Cain's Last Stand, page 22
‘That’s how I read it,’ Rorkins agreed.
‘By elites,’ Julien said, ‘you mean the Traitor Legions?’ Only a man as skilled as I am at reading the subtle cues by which we all betray our feelings would have noticed the faint overtone of repugnance and unease that entered her voice at that point.
‘It’s possible,’ I said, quailing inwardly at the thought myself. I’d faced the tainted parodies of the Emperor’s own Astartes on a number of occasions, emerging in one piece each time more by luck than judgement. ‘But if there are any among Varan’s retinue they’ll be few and far between.’ I hoped. In my experience, only a few advisors would be attached to a raiding fleet like this, the main bulk of the Chaos Space Marines preferring to fight their own battles under their own commands: against one another if there were no other foes available. I smiled, reassuringly. ‘And they’re tough, no doubt about that, but they can be beaten; I’ve done it before.’
‘Any foe can be beaten if the Emperor stands at your back,’ Julien said, sounding more like most of the other battle sisters I’d ever met than she usually did, but mainly for her own benefit, I suspected.
‘Quite so,’ Rorkins said, still staring at the blips in the hololith as if he could somehow reach into it, haul Varan out of his flagship by the scruff of the neck, and finish him off here and now. He glanced across to me. ‘I think you’re right, this is his personal entourage. Household troops, if you will. Throne alone knows what that’ll mean in practice.’
‘Nothing good,’ I said, from long and bitter experience.
For the next few hours the three of us watched the reports trickling in, trying to gain a picture of the overall disposition of the enemy, now that the first few shuttles were grounding, and disgorging their cargoes of fanatical heretics. As before, whatever co-ordinated strikes they’d been hoping to make had clearly been massively disrupted, but enough survivors were getting through to make a considerable nuisance of themselves.
‘Their first assault’s been blunted,’ Rorkins said at last, ‘but that doesn’t mean a lot by itself. They’re still tying up far too many of our own people in keeping them contained.’
That much was obvious. The PDF were responding a lot more effectively than they had done to the first incursion, but then they had far fewer excuses for being taken by surprise this time round, so I’d have expected nothing less, and a few vox calls to the obvious slackers were sufficient to put the fear of the Emperor into them; I’ve often found the casual mention of firing squads can be quite effective in focussing the attention.
The militia were getting stuck in as well, in a few places, but in just as disorganised a fashion as I’d expected, so the results of their assistance were mixed, to say the least. Few, if any, units were bothering to co-ordinate with the local PDF (who, in most cases, had their hands rather too full to spare them much attention in any case), so the ones which saw combat tended to be the ones which had just happened to be in the vicinity of a shuttle landing, grabbed their new weapons, and rushed off to defend their homes. Some fought tenaciously, as, if nothing else, they were strongly motivated, but more often than not they either fled as soon as they took a few casualties, or were simply wiped out to a man by the superior weaponry and tactics of the heretics. The one thing they did do well, however, was buy time, like they were supposed to, and by nightfall[66] nearly all the enemy beachheads were at least surrounded, and being prevented from spreading any further.
The downside, though, as Rorkins had pointed out some hours before, was that simply doing this much had left the resources at our disposal pretty much at full stretch. Emperor alone knew how we’d manage to deal with the Chaotic reinforcements when they arrived.
‘My guess is they’ll try to bolster the largest pockets of resistance,’ Rorkins said, accepting the mug of recaff Jurgen handed to him without wincing, which alone was enough to tell me how exhausted he was. Julien had left by this time, to harry the enginseers from the Mechanicus shrine who were doing their best to bring the power armour her novitiates had been training in to something approaching battle readiness, although from what I’d seen they were going to have to burn an awful lot of incense to do that.
‘Thank you, Jurgen.’ I accepted my own mug gratefully, found myself briefly wondering if the sandwich accompanying it had come from the buffet in Chilinvale, then decided I was too hungry to care. ‘Better grab something yourself. It’s going to be a long night.’
