REVIEWS AND POWERSTONES PLSSS!!!!!REVIEWS AND POWERSTONES PLSSS!!!!!REVIEWS AND POWERSTONES PLSSS!!!!!Chapter 75: Cold Steel Ridge
The heavy-lift landing craft came down hard against the frozen ground platform, its retro-thrusters producing a deafening roar of displaced air as the massive airframe shuddered into stillness.
The acrid stench of promethium exhaust and the enormous pressure release of the hydraulic cargo doors followed in quick succession. Duvette Erdmann led his fully mechanized 112th Regiment out onto Macragge's polar defense line.
For Duvette and the entire Imperial garrison, the one piece of genuinely good news was that the Shadow of the Great Devourer had not yet reached this planet's close orbit. The phenomenon that silenced astropathic communication and drove psykers to bleeding from every orifice had not closed to this range. The sky was overcast and grey, but the vox channels were still carrying clear tactical traffic between units, and the auspex arrays had not yet been drowned in static.
The bad news was written on the deployment orders that the Departmento Munitorum and the Astartes command structure had issued jointly. Their assigned position was stated without ambiguity.
Cold Steel Ridge.
The 112th Armoured Infantry Regiment had halted in a large bridgehead position on the left flank of Cold Steel Ridge. The staging ground had been carved out of the terrain by human hands: thick steel grids and dense poured ferrocrete formed a surface capable of bearing the weight of a hundred heavy tanks without giving way. The ground here sat marginally higher than the surrounding terrain, creating a natural elevated fire platform.
The defensive line in front of them was nothing more than a low blast wall, barely chest height. The polar wind came off the ridge unimpeded, carrying ice fragments sharp enough to cut, dragging across the open ground and striking the soldiers' carapace armour and the tanks' plating with a sound like metal being filed down to nothing.
Around their position, the defensive works were built to a different scale entirely. Continuous fortifications cast from thick ferrocrete and plasteel pressed deep into the bedrock, their firing slits narrow enough to make a meaningful target impossible to acquire. Further back, a massive military-industrial facility had been built directly into the face of a mountain, indistinguishable from the rock it occupied. The complex served as both logistics hub and anti-aircraft fortress. Anti-air batteries covered every surface approach from the rooftops, the Icarus-pattern quad-lascannon arrays densest of all: four-barrelled automated mounts pointed skyward at every angle, ready to shred any aerial organism that attempted an approach.
By every measure, this looked like a position that could not be taken.
Duvette knew with complete certainty that in the original timeline, it fell anyway.
He paid no attention to the noise behind him as the drivers worked their Chimeras and Leman Russes into their designated fighting positions. He walked alone to the forward edge of the bridgehead, stood behind the blast wall at the ridge line, and raised his tactical monocular.
Following the ridge line outward, the view resolved into an endless saw-toothed range of frozen mountains. The peaks were connected only by precarious ice-shelf bridges and ancient industrial suspension spans. Below them, crevasses and glacial fissures dropped away into depths that could not be estimated. The landscape here was the work of geological forces applied without mercy or purpose. It constituted a dead ground that no conventional formation could cross in good order.
This extreme terrain was precisely what constrained the Tyranid swarm's advance. From a strategic standpoint, Cold Steel Ridge was the only passage through the polar mountain range capable of accepting a large force. It was the throat of the approach, the final natural barrier protecting the polar fortress complexes.
Duvette understood exactly what this ground meant in the history that had already been written.
This was not merely a meatgrinder. This was the precise location where Chapter Master Marneus Calgar and the Tyranid Hive Tyrant engaged in their legendary single combat, a confrontation that ended with Calgar losing both arms and being carried from the field at the edge of death. The Honor Guard of the Ultramarines, his personal company, was effectively annihilated protecting him.
Duvette lowered the monocular slowly. The breath he let out was a long white plume, torn apart instantly by the polar wind.
Utterly grim, he thought, and said nothing else.
He checked his panel.
[Current Command Authority: Ash Watchers-Eisenmark 112th Armoured Infantry Regiment]
[Total Strength: 3,000 (all personnel included)]
[Heavy Vehicles: 35 Leman Russ main battle tanks, 20 Chimera armoured personnel carriers, 5 Hydra Flak Tanks, 2 Trojan support vehicles, 50 Mars-pattern Sentinel walkers] [Experience: Elite (0%)]
[Overall Supply: 100%] [Overall Loyalty: 100%] [Overall Morale: 100%] [Overall Sanity: 100%] [Chaos Corruption: 0%]
[Passive bonuses held: Steel Ring (Intermediate), Forced March (Beginner), Indomitable, Threat Sense (Beginner), Veteran's Frame (Beginner)]
[Active skills held: Focused Volley (Level 2), Emperor's Gaze (Beginner), Silence, Burn the Boats, Overload Drain (Level 1), Limiter Break (Beginner)]
He turned and looked back at the drivers still working to reverse the Chimeras and Leman Russes into their revetment pits, and his expression did not improve.
In terrain this confined, between the bridgehead walls and the canyon approaches, the tanks could not maneuver. There was no room to build any kind of offensive momentum. Every one of those vehicles was going to spend the battle with its dozer blade lowered, operating as nothing more than a fixed pillbox. Their mobility, the factor that made armour worth deploying in the first place, had been erased by the geography before a single shot was fired.
His mind went back to what had happened before the landing.
