Chapter 81: Dealing with the Lictor
Less than a few minutes had passed since the end of that brief, urgent exchange on the channel.
Then the weight of heavy footsteps arrived, and Sergeant Titus came at pace through the fire and the blowing snow with two fully armed Ultramarines at his shoulders.
"Commissar. Where is it?" The moment Titus came to a halt, his steady voice carried out through his helm's external amplifier.
He asked the question while raising his massive boltgun and making a brief sweep of the surroundings through his helm's tactical visor.
The bridgehead position around them held nothing but Guardsmen in the process of reloading and the continuous roar of tanks. Within his visual field, Titus found nothing that qualified as a target.
"It is an exceptionally patient hunter. By now it has almost certainly found a blind spot somewhere nearby and gone still. It is watching from the shadow, waiting for me to expose something fatal." Duvette kept his gaze forward, one hand resting on the hilt of his chainsword, tracking the red contact at the edge of his Strategic Display without appearing to. His voice was low. "Battle-Brother."
"With respect, Commissar, we cannot afford to leave Astartes assets committed to open-ended—"
Titus had barely begun when Duvette's expression shifted. His pupils contracted.
Titus needed no verbal warning. Whatever had crossed the mortal's face communicated everything. He and both Ultramarines turned in the same instant, boltguns coming up, muzzles locking onto the apparently empty rock face behind them.
No hesitation. Three Astartes and one Commissar fired simultaneously. The detonations hammered the rock face and the air around it with concentrated weight.
The rock face produced a sound that had nothing to do with rock. A harsh, rasping shriek, the kind that drove directly through the eardrums, broke from somewhere in the impact zone. The air around it twisted like disturbed water. A hunched silhouette became briefly visible in the fire-flash, enormous scythe-bladed forelimbs, segmented carapace that had been bending light around itself. Where explosive fragments had grazed the optical camouflage surface, a few drops of body fluid seeped through.
Before they could adjust aim and finish it, the Lictor moved. Its predator instinct overrode the pain in a fraction of a second and it was simply gone, dissolving into deeper shadow with the fluid speed of something that had never believed in fair exchanges.
Duvette looked at the rock face, now containing only craters, and allowed himself a brief moment of honest frustration. He turned back to Titus.
"Exactly like that. Its optical camouflage and mobility both exceed any conventional organism. It will not expose its position again voluntarily, not until it is certain it can kill me in a single committed strike."
"Then what is your plan?" Titus set his boltgun at rest. The crimson eye lenses of his helm regarded the mortal Commissar.
"I become the bait." Duvette stated it with the calm of a man announcing a logistical arrangement. "I face it alone. What I need from you is this: take your two battle-brothers and visibly return to the main line. One of you turns back partway, unseen, and takes a concealed position covering me. When it commits to the killing strike and fully breaks its camouflage to do it, you eliminate it."
"You are certain about this, Commissar?" Titus held on him with his visor, his register carrying genuine weight to it.
Whatever he found in Duvette's eyes resolved the question. Titus gave a single nod and said nothing more.
"You two return to the front line and reinforce the main engagement." He turned to the two battle-brothers behind him and gave the order with the finality that Astartes command structure produced. "I stay here and handle this."
The three of them moved out, their footfalls heavy in the churned ice and mud. Both battle-brothers returned to the fighting without looking back. Titus walked to the midpoint of a sightline break, slipped into a prepared position with a speed that left no trace, and went entirely still.
Time bled slowly out through the noise of artillery and the distant alien chorus.
Over the next several hours, Duvette staged his own diminishment.
He ordered Stroud to take an escort section and establish a patrol circuit around the command vehicle. He kept that up until well past midnight, then used the thinning fire and the need to conserve strength as justification to progressively reduce the guard count around his position. When the last sentries stood at the perimeter, he issued a clear and unambiguous order: all of them to the front line. Return to your positions. Go.
He knew what he was doing. A Lictor of this caliber, operating at this level of tactical intelligence, would almost certainly recognize the sudden and conspicuous vulnerability for precisely what it was: a trap. The invitation was too perfect to be accidental.
But Duvette did not believe it could hold against the temptation.
Because in the logic of the hive mind, the Astartes in their power armour were the direct physical threat. A mortal officer like Duvette was the brain that made the armoured regiment function as a coordinated weapon. Kill the brain and the coordination collapsed. The calculation was clean and the prize was real.
