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  The Space Marine looked down through the glass and she saw his confusion.

  ‘What is this?’ said Brother Olantor.

  ‘A last resort,’ said Sibiya.

  Honsou watched from the roof of his personal bunker as the bombardment of the Gauntlet Bastions continued. It was impossible to see the walls, for they were wreathed in smoke and flames. He felt the vibrations of the distant impacts through his boots and relished this chance to reduce a bastion of the Ultramarines to ruin.

  This was what it was all about. He had been a shadow of his former self since he had left the Eye of Terror, so consumed by vengeance that he had forgotten what made him the man he was. He was a product of two gene fathers, yet he was wholly an Iron Warrior and the scale of industrialised warfare around him was like a vision of paradise.

  The batteries of the second parallel were bludgeoning the walls before them to submission and it would not be long before they had affected a practicable breach. It had been too long since he had led warriors through a broken wall, climbed the rubble into the teeth of guns and swords with his own weapons howling their prayers to the dark gods.

  The hot taste of steel and burning propellant was a thick reek in the air, the smell of warfare as it was always meant to be waged. A near continuous rain of shells from the two enormous towers beyond the walls pounded the Iron Warriors’ position, but their master had taught them well and only the slaves bore the brunt of the shelling.

  The main weapon systems of the star fort were next to useless in such a conflict, for its guns were designed to hurl explosive projectiles vast distances across space at attacking warships, not troops crawling across its surface like ants. The vast majority of its weapon systems simply weren’t capable of shooting at its own structure. Which wasn’t to say the defenders were powerless, for a great many soldiers manned the battlements and the guns mounted on the towers were mighty indeed.

  Yes, a worthy enemy was ranged against them, but Honsou liked nothing better than a challenge that would prove his mettle to those around him.

  ‘Tell me,’ said Notha Etassay, reclined on a chaise longue of flayed human skin, ‘Are such battles always such tedious affairs? When do I get to bare my blade?’

  Honsou sighed, his reverie of shell impacts and escalades broken by the bladedancer’s lugubrious tones. ‘Ever since we began this fight that’s all you’ve been asking. It takes time to batter down the walls of a fortress. Approaches have to be made, parallels raised and the proper time taken to break it open. It’s the perfect meeting of science and martial glory.’

  ‘Really? I thought it was a necessary evil,’ said Etassay. ‘A long, drawn out affair that you Iron Warriors specialise in before the real feast of death.’

  Honsou felt his good mood evaporate at Etassay’s words. ‘The Iron Warriors learned their craft in the earliest days of the Great Crusade, Etassay, when their siege fleets toppled the fortresses and donjons of countless alien races and splinters of humanity who resisted the coming of the Imperium. It was a craft that saw my Legion used to exhaustion, pushing the warriors beyond the limits of endurance.’

  ‘I didn’t think you were alive to see such times?’ said Etassay.

  ‘I wasn’t,’ admitted Honsou. ‘I was elevated to the Legion in the aftermath of the war.’

  ‘So I heard,’ replied Etassay, glancing over at Cadaras Grendel. No doubt the mohawked warrior had delighted in telling Etassay of Honsou’s mongrel heritage.

  ‘I may not have faced the walls of Terra but I have stood before countless others, and they have all fallen. There is no wall that can be thrown up before me that I cannot tear down. The great Perturabo might not venture from his lair in the mountains of Medrengard, but his warriors continue the Long War in his name.’

  ‘If flattening castles is such a joy to the Iron Warriors, then why is he not here?’

  Honsou shook his head. ‘Perturabo has a thousand lifetimes worth of hate in his heart,’ he said, remembering the deep, dark valleys of the mountains and the dread temples and forsaken towers of Perturabo’s nightmare city. Though he had not seen the fallen Primarch of the Iron Warriors, he had felt his brooding hate on the bitter winds that howled through every haunted street. ‘And such a warrior does not stir for any but the most titanic of conflicts.’

  Etassay stood and swung his arms, loosening the muscles of his shoulder and performing a series of painful looking stretches. Even clad in a form-fitting bodysuit and enclosing helm of androgynous passivity, the warrior’s physique was impressive. His impatience was obvious, but Honsou wasn’t about to launch his assault on the bastions until he was ready.