They had been delivered here directly from orbit aboard heavy transport landers. The tactical situation had deteriorated fast enough that there had been no time to pass through the orbital port for proper reorganization. Whatever preparations remained were being made now, on this frozen ridge, in sub-zero wind.
But before any of that, Duvette had completed the arrangement that mattered most to him personally.
He had not brought Evan or Lena to this place.
Using his authority as Colonel-Commissar, he had arranged for Evan to attach to another regiment being deployed to the equatorial capital of Macragge City, assigned to garrison Hera Fortress. The arrangement had cost him nothing except the offer of a favor owed. In wartime, a Colonel-Commissar with a premium supply rating and an elite formation behind him was a political asset worth something to the right counterpart. The other commander had agreed without hesitation and folded Evan and Lena into his logistics column on the spot.
At the moment of parting, Duvette's expression had been exactly what anyone familiar with him would have expected.
He had pressed a military medical kit into Evan's hands. It contained the full stock of high-concentration nerve suppressants and strong sedatives that he had requisitioned from the Siren's Fury's medicae stores.
He had not offered the boy many comforting words. What he had offered instead was a direct instruction, in a tone that left no room for negotiation.
"Remember what I am telling you. When the Shadow of the Great Devourer descends, if your sister shows any sign of losing control, any screaming or precognitive surge, do not wait and do not hope for the best. Administer the medication immediately."
Evan had gripped the medical kit tightly against his chest. He had looked at Duvette for a long moment, then given a deliberate and unambiguous nod.
After that he had taken Lena's hand, and together with the small escort detail from the 112th, had walked up the ramp of the transport craft headed for the equatorial capital.
The polar wind sent a sting of ice fragments across Duvette's face, bringing him sharply back to the present. He shook his head hard, driving the image of those two out of his thoughts. This was not the moment for that kind of distraction.
The current situation remained stable. Calgar should still be aboard his flagship in orbit, coordinating the defense network across the entire star system. The Tyranid bio-fleet was closing the distance, but the main aerial assault had not yet materialized. There was still time, however little of it.
On the main defense line of Cold Steel Ridge, beyond the vast numbers of Ultramar auxiliary troops holding the fortifications, the element anchoring the position as its irreplaceable core was the formation Duvette had briefly encountered on Parmenio: the Ultramarines 2nd Company.
He could see the blue-armoured figures in the distance, positioning heavy bolters and plasma guns across the high ground. His eyes tracked the movement and a name surfaced in his memory without prompting.
So Titus was part of this battle as well. That explained certain things.
He lowered his gaze from the 2nd Company's positions and moved it approximately two kilometers to the left, where a second independent bridgehead position occupied a section of the ridge wider than the one the 112th currently held.
Through the tactical monocular, at the center of that bridgehead, he found what he was looking for.
A machine that resembled a moving mountain of steel. The Shadowsword super-heavy tank designated Pride of Hera sat with its main gun elevated, the bore diameter of that weapon a dimension that made the stomach tighten to look at directly. It was a sleeping iron colossus, presently inert, and the ground around it made very clear what it was capable of.
A substantial force of Ultramar auxiliary troops had deployed around the Shadowsword's hull, using the armour's flanks as a wall-equivalent to anchor a ring of defensive positions. The thickness of that armour could absorb weapons that would obliterate anything lighter.
Duvette's expression went very still.
In the timeline as it had originally occurred, the Hive Tyrant directing this sector's assault had sent Raveners boring through the frozen bedrock and the permafrost beneath Cold Steel Ridge's surface. The burrowing organisms had bypassed the Shadowsword's frontal armour entirely, the plate that could absorb a Titan's main gun, and had broken up through the floor of the bridgehead directly beneath the vehicle. In the close-quarters carnage of an underground ambush with no warning and no room to respond, the Pride of Hera had been torn apart. The detonation when its ammunition cooked off had consumed the surrounding auxiliary troops as well. What remained of that bridgehead had been a black scar in the ice.
That was the original outcome.
But Duvette was here now.
He could track every Ravener in real time through the Strategic Display. He could call the targeting coordinates before they broke the surface. Concentrated artillery fire, or thermite charges driven into the ice above their approach routes, would meet any burrowing force before it reached the vehicle's kill range. The Pride of Hera could be kept intact. With that Shadowsword operational and anchoring the left flank's fire network, the defensive line would hold a support pillar it had never possessed in the original engagement. And some portion of those auxiliary troops being spent as a static cordon around it might, through no expectation of their own, survive a battle that had originally offered them no such outcome.
"Commissar."
A steady measured tread came up behind him, pulling him back.
Duvette turned.
Major Dylan was approaching. A thin rime of frost had already settled across the shoulders of his carapace armour. He stood straight, and the look in his eyes held the particular combination of tension and resolve that the hours immediately before a major engagement tended to produce.
"All companies confirmed ready." Dylan raised his voice against the wind. "Tank treads locked. Dozer blades lowered. Heavy weapons teams in position in their emplacements."
"Good." Duvette's expression settled back into the cold composure that a commissar's bearing required.
He straightened the collar of his greatcoat and let his gaze travel one more time across the line of tank barrels pointing outward through the bitter air, each one carrying a different weight of killing potential.
"Summon all officers to the command post." His voice was level and carried. "Final operational planning. After that, make ready for what is coming."
He paused for the length of a breath.
"Prepare yourselves for hell."
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