Chapter 74: To Macragge
Over the week that followed, the cleansing operation on Parmenio's surface moved forward with a cold and clinical efficiency.
Chaplain Casiel gave the contaminated underground nest no chance to linger. Acting on his direct targeting coordinates, the strike vessels holding in low orbit brought down the fires of annihilation.
Blinding lance beams punched through the heavy cloud cover like divine punishment and struck the ruins of the dispatch hub with absolute precision.
Temperatures measured in tens of thousands of degrees burned through the surface in a handful of breaths. The deafening roar and the violent shuddering of the ground that accompanied it lasted long enough for everyone on the surface to understand what was happening. When the shaking stopped, that entire complex of structures, along with the alien tunnel network winding beneath it, had collapsed completely.
What had once been Parmenio's Munitorum hub was now a vitrified wasteland, a glowing scar in the rock still venting acrid black smoke and dark red magma.
With the death of the Genestealer Patriarch, the synaptic network that had covered the entire underground of Parmenio was severed at the root.
What came after was, for the Astartes and the Astra Militarum alike, almost absurdly straightforward.
Stripped of the Patriarch's psychic direction, the purebred Genestealers devolved in an instant from cunning and lethal assassins into animals running on nothing but instinct and hunger. They no longer sought cover. They no longer executed flanking approaches or coordinated ambushes. They threw themselves through the streets and the sewers like rabid dogs, charging at anything that moved and dying for it.
The fate of the hybrid and human-form cult members was more pitiful still.
When the psychic veil that had filtered their perception shattered, the world they had built their entire existence around underwent a transformation that broke something fundamental in them. They had knelt and prayed to their four-armed god and to the angels they believed were descending. What they saw now, with that veil stripped away, were alien creatures with chitinous shells and slavering mouths. Monsters. The salvation they had worshipped was a lie, and the lie had consumed everything they were.
The lower-tier devotees broke entirely the moment the truth became visible.
Some fell to their knees in the streets among the torn and scattered dead, wailing, and then raised their sidearms and pressed the barrels to the roofs of their own mouths.
Others dropped their weapons and stumbled toward the advancing Astartes lines, weeping, calling out their confessions, begging for surrender in the Emperor's name.
The Astartes' answer was bolt-rounds. On the soil of Ultramar, betrayal carried a single price, and there was no revision available to that tariff.
The collapse of the synaptic network from within produced chaos, infighting, and a near-unilateral slaughter that eliminated fully half the remaining enemy before Imperial forces had to fire a shot.
By the time the situation on Parmenio was entirely under control and the operation had entered its final stages, Duvette Erdmann had already led his people back aboard the Siren's Fury.
The combined inspection teams of the Adeptus Mechanicus and the Departmento Munitorum ran genetic screening across his fleet with uncompromising thoroughness. When they were finished, the fleet's purity was confirmed without qualification.
They could finally weigh anchor and set course for the true heart of the storm. Macragge.
The remaining logistics fleet in orbit above Parmenio would complete its own reorganization and follow in sequence.
Because Duvette had detonated this particular piece of rot ahead of schedule, an enormous quantity of materiel had been preserved that would otherwise have been sabotaged or destroyed. More than that, the defensive forces of Ultramar had gained preparation time that the original course of events would never have allowed them.
The reward for his intervention was proportionate to what it had prevented.
On the strength of the outstanding military merit that had saved the entirety of Parmenio, and through the absolute trust he had earned from Seventh Company Chaplain Casiel, Duvette secured for his regiment a supply allocation that would have been unimaginable under ordinary circumstances.
Eliminating the Genestealer cult on Parmenio also yielded 400 Emperor's Wrath. A windfall he had not anticipated.
When the supply manifest covering the 112th was confirmed and the materiel transferred to the lower decks, its quality sat comfortably alongside the most elite Astra Militarum formations in the galaxy.
In terms of heavy armour, they effectively absorbed the full complement of an armoured regiment. Dozens of brand-new Leman Russ main battle tanks were delivered into the Siren's Fury's lower cargo holds by heavy tractor-servitors, followed by large numbers of Chimera armoured personnel carriers and Sentinel scout walkers for flank reconnaissance.
In the space of a very short time, the 112th had been transformed into a fully mechanized heavy assault formation.
Whether it was a brutal open-ground engagement or the grinding attrition of a defended line, those armoured hulls and the treads beneath them would push the regiment's survival odds upward in ways nothing else could match.
On the individual equipment side, Parmenio's armoury opened its doors with equal generosity.
