Chapter 80: The Lictor and Titus
The lesson, Duvette had decided, was that a man should never let himself feel too clever.
Because for the past several hours, he had been regretting every thought that had passed through his mind on the subject of changing history.
Destroying the platform had broken the Ravener ambush cleanly. It had also apparently communicated to whatever intelligence was directing this assault that its most patient and precise tactical preparation had just been demolished by a mortal with melta charges. The response had been immediate, disproportionate, and thoroughly personal. The assault pressure on the 112th's salient had multiplied several times over in the space of a single hour.
The swarm pouring toward them now bore no resemblance to the previous weeks' attrition grinding. The volume of organisms was equivalent, but the composition had changed entirely. Mixed into the massed Termagants and Hormagaunts were large numbers of Carnifexes, living siege engines each as heavy and armored as a battle tank, and Tyranid Warriors operating as Synapse nodes to direct the assault with something approaching conscious tactical intent.
And from the far end of the ice bridge, the ground itself had begun to vibrate.
Through the blowing snow, the shapes that had appeared on the canyon rim were the size of small fortresses. Tyrannofexes. The monstrous organisms had driven their forelimbs into the frozen earth and braced the enormous Rupture Cannons mounted on their chest cavities, and they were now trading direct fire with the 112th's Leman Russ tanks across the full length of the bridge in a duel between Imperial heavy industry and alien biology conducted at extreme range.
The cannon fire tore through the polar wind in both directions.
The Focused Volley ability was the margin that kept this exchange from going decisively against them. Under its effect, the tank crews appeared to develop an instinct beyond what training alone produced, their armor-piercing rounds finding the gap points in Tyrannofex carapace joints with a precision that no standard gunnery calculation accounted for. In the exchange, the 112th's tanks were fractionally ahead.
Duvette knew that margin would not hold.
The bridgehead's confined terrain had converted every tank in the regiment from a mobile weapons platform into a fixed, highly visible target with no ability to maneuver. Predictable firing positions under sustained fire was a trajectory with one outcome.
The Biovores on the distant ridge were adding to it continuously. Acid-green bio-plasma came down at intervals from the mountain ridgeline, each impact burning through ceramite and ceramite-equivalent material without much difficulty. The anti-aircraft coverage from the rear could intercept a portion of it in the air, but what came through tended to find tanks instead of the open ground between them, and the crew inside had very little warning and no options when it did.
At the worst pressure points, when the swarm pushed close enough to the blast wall that the main guns were becoming an obstacle rather than a solution, Duvette was having to run Overload Drain on individual tanks in the critical gaps, burning the weapon systems out permanently to hold the line for another few minutes.
He stood beside the command vehicle, his expression providing an accurate representation of the tactical picture, and raised the tactical monocular toward the distant mountain range.
The green had spread further since the last time he had looked.
A thick, unnatural mist in a diseased shade of green had closed around the mountain peaks on the horizon and was sitting there with the patient permanence of a weather system that had decided not to move. He knew what was producing it: Venomthropes, Toxicrenes, and organisms of that class, biological toxin-production units the swarm positioned as area denial. The specific toxins these organisms generated were not filtered by standard-issue respirators with any reliability. Given sufficient concentration, the poison would work through the defenses of every mortal soldier on Cold Steel Ridge with no exceptions.
The polar wind was running north. Steadily, consistently, north.
Within a few days, that cloud would reach the 112th's position. When it did, Veteran's Frame would give his soldiers substantially better resistance to it than any other mortal force on the ridge, but they would still be fighting inside a chemical environment that was designed to kill them, against a swarm that operated in it without any discomfort at all.
The only current piece of unambiguously good news was standing in the trenches beside his soldiers.
Sergeant Titus had brought his two tactical squads through the incoming fire and cut into the position. Twenty Ultramarines in blue power armour, and the effect of their presence on the mortal troops was something no System skill Duvette had available could have replicated. The Guardsmen who had been compressing their fear for hours straightened and let out battle cries that had not been available to them five minutes earlier. Something about Astartes standing beside them turned the impossible from a weight into something that could be lifted.
When the swarm had pushed to the edge of the blast wall and the defensive line had been at the point of giving way, Titus and his squad had vaulted out of the trenches under the 112th's covering fire and driven into the organism mass without decelerating. Boltguns produced their distinctive percussive rhythm, each detonation dismantling a Tyranid organism with straightforward finality. The chainswords and power swords that followed shredded the press of alien bodies around the Astartes and kept shredding it without pause.
Stroud's voice came through the channel: even watching them work, he said, made him want to vault the wall himself and get in among the creatures with a blade. It was the most enthusiasm Stroud had directed at anything in several weeks.
Despite all of it, Duvette's tactical assessment had not changed. The salient's ammunition was draining. The pressure was increasing. The toxic cloud was arriving on schedule. Even with twenty Astartes in the trenches, the isolated position's countdown was still running. He kept his attention on the heavy threat organisms and kept directing the regiment's main guns in concentrated volleys, buying time in the only way available to him.
Then something on the Strategic Display made him narrow his eyes.
A single contact. On the left cliff face, the sheer drop that had replaced the collapsed platform. Ten o'clock position, close to a protrusion in the rock face. Moving upward. Not fast. Careful.
"Finn." He pressed the short-range channel. "Left cliff. Ten o'clock. Near the protrusion. Acquire the target. Do not fire until I give the word."
The cliff on the left had dropped hundreds of meters straight down into the canyon since the platform collapse. Nothing should have been climbing it.
He watched the red contact come over the cliff edge and move onto the platform, one careful step at a time.
He raised his eyes from the map and looked at the same location with his naked eyes.
Nothing.
No carapace. No limbs. The wind and snow were falling through that exact space without deflection, without any disturbance that would indicate a solid object.
Perfect optical invisibility.
A Lictor.
The cold that hit him then had nothing to do with the polar temperature. His back was already wet.
A Lictor received its assignments directly from the hive mind. This one had bypassed the frontal engagement entirely, climbed a sheer canyon wall under optical camouflage in the middle of a battle, and was now walking toward the command position. There was only one category of assignment that required that approach.
Decapitation strike.
"Fire."
The laser sniper rifle's beam cut the air in a single sharp line of red light. At the location where no object was visible, the air bent. A shimmer moved through it, the distortion that proximity to a monomolecular-edged object produces in a force field, and for less than a second the hard outline of alien carapace was visible before it vanished again.
The shot had not connected. The organism's reaction speed and camouflage recovery exceeded what a single sniper could manage against it. Finn's laser was not going to lock this down alone.
Duvette's mind moved quickly to the obvious solution. He picked up the Astartes tactical channel and raised his voice over the background noise of the engagement.
"Battle-Brother Titus. Our sniper unit has identified an unknown high-threat organism that has breached from the left cliff face. The target appears to be me. It is using full optical camouflage. Conventional fire cannot acquire it. I am requesting your assistance."
A brief pause on the channel.
Then Titus's voice arrived. It had the particular quality of a man who has been at war long enough that nothing a battlefield presents to him changes his fundamental register.
"Received, Commissar Duvette. I'm bringing my squad to neutralize the threat."
The kind of reply that was genuinely reassuring, Duvette thought, precisely because it contained nothing that was meant to be reassuring.
He closed the channel. His chainsword came out of its scabbard, the motor engaging with a sharp mechanical roar. The bolt pistol came up in his other hand. His eyes returned to the Strategic Display and locked on the red contact moving steadily toward him across the platform.
You came here for me. The hunter has declared itself.
The corner of Duvette's mouth pulled into a cold, thin line.
Then let me make myself easy to find.
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