shields. One of the cruisers buckles as it is caught and torn in the void field, blowing out along its centre line and voiding significant compartments to space. Its wrecked bulk remains clamped to the Macragge’s Honour as the flagship surges forward, drives glowing white hot.

A second cruiser falls free, clamps blown and cut. The flagship’s batteries begin to pick it apart before it can stabilise its motion.

The third is pounded repeatedly at close range by the flagship’s starboard guns. Gage refuses to order cease firing until the side of the cruiser facing him is a molten hell, burning up, with inner decks exposed.

The executed cruiser drops away, glowing like an ember, and falls out of the plane of the ecliptic.

The master control room is on fire. Flames and smoke are rapidly filling the habitats of the Zetsun Verid Yard. Thiel and the remainder of the kill squad retreat rapidly towards the transverse assembly deck. They pack tight around the wounded, limping primarch.

‘The flagship is inbound,’ says Thiel.

Guilliman nods. He seems to be recovering some strength.

‘The sun,’ murmurs one of the squad.

They look up through the vast crystalflex observation ports and see the Veridian star. It is stricken, its light ugly and sick. A bubonic rash of sunspots freckles its surface.

‘I think we have won something just in time to lose everything,’ says Guilliman.

Thiel asks him what they should do, but the primarch is not listening. He has turned his attention down, to something he can see on the through-deck beneath the assembly layer.

‘Bastards!’ he hisses. ‘Can’t they just burn?’

Thiel looks.

He can see half a dozen of the surviving Word Bearers. They carry the bloody carcass of Kor Phaeron. Somehow, the wretched Master of the Faith seems to be alive, despite the fact that Guilliman tore out his primary heart. He is twitching, writhing.

Leading the party, Thiel sees the Word Bearer whose helm and skull he cut away.

Tchure turns to look at them, sensing them. The side of his face is gore, teeth and bone exposed.

Thiel draws his boltgun, reloaded with ammunition from a fallen brother. The other Ultramarines start to fire too.