Chapter 78: The Ambush
In the long days that followed, Cold Steel Ridge settled into a suffocating and merciless cycle.
Tyranid spore pods came down from the sky in a continuous rain. The organisms they released hit the defensive fire and kept advancing. The Imperial line responded with the mechanical regularity of a siege engine that had been running so long the crew had stopped thinking about it.
Inside the enormous military-industrial complex built into the mountain behind the position, a stockpile of ammunition that would have supplied an Imperial defense force for years was approaching its bottom. Nearly a month of this kind of fighting had managed that.
The heavy artillery batteries at the rear and the surface-facing guns of the polar fortress complexes had ploughed through the ice plain and the mountain valleys in front of them more times than anyone had kept count of. Large-caliber high-explosive shells threw shattered alien organism fragments dozens of meters into the air, mixed in with frozen soil and ice, raining down across the white landscape in a continuous organic debris field.
The scale of the enemy's numbers sat beyond anything mortal arithmetic was built to hold.
The unceasing thunder of heavy weapons that had been going for nearly a month, the stench of propellant that had embedded itself in every nasal passage and refused to leave, the particular organic reek of the swarm on the wind, the knowledge that the Tyranid tide in front of them had not reduced by any measurable degree and would not stop until one side was no longer functional: all of it had ground the Imperial defenders in other sectors down to something that was not quite soldiers anymore. They were hollow-eyed, their bodies reduced to performing the mechanical loop of trigger, reload, fire, trigger again, without the cognition behind it that made the difference between a fighting unit and a spent one.
On this stretch of the defense, the 112th remained functional.
The System's Veteran's Frame was doing precisely the work it had been designed to do. The regiment's physical output and psychological resilience had held through the kind of sustained, remorseless engagement that would have broken any unit without that particular advantage behind it. Where other formations had been reduced to reflex alone, the 112th still had soldiers with working tactical awareness.
Duvette had also been running Focused Volley during the high-intensity phases.
Under that ability, the accuracy and lethality of more than a hundred Leman Russ main guns had been elevated substantially above their already considerable baseline. Combined with the Pride of Hera's main weapon covering from the adjacent bridgehead to the left, the two fire zones interlocked in front of the position and created a corridor of death that looked, to any ordinary Guardsman watching it, like something that could not be broken.
That appearance had generated a confidence in the 112th's soldiers that Duvette found deeply uncomfortable.
Stroud had started betting against the heavy weapons crew on kill counts. Actual wagers, with deadlines.
"See that Hormagaunt with half its skull gone? That one's mine!" Stroud's voice came through the channel with the easy humor of a man who had momentarily forgotten what he was looking at.
Duvette shut it down immediately. The reprimand came across the channel in a tone that left no doubt about the weight behind it, and it put out the levity the way cold water puts out a small fire.
He needed them sharp, because he understood what the Hive Tyrant was doing.
He watched the swarm with cold attention.
The organisms driving into the defensive line in these weeks had been almost entirely Termagants and Hormagaunts, creatures roughly the size of a large dog, carrying their biological weapons at the front of massed charges. Occasional Tyranid Warriors appeared among the swarm as Synapse nodes, slightly larger, their role to maintain and extend the hive mind's control over the lesser organisms, but every time one surfaced it was concentrated on and eliminated quickly.
What had not appeared were the organisms capable of actually breaking a fortified position.
The Zoanthropes, which carried psychic firepower. The Carnifexes, living battering rams armored well enough to shrug off heavy weapons and built to breach. The Biovores providing heavy suppression at range. The bio-plasma variants capable of putting fire into hardened positions. These were the organisms that destroyed lines. They had not been committed.
The Hive Tyrant was rationing them deliberately. Lower-grade organisms as expendable tools to drain ammunition stockpiles over weeks of attrition, waiting for the precisely calculated moment when the heavy organisms could be unleashed against a defense that had spent its best resources fighting shadows.
And underneath all of this, the most lethal variable of all: the Raveners.
Duvette had not relaxed his watch on the underground for a single hour since the battle began. He knew what his position meant strategically. His was the steel pin. As long as it held, this section of the line held with it.
During one of the swarm's assaults, the situation changed without warning.
From somewhere far across the front, a sound arrived that had a different quality to it: sharp, sustained, high enough to register in the body before the mind had categorized it. Something was incoming and it was not another charge.
Duvette's expression changed. He hit the all-channels broadcast at full volume.
"All personnel find immediate cover! Clear all open ground! Moveâ€""
He never finished the order.
The sky above the position lit up in a wash of acid green. Bio-plasma came down in a curtain, each impact burning through solid material on contact, concrete and plasteel beginning to bubble at the point where the plasma struck. The emplacements that had held through weeks of conventional assault began to dissolve.
The command channel carried the first screams from within the 112th's ranks. Soldiers who had not reached cover in time took bio-plasma splash across their carapace armour, the material burning through as if it were not there.
The swarm's patience had finally ended.
On the distant ridge line, emerging through the drifting smoke, the first heavy Tyranid organisms appeared. Carnifexes, their layered chitinous plating making them resemble mobile fortresses, produced a roar that traveled through the ground.
"This is the 112th Regiment, Colonel-Commissar Duvette, requesting immediate heavy fire support on the forward ridge line, repeatâ€"" He was already calling for rear-area fire even as he switched channels. "Kleist! Finn! Anderson! Heavy weapons onto the large organisms! Right now!"
The front was in the controlled chaos of adapting to a threat that had changed classification.
Then Duvette's eyes snapped to the Strategic Display.
The image he found there drove his pupils down to points.
A cluster of red contacts had appeared on the map without any preceding movement trace. No approach from the perimeter. They had materialized directly beneath the floor of the Pride of Hera's adjacent bridgehead, and they were expanding upward at a speed that matched nothing except organisms moving through solid rock.
The Raveners had arrived. They were already underneath the Shadowsword.
"112th to Pride of Hera! Check your foundation! Move the vehicle, move it now!" He was shouting into the friendly channel before the thought had fully formed.
He already knew the Shadowsword could not relocate in the seconds available to it.
Duvette spun and grabbed Stroud by the arm.
"Take an elite section and the melta charges from the stores. Get to the coordinates I am about to give you." His eyes carried only the cold calculation of a man who has already committed to an outcome and is working through the mechanics. "Set the charges and hold for my detonation order. Move."
What he intended: a deliberate, forced collapse of the terrain on that section of the left flank. Bring the ground down on top of the Raveners before they broke the surface. Bury the ambush in the canyon beneath it along with everyone who had planned it.
He released Stroud and raised the vox unit.
"This is the 112th Regiment. Colonel-Commissar Duvette. Emergency communication request for direct contact with Chapter Master Calgar."