Hand Of Abaddon, page 22
‘Are they attempting to land troops?’ asked Vutred, incredulous. She had just returned to the bridge, red-faced on account of her urgency, void-helm tucked under one arm as she addressed Krykkâ.
‘I believe so, kâhl.’
She glanced from the tactical display providing an overview of the engagement to give a look of acid consternation to the voidmaster, who could do little but meet his kâhl’s gaze. ‘Order those ships to return to long-range bombardment positions immediately.’
The voidmaster responded in the affirmative.
‘Remind them,’ snarled Vutred, ‘which vessel leads this Prospect.’
Minnows against the black colossus, the bold quartet of ships crept closer with engines at full burn. Vutred reckoned they were moments away from launching their landers.
The fools…
She felt her jealousy burn, quenched by a cold fear that she would not be first to set foot on the motherlode. And for the briefest moment, she waited to see what would happen.
As they closed to within launch range, a section of the star fortress shifted. Like a puzzle box, its sides sliding back to reveal a hidden compartment, the massive plates parted to reveal a primary weapon array.
Several arrays.
It fired all its defences at once at the interlopers.
The Hewer came apart in the first salvo, its voidmaster regretting his eagerness. There was no fight back, no heroic last stand. The Hewer was a mining vessel, stout but not equipped for such strenuous violence. Its shields buckled instantly, its major drives and crew decks pierced and then sundered. The flare of its annihilation burned brightly for a few seconds, and then there was nothing. Only debris.
Another vessel, the Stronghold-class called Hearthhold, thrust forward, belatedly coming to the Hewer’s rescue, cannon batteries firing at full bore. The barrage strafed against the flank of star fortress but barely bothered it, leaving a crackle of ineffectual starbursts.
It drew the ire of the dread black monster nonetheless.
Further weapons systems came online, a beam array that cut the Hearthhold into pieces, dissecting it like an old wreck. Magazines cooked off, the sequenced explosions pushing the already segmented remnants of the ship further apart, where they were left to drift unanchored in the void.
The Redoubt made to turn, pushing its reverse thrusters, trying to escape.
The black fortress cored the ship with a single, harrowing shot.
Vutred had plied the void ever since she had emerged from the genetor tank, her cloneskein engineered for far-space. She believed every ship possessed its own anima, just like the Ironkin of her beloved Kindred. She felt something now, looking through the bridge’s observation port as the endless black of the star fortress closed over them. Hatred. Pain. Like an animal, chained in misery and made to suffer.
It wanted to hurt them. It had lured the ships in, feigning weakness.
A shadow seemed to crawl over the bridge, snuffing out the light of distant stars. Vutred felt her destiny reach around her neck and begin to squeeze.
‘Get us out of here,’ she breathed, transfixed by the night-black fortress creeping ever closer. Recharged, its weapon arrays lit like a field of red stars across the vastness of its surface. ‘Right now!’ she bellowed, and the voidmaster near leapt to action, having succumbed to the same dread awe as his kâhl.
Krykkâ shouted to the crew. ‘Prepare for immediate warp plunge!’
Chapter Twenty-One
fresh orders
the reality of miracles
operation ‘hell gate’
Gratefully, Kesh plunged into the water and felt a small measure of relief wash over her.
After three weeks in transit in a cramped carrier to reach Barrier Station, she needed it. As a trooper, pulse showers or a wash cloth and a basin of tepid water were the best she could hope for. Officers, though, they were allowed to bathe. An actual bath. Small, none too deep, but she had a block of soap and the water was hot.
Throne, was there anything more divine?
That thought, innocent enough, chilled her. They had made her a captain, given her rank, responsibility and privilege, but she was also something else. She saw it in the looks her adjutant gave her or the bowed heads of the Ministorum priests.
