Chapter 79: Altering the Course of History
The Cold Steel Ridge command center sat deep inside the mountain, buried in solid rock behind walls of thick plasteel. The polar wind and most of the detonations outside were reduced to a muffled background by the material between them and the world, but the vibration of continuous heavy impacts still traveled up through the floor without interruption.
Chapter Master Marneus Calgar stood before the hololithic tactical display like a feature of the room. His gaze moved across the disposition markers with the stillness of a mind processing faster than the display could update. The green projection light threw shadows across a face that had seen enough battles to stop reacting to what battles looked like.
The red enemy contact markers across the display were advancing at a rate that had not been present earlier in the engagement. Around him, the mortal officers assigned to sector monitoring were working their vox units at full volume. Several of them lost control of their composure at the same moment and turned toward the Chapter Master.
"Lord Calgar! The 133rd Ultramar Auxiliary Infantry Regiment on the right sector is requesting emergency fire support! Their forward line is nearly through!"
"Sir! Colonel-Commissar Duvette of the 112th Mechanized Armoured Regiment on the left is also requesting fire support! Heavy organisms are pressing the bridgehead!"
"Pressure increasing across all defensive sectors! Casualty data coming in now!"
The reports overlapped each other. On the face of the most experienced commander in this engagement, there was no panic. But the heavy line between his brows deepened.
Through the tactical data the display was providing, Calgar had already identified what he was looking at. For the past month, the massed charges of Termagants and Hormagaunts had not been intended to break anything. They had been inventory management. The Imperial ammunition stockpiles and the mortal defenders' endurance had been the real targets. Now that work was done, and the organisms that could actually destroy a fortified position were being committed.
The Tyranid swarm was closing its fist.
"Issue the following orders." Calgar's voice settled the room.
"Rear artillery batteries to recalibrate their coordinates and lay suppressive fire across the sectors under pressure. Simultaneously, the 2nd Company will detach tactical squads for immediate reinforcement of the critical nodes closest to collapse."
He was still working through the dispositions when the comms officer assigned to priority channels rose from his station.
"My lord. Colonel-Commissar Duvette of the 112th Regiment is requesting emergency communication."
The name arrived in Calgar's cognition and resolved in the same moment. The Chaplain's introduction. A full complement of heavy armour. The commander positioned on the left flank covering the super-heavy tank. His modified mind had assembled the complete picture before the officer had finished speaking.
"Patch it through."
The channel opened, and the amplifier above the hololithic table filled the command center with what was happening on the left flank: continuous weapons fire, the layered alien shrieking of Tyranid organisms, static interference cutting across it all. Then a voice came through the noise. Steady. Clear. Not wasting a syllable.
"Lord Calgar. This is Colonel-Commissar Duvette of the 112th Regiment."
No preamble.
"Our reconnaissance assets have detected a large number of Tyranid burrowing organisms in this sector. Instrument readings from beneath the Pride of Hera's position are showing severe vibration of unknown origin."
"I am requesting heavy fire support on the approach vector. Additionally, I want authorization to use melta charges to destroy the platform supporting this section of the position. The intention is to collapse it and bury them before they breach the surface. Request approval."
The tactical picture on Calgar's display sharpened as he processed the incoming data. His eyes moved to the large bridgehead platform on the left flank of the hololithic map.
The Space Marine's mind ran the calculation at a speed no mortal could match. The Shadowsword's extraction route. The structural load distribution of the main defense line. The change in defensive sightlines that a terrain collapse would produce. Dozens of interdependent variables resolved sequentially in the time it took to draw a breath.
The outer platform could be destroyed without compromising the structural integrity of the main line. The consequences were acceptable.
"Your tactical assessment is approved, Commissar Duvette." Calgar's voice carried the weight of someone who has held command authority for long enough that decisions have stopped feeling heavy. "I will order the Pride of Hera to withdraw to the safe zone behind the main line immediately. I will also send Sergeant Titus of the 2nd Company with two tactical squads to reinforce your position. Hold what you have."
"Understood. Thank you for your support."
The channel closed.
-----
Duvette let out a long, slow breath.
Calgar had approved the plan. That meant the window he needed was open. What remained was a race against the clock and nothing else.