  ‘If you’re so desperate to swing your blade, you could always join Kaarja Salombar’s corsairs or what’s left of Pashtoq Uluvent’s berserkers,’ suggested Cadaras Grendel.

  ‘Kind of you to offer, Grendel,’ said Etassay with an elaborate bow, ‘but I think I’d rather fight where there’s a chance I might live. The berserkers don’t care one way or the other and Salombar… well, empty heroics may be very piratical, but they aren’t very productive. Sensation can only be wrung of all its juices while one is alive to enjoy the flavour.’

  ‘Don’t say we didn’t offer,’ said Grendel.

  Honsou was fully aware of the loss of men resulting from the impetuous Salombar’s rash charges on the walls, but the Corsair Queen cared not for the impossibility of carrying a well defended wall with only courage and foolish thoughts of glory. Pashtoq Uluvent’s berserkers, unhinged madmen who lusted only to kill, had become a liability of late, and though they too had little chance of carrying the walls, Honsou shed no tears for their losses.

  Besides, the constant assaults on the walls was keeping the defenders’ guns occupied, allowing the covered ways and approaches to creep ever closer to the wall. When a third parallel was established, Honsou would be in a position to mount his direct firing guns to blast the footings of the walls to dust.

  And looking at the drifting banks of smoke that perpetually wreathed the walls, Honsou didn’t think it would take much longer.

  Brother-Sergeant Olantor fired the last of his shells at the fleeing warriors and slumped against the blasted stump of this section of wall. His breath came in short, sharp hikes, the result of numerous breaches in his armour. Though vacuum sealant had prevented a catastrophic decompression, it had left his air supply dangerously thin.

  Decimus knelt beside him and passed him a fresh magazine.

  ‘You always did have lousy fire discipline,’ said his fellow sergeant.

  ‘Thank you,’ replied Olantor, switching magazines with automatic precision. He glanced over the walls, seeing a cratered wasteland of rubble and bodies. The expanse of the star fort’s southern quarter resembled the very worst warzone imaginable, like a devastated city that had changed hands a dozen times or more.

  The battered survivors of this latest attack gathered behind hastily thrown up walls and sheltered redoubts that had been built at their back as the assault came in. It astounded Olantor how quickly the Iron Warriors could build such things, and no sooner had one attack been beaten back than the next was coming in.

  He looked along the length of the shattered wall, its once proud ramparts little more than ragged outcroppings of stone and jutting rebars. It was little enough to shelter from enemy fire, but it was all they had. Olantor could see seven Ultramarines, and around a thousand Defence Auxilia troops. Chaplain Sabatina held his crozius high, reciting the litanies of hate for traitors over the Auxilia vox-net.

  The mortal soldiers were fighting with great courage and honour on a battlefield where even minor damage to an environment suit could see a man dead in moments. Each was trained to quickly seal a tear, but much of the firepower coming at them caused such horrendous damage that repairs were impossible.

  Even Interrogator Sibiya had surprised him, fighting on the front lines with her Datian Saurians at her side. The Saurians were swarthy-skinned men with long-barrelled melta guns and heavy armour
of umber scale. A twitching preacher in ill-fitting haz-mat armour never left Sibiya’s side, chanting words from a heavy book carried on the back of a thickly-muscled, vat-grown bearer. The man seemed oblivious to the fact that only he could hear his own words.

  Olantor felt the crash of iron footfalls behind him, recognising the heavy tread of Brother Altarion. For all that he had entertained doubts as to the Old One’s ability to command the star fort, he had no doubts as to his ability as a warrior. Since the first attack, Altarion had stood alongside the defenders of the Gauntlet Bastions, and the Dreadnought’s presence had done more to raise morale than any number of inspiring speeches from Chaplain Sabatina.

  Those few attackers who had somehow reached the ramparts on automated grapnels, had been met by the crackling hammer or roaring cannon of Brother Altarion. None who reached the top of the wall survived.

  bellowed Altarion over the vox.

  ‘So soon?’ sighed Olantor.

