Chapter 85: The Approaching Showdown
The heavy treads of the Leman Russ tanks screamed against the rock as the vehicles locked into position on the main internal ramp, a passage wide enough to accept over a dozen tanks advancing side by side, cutting straight up through the heart of the mountain.
This was the only internal road on all of Cold Steel Ridge capable of connecting the surface directly to the great landing platforms at the summit.
In front of them, held temporarily at bay by the overloaded volley fire of the fortress macro-cannons, the swarm pressed at the approach.
Behind them, millions of Imperial mortal troops were evacuating onto the waiting transport craft in a race against the clock. At this moment, the 112th Armoured Infantry Regiment stood between these two realities as the only steel barrier capable of sealing the gap.
In that suffocating atmosphere, the one piece of good news was this: although the mountain's interior was vast, it was still an enclosed structure. The Tyranid aerial organisms were denied direct access, forced to go around entirely, to face the polar wind and the anti-aircraft batteries as they pressed against the landing platforms above. Without the three-dimensional threat from overhead, the 112th's task became cleaner and more absolute: hold this corridor with concentrated firepower and stop the ground assault at the choke point.
The heavy weapons positions were all established and ready. Drawing on every gram of his tactical competence, Duvette had deployed all twenty-one Leman Russ tanks along the ramp in a tiered formation. Front-rank tanks had lowered their dozer blades to function as fortified bunkers. Rear-rank tanks elevated to fire over the front rank's hull tops, creating a multi-level wall of steel with no dead ground anywhere in the approach corridor.
This time, the defenders were not mortals alone. The blue-armoured warriors of the Ultramarines stood shoulder to shoulder with the 112th's soldiers on this ground that was destined to run with blood. Their towering figures, built on a scale that spoke plainly of something beyond the ordinary human frame, had positioned heavy bolters and plasma incinerators at every critical high point and covered position along the approach, waiting in complete stillness for what was coming.
Duvette walked the line.
He found Sergeant Titus in one of the emplacements, as still as a statue, calmly checking his weapon with the unhurried composure of a man preparing for a training exercise rather than a final stand.
Nearby, on a protruding ledge of bare rock, the young warrior with the elaborately ornamented power armour and the sweeping red cloak stood in sharp contrast. Cato Sicarius. He had already drawn his power sword, the blue disintegration field along the blade producing a lethal, hungry hum. His gaze was fixed on the far end of the ramp with a barely contained aggression, the look of a man who had to physically restrain himself from charging directly into the endless swarm and taking the hive mind's head with his own hand.
Then, from the elevated position behind and above the rearguard formation, the pneumatic groan of a massive armoured gate opening cut across the ambient noise.
Duvette turned.
Twenty-some warriors in extraordinarily ornate power armour advanced in perfect step, surrounding Chapter Master Marneus Calgar as he appeared at the rear of all the rearguard forces. The Axes of Macragge in the Honor Guard's hands caught the light from the overhead lumens, the disintegration fields rippling blue and lethal along the blades. The iconic crested helmets completed the picture that every soldier present recognized instantly.
The Honor Guard of the Ultramarines. The finest warriors the Chapter had ever produced. Here.
Calgar stood at the elevated position, his deep-set eyes sweeping the battlefield in a single long pass. He took in the Astartes at their positions. He took in the 112th's soldiers at theirs. His gaze came to rest briefly on Duvette, and he gave a single, slight nod.
He raised his voice to fill the mountain.
"Behind us stand the people of Ultramar!"
The thunder of Calgar's voice rolled through the enclosed rock without losing an ounce of its weight. He raised the Gauntlets of Ultramar, the energy fields blazing around them, and delivered the final oath.
"Here, we will forge in blood a wall of steel that no alien shall ever cross. Ultramarines â€" we do not fall back!"
"For Macragge! For the Emperor!"
Every Ultramarine in the passage answered with everything in them. Every soldier and officer of the 112th followed. The combined sound they produced struck the rock walls and came back amplified, and it threatened to lift the cavern roof.
Time passed in the way it does before the end of things.
Then the thunderous siege-scale roar of the fortress macro-cannons that had been holding the swarm at the approach began to ease. Then it stopped.
The covering fire was over.
In the quiet that followed, a new sound began to travel through the thick rock walls and reach Duvette's ears, dense and layered and continuous: the sound of countless chitinous limbs scraping against stone, threaded through with the alien shrieks that preceded every assault. The swarm was in the approach corridors and closing.