He stood beside the command vehicle with his eyes locked on the Strategic Display only he could see. In the depths of the map, the red contacts representing the Tyranid Raveners were pressing upward through the bedrock at a speed that communicated nothing except intent.
Stroud had already made it to the designated coordinates with his elite section. Duvette had confirmation via vox: the melta bombs were placed precisely against the load points of the primary plasteel support columns bearing the protruding platform, and the remote detonation codes were set.
At the same moment, the Pride of Hera, now receiving Calgar's direct order, began to move. The Shadowsword produced a heavy grinding of metal under enormous tension as hundreds of tonnes of war machine engaged full reverse thrust. The treads cut deep channels into the frozen soil as the vehicle pulled back from the platform, and the Ultramar auxiliary troops deployed around its flanks moved with it, pulling toward the safe zone behind the main line.
The gap in the fire coverage that the Shadowsword's departure opened was immediate and dangerous.
"All 112th artillery units, close the left fire corridor!" Duvette's order went out at once. "Rear battery group, lay suppressive fire forward of the Pride of Hera's withdrawal route!"
He watched the Strategic Display. The Raveners were still coming.
As soon as the Shadowsword had cleared the blast perimeter and the 112th's soldiers and Leman Russ tanks at the platform's edge had shifted to the rock foundation on the right, Duvette locked his eyes on the display.
The red contact filled the surface boundary and stopped moving.
The ground ahead began to deform. Thick cracks spread across the ferrocrete platform like a web under sudden load, fracture lines running outward from a central point. Through the bedrock, the alien screeching was now audible without any instrument, pressing up through the stone directly into the ear.
The breach was a fraction of a second away.
"Detonate."
The melta bombs gave no warning. The shaped high-energy release detonated underground in the same moment the order arrived, temperatures measured in tens of thousands of degrees severing the primary support columns in less than a tenth of a second. The material did not fail. It ceased to exist.
Without the columns, the combined mass of the concrete platform and the rock it sat on had nowhere to go except where gravity intended.
The sound the collapse made was not an explosion. It was something lower and more final than that: the sound of a structure surrendering to its own weight over a deep void. Dozens of metres of platform and foundation fractured from the center outward and fell.
At the precise moment the surface gave way, a dozen Raveners had bitten through the last layer of rock. They were large and fast and covered in rending claws and not one of them had time to register what had happened to the ground beneath them. The burrowing mass driving upward behind them had no time either. The platform, the rock, the Raveners, the organisms still burrowing, all of it went down together into the glacial canyon below, which was deep enough that the bottom was not visible from the edge.
The collapse triggered a localized avalanche. The extended platform section split cleanly at the fracture point and followed everything else into the void. Debris, structural rebar, ferrocrete fragments, and the churning remains of organisms that had been seconds from breaching the surface scattered outward and down into the darkness below.
Dust and ice fragments billowed up and outward in the polar wind.
Duvette had prevented what had happened in the original timeline: the Ravener breach, the destruction of the Pride of Hera, and the loss of the left flank.
He walked to the edge of what remained and looked.
To the left, where the platform had extended, there was now open air above a canyon drop. The mountain face hung exposed. The defensive line, which had been continuous, had changed shape around the gap the collapse had created.
The 112th's bridgehead, which had sat alongside the Pride of Hera's position and been covered on its left by that vehicle's enormous hull, now jutted outward over the void like a solitary cliff edge. The Shadowsword's hull was gone. The left flank was fully exposed.
This salient, protruding forward and isolated on one side, had just become the most obvious point of pressure in this section of the line. The Tyranid swarm would read it as the breakthrough opportunity. The defensive load on the 112th's position was going to increase at a rate that did not have a simple number attached to it.
The polar wind cut across Duvette's face and caught the hem of his black greatcoat.
He did not know whether what he felt in that moment was excitement at having bent a major historical event out of its original shape, or simply the particular sensation of being surrounded on all sides with nowhere to fall back to. Whatever it was, it produced a smile. Not a reassuring smile. The reckless, defiant kind.
He raised his head and looked directly at the Tyranid heavy organisms still driving toward the bridge in the distance.
"Come on then. Let's see what else you have."
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