Chapter 84: The Great Retreat from Cold Steel Ridge
The heavy door sealed behind Duvette as he stepped out of the council chamber, cutting off the atmosphere inside. The council was over. The fate of Cold Steel Ridge had been decided and fixed.
He started back toward his position. Along the way, mortal auxiliary troops and Guardsmen in the process of being reorganized into new formations looked up as he passed. The expressions on their faces held something between awe and envy that they had not finished concealing.
Every soldier on that ridge understood what it meant when a mortal commander was summoned directly to the Chapter Master in the middle of a battle and given an assignment. Whoever walked out of that door had been trusted with the most critical work on the ice plain.
Duvette gave none of it any attention. He walked with his head forward and his expression closed, and he covered the ground back to the 112th's bridgehead at pace.
The front line had fallen into a brief and unusual quiet as the swarm's assault pressure receded. He used it without hesitation. He triggered the internal channel's emergency assembly alarm and, once he had confirmed the line was holding, gathered every company and platoon officer in the regiment in the open, the polar wind cutting across all of them in equal measure.
Major Dylan. Kleist. Stroud. A crowd of officers around them, all carrying the smell of propellant on their carapace armour and their breath.
Duvette looked across the assembled faces and dispensed with anything that could have been interpreted as ceremony.
"High command has issued the directive. The main force is about to begin a full withdrawal. Cold Steel Ridge will be abandoned." His voice was clean against the wind. "The 112th Armoured Infantry Regiment will cover that withdrawal. We are the rearguard. We will be the last unit to leave this position."
The breathing around him changed audibly.
He waited a beat, then gave them the rest of it.
"We will not be alone. The majority of the Astartes, including Chapter Master Calgar himself, will remain here and fight beside us. We will face the swarm's primary assault force together."
He had expected a particular kind of reaction to this. A rearguard assignment in a certain-death tactical environment from which no operational plan guaranteed any exit was not generally the kind of news that produced enthusiasm.
The officers of the 112th did not produce what he expected.
After a brief silence, their faces lit up.
Not relief. Not the strained calm of men choosing to accept something unavoidable. Something much more alarming.
The Eisenmark armoured officers, in particular, looked as if they had been told something they had been waiting to be told their entire lives. The light in their eyes was the kind that belonged to men who had found something worth dying for and could not contain their reaction to finding it.
Duvette looked at those expressions and privately acknowledged that he had underestimated the place the Astartes held in these soldiers' understanding of the universe. To have seen Space Marines fighting alongside you was an honor. To be asked to stand and fight as the rearguard at the side of Marneus Calgar and the Ultramarines, the oldest and most decorated Chapter in the Imperium of Man, in what would very likely be the final stand on Cold Steel Ridge, was not a burden these soldiers were calculating how to survive. It was a gift.
Death had ceased to register as something to be feared. For the regiment of the 112th, on this ice plain, on this night, it had become the means by which something permanent was made.
---
The polar night descended as scheduled.
Duvette stood alone beside the command vehicle. In the distance the swarm continued its relentless pressure, Termagants and Hormagaunts pushing forward through their own dead in the diseased green mist, which had now advanced to approximately the midpoint of the great bridges. The artillery kept firing. Nothing about this surface picture had changed.
What had changed was the sky.
The sky had turned crimson-purple again, and Duvette knew exactly what he was looking at.
What remained of the Imperial fleet above Macragge had been ordered into close polar orbit to force open the extraction corridor. The cruisers up there were driving themselves into the teeth of the hive ships' return fire, voluntarily descending to orbital altitudes that left them exposed to concentrated bio-plasma bombardment, running their reactors past safe operational margins to generate the energy output required for a sustained macro-cannon and lance barrage.
Several orbital lance strikes came down through the upper atmosphere one after another, each one wide enough to be visible from the ground as a pillar of white-hot light. They hit the outer edge of the Tyranid swarm concentrations around Cold Steel Ridge with the force of seismic events.
At the same moment, the anti-aircraft coverage directly above the position erupted into its loudest voice of the entire engagement. Tracer rounds and anti-aircraft shells interlocked across the night sky in a continuous web of fire, tearing apart the Gargoyle formations and the drifting Spore pods attempting to press into the extraction corridor from above.
Then the transports appeared on the horizon.
Heavy-lift extraction craft, operating under the close escort of Thunderhawks and other Imperial Navy interceptors, came in against the wind toward the large landing platforms at the ridge's upper levels. The corridor above them was being held by orbital fire and the anti-aircraft net in real time.
Duvette drew a long, cold breath of polar air.
The extraction had begun.
As the main force started its embarkation, the sound of weapons fire across the surrounding defensive sectors began to thin with visible speed. The fire density was dropping as units pulled back from their positions toward the landing platforms.
The rear artillery batteries and the polar fortress's heavy guns opened into continuous suppressive barrages designed to break the swarm's assault momentum. The explosions would hold the pressure back for a time, but not indefinitely.
The Hive Tyrant would detect the contraction of the Imperial defensive perimeter the moment it began. It was a Synapse organism of exceptional tactical capability. It would understand that the million-strong army it had been bleeding for weeks was about to leave, and it would not allow that without the most intensive possible pressure on every available approach route.
Which meant the 112th would have to seal the single main road from the ice plain to the ridge top and hold it against whatever came.
Even with Calgar's Honor Guard and the Ultramarines 2nd Company fighting alongside them, this was going to be the worst of everything the battle had produced so far. A close-quarters meatgrinder on one road, the toxic cloud advancing from the north, and the full weight of the swarm's redirected fury pressing from the south.
At the bridgehead, Kleist was already moving among the armoured crews with the focus of a man who had stopped waiting for better options. Metal ground against metal as the Leman Russ tanks broke the ice that had frozen around their tracks during the static defense period and began the slow process of reversing out of their fixed firing positions.
Duvette pulled his attention inward and checked his System panel.
[Current Command Authority: Ash Watchers-Eisenmark 112th Armoured Infantry Regiment]
[Total Strength: 2,632 (all personnel included)]
[Heavy Vehicles: 21 Leman Russ main battle tanks (including 5 damaged), 20 Chimera armoured personnel carriers, 2 Hydra Flak Tanks, 2 Trojan support vehicles, 21 Mars-pattern Sentinel walkers] [Experience: Elite (34%)]
[Overall Supply: 43%] [Overall Loyalty: 93%] [Overall Morale: 86%] [Overall Sanity: 70%] [Chaos Corruption: 0%]
He was carrying 400 Emperor's Wrath. The regiment behind him was not a force that had been bled empty. They were depleted, damaged, and running low on everything that mattered, but they were not spent.
For the living. For the dead.
Nothing left but to fight to the last.