For the hundred veterans of his core First Company, Duvette secured a quantity of carapace armour and a consignment of hellguns, the heavy variant requiring external high-energy power packs. For the regiment's ordinary infantry, every ageing lasgun was retired and replaced with the Triplex Phall-pattern lasrifle: higher power output, greater firing mode flexibility, and a weapon the soldiers had earned the right to carry.
The return to the ship fully laden ignited the entire lower deck.
When the regiment learned what they had been allocated, the 112th fell into a celebration that had no precedent in the formation's history. For soldiers who had spent their careers in the mud with whatever materiel the Departmento Munitorum had seen fit to leave over from more important assignments, this was a scale of equipment that belonged to a different reality. It was not only the firepower. It was the recognition that their odds of surviving the meatgrinder ahead had increased in a real and concrete way.
The noise filled every compartment of the lower deck.
Duvette Erdmann leaned against the cold metal frame of the corridor entrance and watched all of it without expression.
He made no move to quiet them.
Let them have this, he thought. Before the fighting truly began, a confidence built on solid firepower was exactly the kind of thing that would hold a regiment together when the alternative was coming apart. When the genuine nature of the combat became impossible to ignore, it would be early enough to face it then. For now, let them celebrate what they had earned.
He watched the celebration a moment longer, then something resolved in his mind. He straightened, turned away from the noise, and walked to the separate cabin where Evan and Lena were quartered.
The metal door slid open.
Evan was sorting through his kit, his expression focused. Lena sat quietly on the bunk beside him. The small girl was still, her hands folded in her lap, saying nothing.
Duvette walked in and let his gaze rest on both of them for a moment. He had come for a matter of the highest importance, and he intended to address it directly.
"Commissar." Evan straightened immediately and came to attention.
Duvette waved a hand, gesturing him to stand easy, and then let the seriousness of what he needed to say come through clearly.
"In the battle ahead at Macragge, the void fighting will be extraordinarily brutal." He put the reality of it in front of his adjutant without softening it. "The Tyranid bio-fleet is on a scale none of you have the frame of reference to imagine yet. When the engagement begins, even the heaviest-armoured battleships in the fleet will be torn open like they are made of paper under sustained acid and spore mine bombardment. A troopship like the Siren's Fury, in that kind of orbital meatgrinder, has no guarantee of surviving."
He paused. His gaze moved to Lena on the bunk.
"Keeping Lena aboard means leaving her in a steel coffin that could come apart around her at any moment. Taking her to the surface looks equally dangerous at a glance. But under the circumstances, it is the best option available."
Duvette walked Evan through the plan in full.
Once the fleet reached Macragge's close orbit, he would use his current authority to authorize Evan to lead a fully-armed escort detail to the surface. Their destination: the large underground fortress complexes built into the equatorial bedrock.
"In the Tyranid ground assault, many of the major equatorial cities and fortresses held on until the very end, sheltered by the depth of the rock strata beneath them." Duvette's tone carried the absolute certainty of a man who had already seen the outcome. "Down there, tens of millions of mortal auxiliary troops will be holding the line. The numbers and the fortifications together mean the swarm will require an enormous amount of time to consume the surface entirely. Your survival chances in an underground fortress are considerably better than they would be aboard any ship in orbit."
Evan went quiet when Duvette finished.
A moment passed. Then he raised his head, met Duvette's eyes, and gave a single firm nod.
Duvette said nothing more. He stepped forward, reached out with his gloved hand, and rested it gently on Lena's head, his fingers settling for a moment in the soft warmth of her hair. The small girl looked up at him with eyes that held an absolute and uncomplicated trust, the kind that belonged to a child who had decided that this cold, demanding man would not let her come to harm.
Duvette felt the faint warmth through the leather of his glove, and the quiet concern inside him did not decrease by a single degree.
The most dangerous question was one he had no answer to yet. When the Shadow of the Great Devourer fully descended on Macragge, when it suppressed every astropathic channel and warped the space around the planet and drove its suffocating psychic weight into every mind within its reach, would a child this young be able to withstand it? That soundless, sourceless despair and madness that worked directly on the soul, bypassing every rational defense the mind could build?
He looked at her trusting eyes and said nothing. He withdrew his hand, turned, and walked out of the cabin.
Moving through the cold corridor of the warship, his mind was already working through the next problem.
He needed to make a personal visit to the ship's medicae stores. He needed to use his authority to requisition, in advance, a supply of military-grade nerve suppressants and high-potency sedatives.
It was a harsh thing to contemplate. But against the creeping assault of the Shadow in the Warp, it was the most effective protection available. If that unnameable darkness closed around her and she began to break, administering the medication by force and dropping her into a deep physical unconsciousness was an infinitely better outcome than watching the fear consume her from the inside.
That was the calculation, and he had reached it without flinching. The math was not comfortable, but the math was correct.