  ‘Looks like,’ said Decimus, glancing over the wall.

  Chapter Four

  Honsou got his breach seventeen hours later. As the corsairs and berserkers scrambled up the pitted and easily-climbed walls of the Gauntlet Bastions, the Iron Warriors built and fortified their final batteries. Their works were too close to the walls for the defending gunners in the mighty towers of the basilica to target without fear of hitting their own men, and thus the work was undertaken with only minimal disruption.

  The huge, elevated platforms were raised with sheet steel and hard packed slabs of rockcrete salvaged from the ruins. Within two hours of their completion, six enormous guns rolled along the covered ways from the Iron Warriors’ bridgehead. They had belonged to Lord Toramino and Lord Berossus, warsmiths who had laid siege to Honsou’s fortress on Medrengard, but in the aftermath of their defeat, Honsou took the weapons for his own.

  Toramino once claimed his guns had fired on the walls of Terra, and while that was a boast made by many a warsmith, Toramino’s likely had merit.

  The movement of so many colossal weapons could not go unnoticed, and the Imperial gunners bent their every effort into stopping them, but the Iron Warriors had done their work well. Where the covered ways were breached, battalions of slaves and bulldozers rushed forward to repair the damage and level the roadway. Where there was any danger of the Imperial defenders zeroing in on the artillery pieces, Adept Cycerin assigned extra firepower to suppress them. After a punishing five-hour journey, all six guns reached their battery positions without suffering any damage.

  A mix of high-energy conversion beamers, conventional, direct-firing macro-cannons and mobile laser drills, the war machines went to work on the base of the Gauntlet Bastions with a vengeance. Using the wall’s mass against it, the conversion beamers blew open crater after crater in the structure, while the laser drills sliced through adamantium rebars with horrifying ease. A booming rumble, like distant thunder, signalled the first collapse, and a wide crack split the edge of the leftmost bastion, snaking violently from the base of the wall to the rampart in a matter of seconds. At the top, men scrambled to flee the disintegrating wall, but it was too late for many of them. Tank-sized chunks of rock and compacted stone tumbled down, carrying hundreds of men to their doom as the rubble crashed to the ground in a rain of debris.

  Billowing clouds of smoke drifted over the Iron Warriors’ position and within moments it was clear that a practicable breach had been achieved. A vast section of the bastion had collapsed, spilling a sloping ramp of craggy rock and stone into the ditch before it.

  The Rhino slammed down on the rock with a thunderous crack, and Honsou held onto the stanchion beside his head as the impact threatened to tear him from the bench seat. Acrid fumes filled the interior of the vehicle and red light from the driver’s compartment flickered through the grille that separated it from the troops.

  He could hear the booming reports of artillery and the snapping fizz of lasers. Shrapnel and rock pellets pinged from the hull in a constant rain. Any normal soldier would fear venturing out into such a maelstrom of violence, but Honsou relished it. This was where he was meant to be, in the thick of the fighting, winning back the victory Horus Lupercal had let slip from his grip one body at a time.

  No doubt Vaanes would have tried to talk him out of spearheading the assault, whereas Grendel and Etassay were only too happy for him to lead from the front. His death could only advance their prospects, and Grendel practically shoved him to the Rhino when the time came to launch the assault. Far from letting Honsou snatch all the glory, Grendel’s urge to kill and maim had seen him take his place in the storming of the breach also.

  The Rhino suddenly rucked upwards, and hot exhaust fumes spurted into the troop compartment as it fought for traction in the loose rubble. Honsou pushed himself to his feet, and slid down the compartment to the heavy doors on the side of the Rhino. He hammered the door release, but something was preventing the doors from opening. He slammed his foot against the metal, tearing the door from its hinges and sending it tumbling down the slope of the breach.

  Strobing light filled the Rhino’s interior and the noise of battle swelled to deafening proportions. A stray round spanked from the buckled frame and Honsou grinned at the thought of getting into the thick of such a furious battle.

  ‘Follow me!’ he shouted, leaping from the troop compartment.