Divinity could appear in many ways. During these dark days of reconquest, many amongst humankind had come to believe that the Emperor was stirring, and His will had become manifest through chosen servants or in the deeds performed by these servants. Miracles. Kesh felt far from touched by the divine. There were things… things she could not readily explain, that, in truth, she had no desire to explain for fear that it would irrevocably change what she believed about herself. She felt pain, the burns that lingered on her arms, the soreness in her back, the weariness in her limbs. Cuts stung as the soapy water washed them, bruises ached as she moved.
Miracles did not ache.
And yet she had lived when she should have died. More than once. Either that meant she was preternaturally lucky or that some power beyond her understanding had protected her.
Annoyed with herself at spoiling her own serenity, Kesh stood and climbed out of the water. She dried off, dressed quickly. Her quarters had increased in size, several rooms made available to her in the prefabbed structure. As she moved from one to another, her new adjutant awaited her.
‘Ma’am, I was just on my way to find you,’ said Vosko.
Vosko was a corporal in the 84th Mordian. She had served as an adjutant before the war on Barren and was of a similar age to Kesh.
‘Found,’ said Kesh. ‘Though any earlier and you would have seen a lot more of me than you probably cared to.’
Vosko remained unruffled and at attention.
Kesh flashed her a look, still unused to the deference afforded by her new rank. ‘At ease, corporal. What do you need?’
Vosko had a scroll in her hand and offered it to Kesh. Breaking the wax seal with her knife, Kesh unfurled the parchment and read the machine-printed contents. The bottom had been signed in ink, Falden’s name in wiry script.
‘Orders from the colonel,’ said Kesh, rereading before rolling up the parchment and handing it back to the adjutant. ‘Army group wide. We’re marching on Kreber Pass.’
Despite herself, Vosko swallowed loudly.
It was unexpected. A second battalion was meant to be joining them at Barrier Station before Imperial forces took on the Pass. Another thousand men and heavy armour.
‘Was there anything else?’ asked Kesh.
The adjutant shook her head. ‘No, ma’am.’
Kesh’s eye was drawn to the wooden mannequin in the corner of the room. Her armour sat upon it. Gilded carapace breastplate, emblazoned with a gold aquila, ‘84th’ stamped on the gold-trimmed shoulder guard. It was a fine suit, regal, as befitting a Mordian captain. A leader’s armour. Her first battle as an officer. Kesh willed it to be anything other than the Pass, but found her blessing from the Emperor did not extend to altering this particular fate.
Kreber Pass was the gateway into enemy-occupied Barren. Through it lay the largest continental landmass of the world’s northern hemisphere. According to Militarum intelligence, it harboured the bulk of the enemy command structure and was believed to be the key to victory on Barren. That Colonel Falden had decided now was the time to try and take it either spoke of some hitherto unseen confidence in the Militarum’s current campaign, or desperation.
She hoped for the former and, despite her loathing of the word, prayed for a miracle.
Falden had not made himself available for discussion after Kesh had left Barrier Station and arrived on the northern front, rearguard line.
As her command vehicle pulled into the dirt and gravel depot, she noticed the majority of the other officers had already arrived. She rode in with Vosko and a Catachan captain who had needed a ride. Kesh’s command squad was also in the modest cab. This included Lodrin and Mavin, a banner bearer she barely knew called Atur. And with Abel Munser that made four.
Abel Munser: there was no soldier in the 84th that she trusted more. To his credit, Munser had behaved like a professional soldier. He no doubt carried some anger at being passed over but bore no obvious ill will to her personally. The man had Mordian rigour threaded through his bones. Discipline was as breathing to him.
‘Hagan,’ said the other officer who had been in the car with her, the Catachan, introducing himself as they walked through a gap across one of the muster fields. Utterly unlike the Mordian officers, Hagan was rugged and slightly unkempt, his uniform frayed and stained by old blood. Tanned skin gave him a healthy pallor, a sharp contrast to Kesh who was deathly pale by comparison. He wore his blond hair longer than most officers she knew, with a black bandana keeping it in place. She doubted it was regulation but doubted more that any commissar would be bold enough to call him on it. He had a look to him, a sort of far-off wariness that never seemed to abate, even when he was riding in the cab. Readiness, perhaps, was a better word for it. He dwarfed Kesh, his frame, his musculature. Every inch of exposed flesh on his body had a scar, it seemed, the puckered pink skin of healed knife wounds and acid burns like a detailed combat record.