Duvette stood alone beside the command vehicle, still as a man with nothing on his mind, facing away from the direction the contact had last appeared.
In a half-buried ferrocrete emplacement not far away, Titus was something that could have been mistaken for part of the wall. He had dropped his power armour into silent running mode to achieve perfect concealment. The surrounding cacophony of heavy guns and alien shrieks covered every minor sound. Nothing moved. Nothing breathed loudly enough to register.
Then the red contact on the Strategic Display accelerated.
It was moving toward the command vehicle from the left, on a line that was calculated and exact, the approach route of something that had done this before and did it very well.
"It's coming." Duvette put it into the short-range channel in a single short phrase.
The Lictor covered the distance in complete silence. The fire bursts that flickered across the position at intervals revealed nothing of its passage. Not a disturbance in the snow. Not a displaced shadow. A standard Astartes standing here would not necessarily have detected it by ear or eye alone.
What Duvette had was the Strategic Display.
His gloved hand tightened around the chainsword's hilt. His posture gave away nothing. He activated Limiter Break, turning his full attention to the space behind him.
The Lictor's shriek announced its strike a fraction of a second before impact. It came over Duvette's shoulder from behind, its massive bone sickles descending on a line that would have taken him through the torso.
Duvette did not turn. He drove both legs into the ground and threw himself forward with everything the skill had given his body, hitting the churned mud below at full extension.
The sickles sheared through the air above him. Close enough to hear.
The Lictor came down from its leap and landed behind him. For one moment the shock of a missed kill registered in its compound eyes. Its assassin instinct immediately calculated that the window was closing and started the process of re-engaging its optical camouflage to pull back and reset.
Duvette had not come this far with this much riding on it to let that happen.
He rolled with the fall and came back to his feet in one motion. He drove forward with a shout and swung the chainsword into the partially-transparent shape that was still recovering its footing, the motorized teeth screaming against alien carapace.
The blade bit through. The sound it made was horrible. Body fluid fountained outward and across the Lictor's surface, and where the hot liquid touched the optical camouflage cells it destroyed them, bringing the Lictor's full silhouette into visibility against the dark.
Pain converted into fury. The Lictor abandoned its withdrawal. It let out a sound like tearing metal, swung a bone sickle at Duvette's skull with the force that material built to split ceramite delivered without reservation.
There was no avoiding it at that range. Duvette clamped his teeth and forced every remaining unit of strength the skill had given him into rotating the chainsword's flat against the incoming blow.
The impact of blade meeting sickle produced a sound that made the back teeth ache. The Lictor's physical output was not something a mortal frame, even a System-enhanced one, could meet symmetrically. The chainsword's body bent at an angle that should not have been possible and the motor screamed. The force of the impact drove Duvette's hands down so hard that both his palms split along the grip, blood coming fast, and put him down on one knee in the frozen soil with the bones of his arms registering something that might have been beyond strain.
He had one breath of air remaining.
"TITUS!"
The static running mode disengaged in one instant. Titus came out of the emplacement's shadow at a dead run, moving with the momentum of several tonnes of power armour and Astartes physiology at full output, and drove that mass directly into the Lictor from behind.
He did not fire. He hit it.
The impact was the sound of a vehicle collision. The Lictor's body went sideways with the physics of it and landed hard several meters away. It pushed back to its feet and reached instinctively for its camouflage cells.
Titus crossed the distance in three strides, raised one power-armoured boot, and brought it down onto the Lictor's chest with enough force to crack the rock beneath. The sound of the alien's internal structure failing was audible over the surrounding noise. The Lictor was held there.
Duvette drew his bolt pistol and walked forward. He emptied the full magazine into the Lictor's skull in a sustained burst.
The detonations worked through the cranial structure from the inside. The finest assassin organism the Tyranid swarm had sent against him went still and did not move again.
Duvette stood over the enormous, damaged body and breathed. The white of each exhale was stripped away by the wind immediately.
The adrenaline was still running hard through his system, but his body had settled into the particular register of pain that follows extreme physical output. Every muscle group was registering something at once. His hands, where the grip had split both palms, had gone past sharp pain into a numbness that was almost peaceful.
The last assassination attempt before the withdrawal order, he thought. That was what this had been.
He straightened, looked past the bridgehead, across the defensive line, toward the distant horizon. In the firelight that perpetually stained the sky, the diseased green of the toxic cloud was visible. The polar wind was carrying it toward them, and it was closer than the last time he had checked.