  A dozen Rhinos were staggered on the lower slopes of the breach, each with their engines revving furiously and belching thick geysers of exhaust smoke. Three were in flames, little more than blackened hulks, but Iron Warriors poured from the rest in a steeldust tide. Kaarja Salombar’s corsairs came with them, and a host of wiry kroot with rippling head spines vaulted from rock to rock as they climbed to the defenders above. Their skins exuded an oily residue that stank of burned fat and oil, but whatever it was it protected them from the vacuum and allowed them to breathe.

  Behind Honsou, a pack of multi-legged battle machines, the daemon-engines of Votheer Tark, climbed over the rubble, vast iron pincer arms snapping and heavy rotary cannons spewing thousands of shells at the ramparts. Votheer Tark himself, a hybridised meld of automaton and flesh, rode into battle within an underslung pod attached to a spider-like creature with racks of mortars on its back like a nest of spines. Two of his machines exploded as they triggered buried mines, spraying razor fragments through the attacking horde. Another crashed down, its legs blown off as a volley of heavy fire from above tore into it.

  Brutish ogre creatures, abhuman freaks gene-bred for strength and blind obedience, lumbered alongside the attackers. Each was armed with a fearsome chain grapple and enormous cannons torn from the wrecks of fighter craft.

  Notha Etassay’s warriors moved over the rubble as though it were no more an inconvenience to them than a gentle slope. Their movements were supple and their swords shimmered in the flickering light of battle. Etassay’s crimson bodysuit and golden helmet were surely a magnet for any enemy sniper, but the androgynous blademaster seemed to float through the hail of fire as though it moved in slow motion. The mark of a great warrior was to find the space in which to kill, space in which you could deliver a killing blow, but to achieve that in the midst of gunfire was simply incredible.

  Though this horde of renegades, corsairs and killers was a far cry from the glory of an Iron Warriors army, it was, nevertheless, a vast wedge of force aimed at the hole torn in the defences. Toramino would have scorned to fight alongside such a rabble, but he was dead and all Honsou cared was that this army fought and died at his command.

  The axe sheathed at his back hungered for blood, but until he reached the crest of the breach, this was a fight for guns not blades. He racked the slide on his bolter and clambered uphill. The ground was loose shale and powdered rock, slippery underfoot, but he had climbed breaches in the face of determined resistance many times. Solid rounds and lasers flashed around him, ricocheting from stone and steel and armour in equal measure.

  A heavy
impact slammed into his chest and he grunted, knowing that only a bolter round would have the power to stop a Space Marine in his tracks. He looked up and saw a pair of blue armoured warriors atop a precariously balanced nub of rock.

  Ultramarines!

  He’d known this star fort was manned by Ventris’s Chapter, but to see them so close fanned a fire of anger in his heart that had been building ever since he’d left Medrengard. He pulled his own bolter hard to his shoulder and squeezed off a short burst. One of the warriors spun away from the wall, but Honsou already knew he hadn’t killed him.

  ‘On! Up!’ he shouted, slogging up the slope at the head of fifty Iron Warriors.

  Withering fire sheeted from the walls above, streaking bolts of hard light and whickering trails of bullets that left spiral holes in the smoke. Fighters less well armoured than the Iron Warriors fell back, torn up by the weight of fire, and hissing, venting bodies littered the rubble slopes as their suits equalised pressure, spraying fans of blood into the air. Honsou felt the ground below him begin to shake and dropped into cover as the slope ahead of him heaved upwards before sinking down rapidly. A concussive blast erupted as a subterranean shell detonated and sent a plume of fire and rock skyward. Avalanches set off by the underground blasts cascaded downwards, carrying debris and bodies to the base of the wall.

  Hundreds were dying, but with every passing moment, the attackers were gaining metre after metre of ground. Honsou pulled himself upright and climbed onwards.

  Something bounced on the rocks towards him, and he threw himself flat as the heavy disc of a melta charge spun towards him. It struck a hand jutting from the fallen masonry and flew over his head, exploding with a shrieking bang of superheated air. Honsou looked over his shoulder to see one of the ogre creatures staring dumbly at the space where its arm used to be. The entire right side of its body was torn open and the fused ends of its ribs smoked as its boiled innards slopped from its ruined body.