Chapter 24: Fallen
The bolt pistol's discharge filled the narrow tunnel again and again, Duvette firing left-handed as he pushed forward at the head of the formation. The soldiers pressed behind him in a solid mass, driving the retreating heretics back step by step.
Then the earpiece crackled with sharp electrical interference, and through the static a hoarse, familiar voice broke through.
"Duvette? Can you hear me? This is Nathan!"
The vox channel had cleared. Whatever Warp interference had been blocking communications had opened for a moment.
Duvette pulled back into a recess in the rock wall and pressed his hand to the vox-bead at his ear. "Colonel! I can hear you!"
"Report!"
The urgency in Fox's voice was carefully contained but audible underneath the control. Duvette kept it brief and fast.
"We've just cleared the main tunnel and are pushing toward the square. Enemy main force is still in the square: four psykers conducting the ritual, four fixed heavy guns. And seven Chaos Astartes." A half-second pause. "All of them dealt with."
Silence from the other end for one full second.
"All of them?!"
"All of them," Duvette confirmed.
"Good." Fox's voice shifted into something precise and clipped. "I'm leading the 16th Company through the right fork. The other companies are pressing from every direction simultaneously. Keep your advance speed up. Don't give them room to breathe."
"Understood."
The channel closed.
Duvette came out of the recess and kept moving. The air ahead had changed: the blood-smell had thickened past the point where it registered as smell and had become something that sat on the tongue and the back of the throat. The temperature was rising steadily, the heat rolling in waves from the direction of the square, carrying sulfur and rot with it.
Then something hit him in the chest.
Not physically. An invisible pressure, settling onto his sternum and not letting go. The throbbing behind his temples that had come and gone since the first time Emperor's Gaze had been active in these tunnels returned with full force, and with it something colder: a wave of inexplicable dread that ran up his spine before burning away just as quickly, replaced by an anger that had no specific object and then faded in turn.
He turned around.
The soldiers from the other companies who had arrived with Fox's advance were no longer fighting like soldiers.
They were not looking for cover. They were not maintaining their firing lines. Men were standing upright in the middle of open passages and walking into enemy fire as if it were not present, lasguns still half-full being dropped so both hands could reach for the combat knives at their belts. He watched a soldier from the converging columns throw himself onto the nearest heretic without any weapon at all, teeth and hands and the full weight of his body going into the contact. On both sides of the passage, soldiers and heretics had abandoned any distinction between a firefight and a brawl, clawing and stabbing and biting in formations that no longer resembled formations at all.
Khorne's influence. He understood it the moment he saw it.
He swept his gaze across the HUD. His own four hundred — the companies under Burn the Boats — showed Chaos Corruption locked around 40%, the skill holding the number flat against the pressure pushing it upward. It was working, but only for the soldiers under his direct command.
The others had no such protection.
A soldier came running past him from the direction of the converging columns, heading directly toward the heretic line without any sign of tactical intent. Duvette reached out and caught his arm.
The man turned on him immediately. The eyes were completely shot through with red, the face contorted with something that had gone past anger into something less specific and more dangerous. He tried to wrench his arm free and when that failed he swung at the commissar who had stopped him.
Duvette checked the status display above the man's head.
[Chaos Corruption: 67%]
The danger threshold was 60%. Above that number, a baseline human's grip on rational behavior began to fail, the Warp's influence filling the space reason had vacated. At 67% this soldier was functionally no longer making decisions. He was a weapon with no one behind it.
Duvette brought the edge of his hand down against the side of the man's neck with controlled force. The soldier's legs went out from under him and he went down and stayed there.
Fox's voice came back through the channel, and what Duvette heard was not the voice from two minutes ago.
"Advance! Advance! Kill them all! Take their heads! Every last one of them!"
The careful control was gone. What had replaced it was something rawer, something that had been feeding on itself and growing since it found the first opening.
"Colonel!" Duvette pressed the vox-bead hard. "Stay calm! Maintain formation! We need coordination out there!"