As they walked on, he opened up a little and she learned that several Catachan regiments were spread across the Anaxian Line – on Barren and also Garrovire. The doughty death-worlder was as fierce a soldier as Kesh had ever met. He hadn’t spoken during the journey in the car, his thoughts no doubt on the coming battle. But as he talked now, his features brightened, his initially dour demeanour softening into something more approachable, and she found the man instantly to her liking.
‘I’m Kesh,’ she said eventually. From the change in Hagan’s expression, she could tell that meant something to him.
‘I’ve heard stories…’
‘Oh,’ Kesh replied, thinking she might need to revise her earlier opinion. ‘Are you about to kneel or something?’
Hagan kept his eyes forward on the prefab command bunker ahead where the officers would be gathering for Falden’s briefing. ‘Only if I need to tie my bootlaces. Or load up a heavy stubber. I only care about one thing, Kesh.’ Now he turned to look at her. ‘Can you soldier?’
‘I can, sir. That I can do.’
‘Good,’ Hagan replied, returning his attention to their destination, ‘and you don’t have to call me sir when we’re both of the same rank. Hagan will do just fine.’
‘Still getting used to it,’ Kesh confessed.
‘No better primer than the field of battle.’
‘I suppose not. You sound like someone I once knew.’
He raised an eyebrow. ‘Once?’
‘Died… On the field of battle. He was a pragmatic man, liked aphorisms.’
‘I don’t know much about aphorism, Kesh, but when it comes to war and death I find the only sane response is pragmatism.’
‘Wise words.’
The command bunker was just a few feet away, and with it the time for further conversation had all but passed. Hagan mounted the steps, the Mordian sentries on duty taking in his rank pins and identity.
‘Let’s hope it’s enough,’ he said.
‘Enough for what?’ asked Kesh, following. She felt a brief tremor of anxiety at the silent appraisal of the guards, but they let her through without so much as a narrowed glance. She dared to allow herself to start to feel comfortable.
‘To survive this.’
And just like that any positive feelings bled away and left behind something cold and solemn.
The bunker was cramped. A space made for twenty was being put to use for over forty. Shouldering her way through the polished brass masses as politely as she could, Kesh was glad she’d told Munser and the others of her command squad to wait with the regiment. She followed Hagan most of the way but parted to join her own and found a decent spot amongst the other Mordian officers towards the south side of the room, with a solid view of the strategium table.
Falden stood by it in a small ring of clear space, his roundish face stern and flushed. Unlike in his chambers back at Tartarus, he wore a silver breastplate and carried his helm under one arm. She wondered if he planned on being part of the attack or whether he would remain at rearguard as operational command.
Together with the colonel, she saw four other high-ranking officers who had also garnered a little more elbow room than their lowlier counterparts. She noticed one of them was Hagan, and wondered how high-ranking a captain he actually was.
The others were not known to her, but she recognised the regiments as Vardish and Gunbad – both carryovers from the attack on the Last Stronghold – together with an officer in a tank commander’s uniform that she assumed belonged to the Mundin, the main armour assets accompanying the Militarum infantry.
Then came the slightly more esoteric members of the cadre. A Martian priest in typical red robes, his augmentations mostly hidden by his garb; a mistress of the Astra Telepathica, her head tilted slightly upwards, the light catching the hollow sockets where her eyes used to be, also enrobed; an Ecclesiarch in full religious vestments but armoured in a polished silver breastplate emblazoned with the aquila; and lastly, the forbidding black outline of the lord commissar, her cap pulled low so it cast a shadow over her eyes, her hands held behind her back.
Together, these men, women and others made up the entire command echelon for the Barren Northern Front Offensive.
