Mike Lee - Fallen Angels

Twenty minutes after the attack began, the rebel advance faltered and began to withdraw. They left behind twenty knocked-out vehicles and more than two hundred dead soldiers. Three of the Dark Angels' weapons emplacements had been destroyed by battle cannon fire, and three Astartes had been slain. The First Legion could claim victory in the opening engagement, but the battle was only beginning. The Sons of Horus had yet to make an appearance.

Over the course of the next three hours the Dark Angels repulsed five more attacks. Each time the rebels refined their tactics and probed more aggressively around the Astartes' flanks. Each time they drove back the rebels with significant losses, but casualties among the defenders mounted, and with each attack they lost one or more of their few remaining lascannons or heavy stubbers. To Nemiel it felt as though a noose was slowly being tightened around them.

The rebels dropped mortar rounds onto the outskirts of the sector during the third attack, targeting buildings where they knew a heavy weapons emplacement was located. By the sixth attack the enemy APCs were growing bolder, advancing within ten metres of the sector perimeter before being turned back.

An hour passed before the commencement of the seventh attack, allowing the Astartes time to redistribute ammunition and tend their wounded. The Dark Angels' spirits had been restored by the time the first mortar rounds began to fall, and when the rebel tanks and APCs began their advance they opened fire with their few remaining heavy weapons and prepared for close-quarters combat.

This time the rebel tanks and APCs closed in on the perimeter from three sides, and the weight of fire from the defenders wasn't strong enough to stem the tide. The enemy vehicles hit the first defensive line in a score of places; they poured cannon and heavy stubber fire into the manufactories as they pressed deeper, forcing the Astartes to break cover and assault the lumbering vehicles. Within minutes both companies were involved in dozens of squad-level melees, as the Dark Angels came to grips with platoons of heavily-armed infantry.

And then, judging that the decisive moment had come, the Sons of Horus launched their attack.

'Rhinos approaching from the north!'

Nemiel heard the call over the vox and saw the enemy strategy at once. While the rebel infantry had been probing the extent of the Imperial defences, the Sons of Horus had been moving under cover of the attacks in a sweeping movement to the north that would bring them around behind the Dark Angels' positions. It was the kind of swift, decisive strategy that made the Sons of Horus such deadly opponents on the field of battle, and reflected the tactical prowess of their illustrious primarch. Now, Nemiel and the mobile reserve was all that stood in their way.

'Move out!' he ordered as he leapt inside the lead Rhino and slammed the troop door shut. The three transports roared into motion, circling around the assembly building and racing down the accessways to the northern perimeter. He switched to the command net and called the rooftop lookouts. 'How many Rhinos are we facing?' he asked.

'I count four,' one of the lookouts replied. 'The Dragoons are engaging them now.'

The Tanagran troops stood their ground in the face of the enemy charge, and the autocannons of their four Testudos began to spit bursts of armour-piercing rounds at the oncoming transports. Two of the lightly-armoured APCs were hit and ground to a halt, smoke pouring from their wrecked power plants. A third caught fire and exploded, scattering burning debris in a wide arc.

Had the vehicles been crewed by human troops, the attack would have been stopped cold, but the hatches on all three of the destroyed vehicles slammed open and squads of pale-armoured warriors fought their way free of the wreckage and resumed their attack. They were fearsome apparitions of war, their battle-scarred armour clad with two centuries' worth of campaign honours and prized trophies looted from worlds stretching the length and breadth of the Imperium. Once they had been called the Luna Wolves, and had been the first of the Astartes Legions to be reunited with their primarch. Their name had been synonymous with the Emperor's Great Crusade for nearly two hundred years. Now they were called the Sons of Horus, and they had drowned Isstvan III in the blood of twelve billion innocent souls.

Boltguns blazed, wreaking carnage among the Dragoons; plasma guns spat bolts of charged particles that bored into the front armour of the Testudos and blew two of them apart. The lone surviving Rhino continued forwards, firing bursts from its remote-controlled twin bolter until it crashed into the enemy positions and dropped its rear assault ramp. Another squad of rebel Astartes charged out of the vehicle and attacked the surviving Dragoons in close combat, carving through the exhausted soldiers with snarling chainswords and glowing power weapons.

The Tanagran troops were on the verge of collapse when Nemiel and the reserves arrived. He ordered the APCs to halt fifteen metres back from the melee so the three squads could deploy in good order. The Redemptor looked across the battlefield at the fearsome, pale-armoured warriors. There were four full squads against his three under-strength ones; he and his men were in for a rough fight.

Igniting his crozius, Nemiel led the charge. 'Loyalty and honour!' he cried. 'For the Lion and the Emperor!'

Brother-Sergant Kohl took up the war cry, and in moments all twenty-three of the Dark Angels were shouting too, as they crashed into the ranks of their foes.

Nemiel saw a rebel warrior cut down two screaming Dragoons and then turn upon him. He rushed at the Son of Horus, channelling all of his rage into a sweeping blow from his crozius. But the veteran warrior sidestepped the blow with fearsome speed and slashed the Redemptor across the wrist. Had it been a power blade, the sword would have sliced off Nemiel's hand; as it was, the teeth of the chainsword raked across his armoured gauntlet, scoring deep gouges in the ceramite plates.

The Redemptor lashed at the rebel with a backhanded stroke, feinting for the warrior's head and then striking downwards at his knee. Again, the Astartes nimbly dodged the blow and then brought up his bolt pistol and shot Nemiel in the head.

The blow to his helmet blinded Nemiel and knocked him off his feet. He registered the impact across his shoulders as he struck the ground and felt blood trickling down the bridge of his nose. The bolt pistol round had failed to penetrate his helmet, but the impact had split it and damaged the delicate circuitry beneath the ceramite plates. His vision came back in flashes of red-tinged static just as the edge of his enemy's chainblade pressed against his breastplate. He felt the whirring teeth skip and screech across the curved plate, scrabbling for purchase. In another few seconds he knew that it would mar the surface enough to bite deep, and then he was as good as dead.

With a shout, Nemiel brought up his pistol and fired a shot into the side of his opponent's knee. The bolt round punched through the relatively weak joint armour and blew the warrior's lower leg off. The Astartes collapsed with a roar of pain and rage, and Nemiel threw himself atop his foe, batting aside his chainblade with the barrel of his pistol and slamming his crozius down on the warrior's helmet. The helm imploded with a bright blue flash, and the Son of Horus went limp.

Gasping Nemiel tore at his damaged helm one-handed until he finally pulled it free. A pitched battle was raging all around him; the Dragoons were nowhere to be seen, leaving his warriors to fight the numerically-superior Sons of Horus alone. Pistols flashed and thundered, and blades drew sparks as they slashed across the curved surfaces of power armour. He saw a Dark Angel take a shot from a plasma pistol at close range and fall to the ground, then another lose his arm to a deadly lightning claw. A rebel Astartes toppled, run through by Brother-Sergeant Kohl's power sword. Brother Ephrial smashed a rebel to the ground with the butt of his meltagun and blew the prone warrior apart with a searing blast of microwaves. The heat generated by the blast staggered everyone around him - all except the pale-armoured warrior who had slipped behind Ephrial. Brandishing a huge power fist, the Son of Horus punched Ephrial in the back of his head, killing him instantly.