‘Very good, sir.’ Jurgen retreated to a convenient corner, from which slurping and chewing noises shortly began to emanate, and I returned my attention to the hololith. The surface of Perlia was scattered with contact icons, like the rash of some virulent disease, and I studied the runes accompanying them for tactical data, trying to find the largest infestation. It didn’t take long, of course.
‘The primary target seems to be the capital again,’ I said, and Rorkins nodded wearily, zooming the image to enlarge the area around Havendown. Almost a dozen individual battles were continuing, some in the heart of the city itself, while a significant concentration of the enemy was clustered around the perimeter of Rytepat, clearly determined to take it as quickly as possible. Well, I could hardly fault them for that, the fighters based there were the single biggest threat to the secondary flotilla, and neutralising them would be high on Varan’s to do list.
‘Makes sense,’ he agreed. ‘If they take Havendown, and the Governor’s palace, it’ll be a tremendous blow to civilian morale. Even the orks couldn’t manage it during the first siege.’
‘Then we need to make sure the heretics don’t either,’ I said. The PDF were still holding the line, but it was going to be a close-run thing either way.
With a growing sense of foreboding, I saw Rorkins nod thoughtfully, and braced myself for the inevitable. ‘Looks to me as if our people could do with a commissar breathing down their necks,’ he said.
‘It probably couldn’t hurt,’ I replied, as evenly as I could contrive, cursing my reputation for derring-do just as fervently as I always did when it backed me into some corner where I either had to risk my neck facing the enemy or lose the trust and respect of people I needed to impress in order to stand any chance of surviving at all. ‘I’ll see what Jurgen can find in the way of transport.’
EDITORIAL NOTE:
As is his habit, Cain is less than forthcoming about the more general course of the siege, preferring, as usual, to concentrate on those aspects of it that inconvenienced him personally. Accordingly, I’ve appended the following brief extract, which gives a little of the wider picture.
From In Blackest Night: The Millennial Wars Appraised, by Ayjaepi Clothier, 127. M42.
The landing of the first wave of enemy troops was accomplished in the teeth of far fiercer resistance than the heretics would have expected, and the losses they sustained were considerable. Thanks to the astute placing of minefields by the SDF, the majority of the assault ships were severely damaged, and were unable to get their full complement of troopers deployed, but enough made it down to engage the defenders in pitched battles around strategic installations and centres of population across the entire globe. The regional command centres in Midvale and Follendyke were both taken after fierce fighting, the last defenders of the latter setting demolition charges as they retreated to deny any useful intelligence to the enemy, while over a dozen towns defended by no more than the citizen’s militia which Commissar Cain had somewhat vaingloriously founded in imitation of his erstwhile compatriots of the First Siege were taken with barely a shot fired. To the amazement of the surviving civilians, instead of embarking on the expected orgy of looting and bloodshed, the occupying forces remained disciplined and in good order, merely imposing a curfew and awaiting the arrival of their leader.
They didn’t have long to wait. The second wave of the flotilla arrived in orbit within hours, having been harassed the entire way by the surviving SDF boats, whose commander had adopted the unorthodox tactic of approaching at high speed, unleashing a barrage of ordnance at point-blank range, and continuing past the enemy convoy before it could bring its own weapons to bear. In the main this had little result beyond annoyance, but only one gunboat fell to return fire, the rest managing to retreat beyond effective range again before they could be targeted. Though Varan’s heavy cruiser, the Undefeatable, was, naturally, the primary target of these forays, the lighter escorts accompanying it took the brunt of the damage, a couple of them apparently suffering minor degradation of their engines and auspex arrays, which may have rendered them a little less capable of defending themselves subsequently.
Despite these heroic endeavours, however, the Undefeatable took up its station above Havendown with no visible difficulty, and Varan joined the battle for the heart and soul of Perlia in person. Once again, persistent local legend puts Commissar Cain at the centre of this conflict, insisting that he and the warmaster fought one another hand to hand, although there is no reliable evidence to back up so fanciful a story.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
As we bounced and rattled along the highway to Havendown, Jurgen’s driving as erratic as ever, I took advantage of the relative solitude and the clear night air to order my thoughts as best I could. I’d done everything possible to ensure the safety of the Shadowlight, although in all honesty that was looking tenuous at best, so now my highest priority should be getting through the rest of the night with my head still attached to my shoulders.