This particular mission, the one these lauded officers now presided over, had been somewhat ominously dubbed ‘Operation Hell Gate’. As Kesh saw them all standing there, looking as if they were about to be measured by their undertaker, she wondered which bastard of a high general had thought up this moniker. She didn’t have long to ponder, as Falden began his address a second later.
‘Ladies and gentlemen, to say this undertaking is of the most grievous import to this campaign and the hardest challenge we have yet faced, is a rather sizeable understatement.’
It went somewhat downhill from there.
Falden was eloquent and urbane; for a colonel Kesh found him decent but committed to his course, even if it might be folly. He had his orders, and come what may, they would be carried out or there would be no one left alive to carry them out.
Simple. Brutal.
She learned, with a rising feeling of unease, that Kreber Pass was heavily defended. Entrenched guns sat either side, worked into the near-impenetrable mountains. Several attempts had already been made by scout units to find a way through, but each one had failed, snared on hidden traps and then killed or hunted by enemy counterforces. This rate of attrition had left the Northern Front Offensive battle groups light on infiltrators.
And where the scalpel fails, the hammer prevails, Falden was wont to say, and did so again to a distinct lack of enthusiasm.
Grim resolve would serve instead, and Kesh’s was growing by the minute as any air support was ruled out on account of the enemy missile arrays and flak cannons. That meant they would need to force the gap with infantry. Mechanised armour would provide support, covering fire. The phrase and the notion did not fill Kesh with confidence.
She came under brief scrutiny when the victory at the Last Stronghold was mentioned, specifically in conjunction with a surge in Imperial morale when the Renegade Astartes general had been slain. True, they had lost their own Space Marine too, but the Militarum had the front foot and the upper hand, or so Falden boasted, coughing up maxims like they were bullets.
And then he revealed why Operation Hell Gate had to happen now.
Imperial astropaths had intercepted a fluctuation in the warp, and Militarum intelligence worried that it signalled enemy reinforcement. This was confirmed, somewhat eerily, by the mistress of the Astra Telepathica.
‘Belief is that xenos mercenaries or other cultist warbands are being called to the banner of their overlords on Barren,’ said Falden, stepping back in to wrap up proceedings. ‘Our concern is that this means the garrison in the Pass will be further reinforced, in which case our efforts to break through, however adamant, will be stymied indefinitely. A stalemate would be very costly, a forced retreat disastrous. We ride the boost in morale now after a hard-fought victory’ – here he glanced at Kesh, but didn’t linger – ‘or squander it and beg the Emperor for forgiveness when He asks why we failed in our duty.’
He left a short pause, which the assembled officers filled with reverent silence. They all felt the singularity of this moment. It could be a turning point in the war, an irreversible one.
‘We have no troops skilled in mountaineering, so it’s a headlong push into the Pass. It will be bloody. Our losses will be high, but we must see it done. I don’t say this to dent morale, it is merely a fact. Our heavy guns and mechanised armour will do their best to keep the enemy’s defences busy, but there are numerous pillboxes and improvised bunkers blighting every inch of that bastard maw of razor-sharp rock, which will make our lives difficult.
‘They want to kill us, make no mistake about that. Some of these women and men once served the Imperium. They have turned coat and abandoned honour and sanity for perfidy. No quarter, no clemency is to be granted. Mercy is not a word in your lexicons for the duration of this battle. And Emperor’s strength to those brave souls in our spearhead.’ Falden’s gaze went to Kesh again, and this time he did linger.
The feeling of unease she had been nurturing in her stomach curdled aggressively into something firmer and colder.
‘The Eighty-Fourth have the honour of leading the charge,’ he said, ‘Captain Magda Kesh commanding.’
Around her the officers parted, and she felt as exposed as a Valhallan on the ice plain without her winter attire.
She noticed a few make the aquila, or murmur a prayer under breath. The Ecclesiarch had stepped forward of the others, his eyes firmly on Kesh.