A pause. When Fox came back, the words came in pieces, broken up by something that sounded like effort, as if each one had to be retrieved from somewhere it had no interest in being found.
"...I'm trying." His breathing was loud through the channel. "But... they're... too loud!"
"Hold on!" Duvette said. "I need you to hold on!"
The tunnel exit came into view ahead.
Light. Real light, the uneven orange torchlight of the square, bleeding back through the tunnel mouth. They had reached the end of the passage. The rubble slope and the vast space beyond it were right there.
But what was waiting at the bottom of the slope was not a broken enemy.
The remaining heretic elite had formed a defensive line at the base of the ramp, weapons raised, armour plates catching the torchlight. They had fallen back to prepared positions and were making use of them. And behind them, standing at the center of the underground square, in the middle of the blood-red eight-pointed star drawn across the floor, was a figure in a PDF colonel's uniform.
Adrian Hock spread his arms wide.
His voice came through a vox-amplifier that carried it to every corner of the square, every tunnel entrance, the full volume of the space.
"Welcome, dogs of the false Emperor!" The laugh behind the words was not a performance. "I have a gift prepared for you."
He raised his right hand and made a single gesture.
All four fixed heavy guns in the square's corners opened fire at the same moment.
The sound swallowed everything else that was happening in the space. Each weapon was cycling at hundreds of rounds per minute, the combined output sweeping across every tunnel exit ramp and the open ground between them in overlapping arcs. The large-caliber rounds tore through the air and through whatever the air contained, without reference to which side it belonged to.
This was not a tactical decision. It was an offering.
Duvette threw himself behind the nearest solid surface and screamed into the noise. "Cover! Everyone with any sense left, find cover now!"
His voice was lost completely in the roar.
He watched, from behind the rock, a soldier who had gone past the point of rational thought charge directly into the arc of fire. The upper half of the man's body came apart in the same instant. But the blood that sprayed outward did not spray the way blood normally sprays. It moved wrong.
It went toward the center of the square.
All of it. As if the stone floor had an opinion about the matter. He could see now what he had not been able to see from the tunnel: the floor of the square was not flat. Channels had been cut into the stone across the entire surface, shallow and deliberate, a network of grooves that ran in converging lines from every direction toward the central star. Every drop of blood shed in this space — from his soldiers, from the heretics, from the World Eaters, from everything that had died here — had been running down those channels and collecting at the star's center.
The blood was boiling. Fist-sized bubbles broke the surface and burst in waves, releasing a smell that hit the back of the throat and stayed there.
Duvette pressed himself flat and worked the vox.
"Nathan! I need heavy fire! Autocannons, rocket launchers, anything you have!"
Static.
Somewhere in the static, something that might have been a voice, getting further away and then gone.
"Nathan! Colonel! Answer me!"
Nothing.
He switched channels. One company commander. Another. Another. Cycling through every command frequency he had. Each one returned the same answer, which was not an answer. The vox hissed and produced nothing useful on every channel he tried.
Then a notification appeared in the upper left of his vision.
White text, against the deep red light that was flooding through the tunnel mouth from the square beyond.
[You have assumed full command of the Ash Watchers 101st Regiment.]
Duvette went still.
He understood what that meant. He had understood it before he finished reading it.
Fox was dead.
Somewhere in the metal storm that had just swept the square's perimeter, or earlier, in one of the maddened charges through the tunnel, or somewhere else entirely — a colonel of the Astra Militarum, the commanding officer of the 101st Ash Watchers, was gone.
No final words. No last orders. No dramatic moment that could be pointed to and remembered. The vox had been growing more erratic and then it had simply stopped, and the System had filled the silence with a notification that transferred command of more than a thousand soldiers to the commissar crouched behind a rock with a broken right arm and five bolt rounds left.
There was no one above him now.
He was the highest-ranking officer in this tunnel.
He was the highest-ranking officer of the 101st Regiment.