As we left the last few lights of the village behind us I glanced up, the open top of our Salamander affording me an excellent view of the night sky, and felt the breath still for a moment in my chest. The old familiar stars were still there, of course, even a few of the constellations I’d learned to pick out since taking up residence on Perlia: within moments I’d spotted the Slith[67] and the Adze, just as I’d expected to. Now, however, there was something new, a faint band of luminescence that stretched across the sky, like a narrower, dimmer echo of the milky way itself.
For a moment, I don’t mind admitting, my heart hammered in my chest, as the panic-stricken thought that it was some kind of warp manifestation conjured up by Varan’s sorcerers (or Felicia’s merry meddlers in the Valley of Daemons poking away at things man was not meant to know) took hold of me, until reason reasserted itself, and I recognised the phenomenon for what it was. Even then, it was a thought to chill the blood: Perlia had a new ring system, made up of debris from the first wave of enemy ships that had blundered into Visiter’s minefield. I was looking at a cloud of detritus, ranging in size from crippled starships over a kilometre in length down to chips of metal smaller than a fingernail paring, and I had little doubt that there were hundreds, if not thousands, of corpses floating about up there too. Of course it would be a relatively short-lived spectacle, as the tenuous fringes of the atmosphere brushed at the tumbling debris, slowing the pieces enough to snare, and dragging them down to a final cremation; even now the sky was being streaked with lines of light, as the first brands entered the bonfire[68].
‘We’ll be there in about an hour,’ Jurgen informed me, his voice unexpectedly loud in my earpiece, and I nodded, before remembering that he couldn’t see me.
‘Very good, Jurgen,’ I responded, and propped myself up against the pintel mount of the heavy bolter I always like to have installed on any vehicle assigned to me. The Salamander’s built-in weapons are mounted facing forwards, which is seldom my direction of choice in the presence of the enemy, and the ability to throw some grief their way while retreating has saved my neck on more than one occasion. Besides, it lets me do something myself when things get sticky, which is always comforting, even when it’s not particularly effective, and it looks appropriately heroic, which never hurts when you’ve got a fraudulent reputation to maintain. ‘Better slow down a bit, we don’t want the cadets getting lost.’
‘No, commissar,’ my aide replied, with the faintest air of disappointment. ‘I suppose not.’ He’d opened up an impressive lead over the Salamander behind us on the twisting mountain road, but then Kayla still retained a residue of caution, despite the tendency of the young to believe that they’re immortal, and Jurgen had been honing his ability to push vehicles to the limit for the best part of a century. I’d been a little dubious about bringing the cadets along, to be honest, but they’d proven their mettle on the asteroid, and the situation in Havendown seemed so finely balanced that any extra edge we could gain seemed worth taking a chance on.
‘Are you all right back there?’ I voxed, keeping my voice casual, and peering down the road for the dark bulk of the trailing vehicle. There was no point in looking for lights, of course, as we had no intention of betraying our position to the enemy any more than we could help, and were proceeding entirely by the faint blue glow of the stars above our heads[69]. Fortunately our eyes had adjusted to the tenebrous glimmering by now, and I was able to discern the boundaries of the carriageway, as well as a mottling of darker shapes which showed the presence of something in the gloom beyond. What these silhouettes might be I had no idea, trees, rocks and field boundaries for the most part I suppose, interspersed with the occasional building, and I fought the tendency of my imagination to populate them with unseen ambushers. I’d seen too many troopers spook themselves enough to open fire on innocuous shadows, only to be felled as soon as the muzzle flash betrayed their position to the enemy.
‘We’re fine,’ Nelys assured me, with rather too much confidence for my liking. After a little thought, I’d selected him, Kayla and Donal to accompany me on this little expedition: Nelys because I knew he’d follow orders, Kayla because she’d keep him in line if we had to split the party, and I trusted her streak of common sense (which is all too rare, despite its name), and Donal because he still reminded me a little too closely of myself at that age, and Rorkins had enough trouble to worry about at the moment. That had left a fourth seat free in the sturdy little vehicle, which I’d filled with Briel, on the entirely reasonable grounds that he’d been the first of the remaining cadets to cross my path after selecting the other three.
‘What’s our primary target?’ Kayla asked, as Jurgen slowed our breakneck progress to something on the order of merely alarming, and I began to make out the squared-off silhouette of the Salamander behind us.
To be honest, up until that point I’d still been debating the matter with myself, wondering where we were most likely to make a difference. The battle for Rytepat had pretty much stalemated by this point, and I’d been tempted to stick my nose in there, if only to maintain the fiction that the command bunkers at the heart of the PDF garrison were still the hub of the war effort. On the other hand, the heretics weren’t actually gaining any ground, the runways were still clear enough to launch fighter sorties from, and I didn’t think I could put up with the pompous idiots from the PDF high command for very long. (I suppose I could just have shot them all if they got too irritating, but that would have upset the junior officers who were actually doing some useful work, and, in any case, I thought I might need some of them around later to pin the blame on if things kept going north the way they had been[70].) As so often, I’ve found, it’s the little things that sway your judgement, and although I was to have no inkling of the fact at the time, my antipathy to the PDF grandees was shortly to save my life.
‘The Governor’s palace,’ I said, after a moment spent trying to focus on the screen of my data-slate despite Jurgen’s best efforts to send both it and me bouncing into the corner of the passenger compartment. The glow of the tiny pict was almost invisible, and would have been masked by the slabs of armour plate surrounding me in any case, so I felt any additional risk incurred by consulting it would be minimal. That was the next most obvious target for the enemy to take, and the situation there seemed balanced on a knife edge, so that’s where we’d intervene. I suppose I could have split the cadets up, and scattered them around the city to make nuisances of themselves with different units, but I wasn’t entirely sure they were ready for that yet. The defence of the palace was crucial for morale, if nothing else, and if we lost it, the planet could very well follow.
After acknowledging my instructions the cadets went silent again, too disciplined for idle vox chatter, and I resumed brooding for a while as the road rolled by under the treads of our vehicles. In fact we’d almost reached our destination before I heard another voice in my comm-bead.
‘Is it sunrise already?’ Briel asked, sounding a little confused. I hauled myself up on the pintel mount again, leaning against the heavy stock of the bolter as I peered over the rim of the armour plate. Sure enough, the sky ahead was tinted red and orange, the brighter colours seeping through the pre-dawn grey like ink on wet paper.
Surprised, I glanced at my chronograph, finding that it was at least an hour before Perlia’s primary was due to poke its head over the horizon. A moment later we crested a ridge, our tracks seeming to part company with the carriageway for a moment before we jolted back onto the hardtop, and my forebodings were confirmed.
‘That’s not sunrise,’ I told him, ‘it’s Havendown. The whole city’s ablaze.’
By the time we got into the city itself, however, it had become obvious that my initial impression had been somewhat exaggerated, though not nearly as much so as I would have liked. Fires were indeed raging in several districts, replacing the sullen furnace glow which had brightened the night sky with lowering thunderheads of dense black smoke as daylight began to seep slowly through the curdled air, but most of the streets we roared along showed little or no evidence of the fighting, beyond the usual litter left behind by fleeing civilians. Now and again we passed more obvious signs of conflict, like hastily-erected barricades, subsequently breached (although which sides had taken which part in the brief sieges these lines commemorated was usually anybody’s guess), or shops and hab blocks showing the unmistakable stigmata of heavy ordnance. More rarely, we passed the site of a pitched battle, with a gutted AFV or two still burning, and the occasional structure reduced to rubble; when this happened, Jurgen slowed, allowing the cadets to catch up, while we scanned the scene for survivors. All the combatants we saw were dead, though, some in the uniforms of the Perlian PDF, the rest in the desecrated Imperial kit of the traitors from Madasa.