Duvette drew a long breath of cold air carrying the smell of promethium and machine oil and spoke once into the command channel.
"All personnel. Prepare yourselves."
The 112th's soldiers locked their hands around their lasrifles. They understood what was about to arrive.
The first wave came. Hormagaunts and Termagants flooded into the far end of the ramp in a surging mass. Duvette ripped his chainsword from its scabbard, the motor engaging with a savage roar, and drove every last gram of air from his lungs in a single command.
"For the Emperor! For Ultramar! Open fire!"
Hundreds of dazzling red laser beams lanced into the dark purple mass simultaneously. In that enclosed corridor, every discharge struck the hard rock walls and returned amplified, layering over the next detonation and the one following that. The combined main-gun salvoes of over twenty Leman Russ tanks and the roar of heavy bolters interlocked and built on each other until the sound pressure crossed from noise into something physical, something that registered in the chest before the ears had processed it. Guardsmen positioned near the artillery were bleeding from their ears. No one pulled back.
The thick reek of promethium propellant and the nauseating stench of alien chitin burning under lasfire were trapped in the enclosed space, filling every breath.
The swarm's vanguard was vaporized and shredded as it entered the fire net. The organisms behind stepped across the bodies of those in front and kept advancing without breaking pace.
The Hive Tyrant's calculation was apparent. The vast biomass of the evacuating force waiting on the platforms above represented a harvest that could not be allowed to leave. To reach it, this corridor had to be forced. The lower-grade organisms at the front were not expected to survive first contact. They were expendable instruments, sent to consume the first wave of firepower and create a gap in the coverage that the heavier organisms could exploit.
When that first wave had done its work, the Carnifexes came through from the rear, each one a living siege engine, and their charge sent tremors through the rock floor.
Here the Astartes' heavy weapons declared themselves.
Titus's heavy bolter produced its distinctive deep roar, large-calibre explosive shells detonating inside the packed organism formations and throwing body mass in every direction. Plasma incinerators directed brilliant blue jets of superheated energy that bore a resemblance to small suns and no resemblance to mercy, reducing the leading Carnifexes to boiling fluid in moments. Melta beams struck the heaviest alien chitin and converted it directly to vapor.
The corridor had become a killing ground of a completeness that conventional defensive doctrine did not account for. Severed limbs and dark alien blood coated the rock walls to a height that told the story of the engagement more accurately than any report could.
And still they came. The swarm poured in like an endless black mudslide, the sheer volume of it making the fire net's achievements invisible from moment to moment.
The pressure on the defensive line increased at a rate that required no instruments to measure. The blast wall at the front was taking damage fast.
Then something in the assault wave caught Duvette's attention.
A creature moving through the mass was built on a different scale from the Carnifexes: heavier, more compact, wearing carapace of a thickness that made the standard heavy organisms appear lightly armoured. Several laser strikes hit it and left marks that could not generously have been described as marks. A Tyrant Guard.
Duvette's eyes narrowed.
This organism existed for one purpose: to absorb incoming fire intended for a high-tier Synapse organism. It was the ultimate shield creature, evolved specifically to keep something much more dangerous alive while it closed the distance. The fact that it was charging at the front of the assault now, rather than holding a protected position behind a higher-value asset, was not aggression.
It was preparation. It was clearing the firing corridor.
"Leman Russ, armour-piercing rounds," Duvette called into the channel without hesitation. "Concentrate fire on the heavily armoured organism at the front."
Several turrets swung in sequence to acquire. The main guns discharged together. Even the finest biological armour the Tyranid swarm had produced offered no answer to a simultaneous broadside from multiple main battle tanks at this range. The Tyrant Guard was torn half apart and fell into the blood pooling on the ramp floor.
Duvette felt nothing that resembled relief.
He knew exactly what a Tyrant Guard's suicidal forward charge meant in the context of this engagement. They did not operate alone. Their purpose at the front of an assault, clearing the approach with their own body, served only one function: something far more powerful was directly behind them, and it needed the corridor open.
In the instant the Tyrant Guard fell, a screech arrived.
Not the screech of ordinary Tyranid organisms. This was categorically different, a sound that bypassed hearing entirely and worked at the level below will, a physical wave of cold that drove through the nerves of every living organism in range and forced the body to understand before the mind had processed anything at all.
The Astra Militarum soldiers around Duvette reacted without choosing to. Nausea struck them in a wave. The taste of blood rose in mouths that had not been cut. Fingers trembled against trigger guards, not in the ordinary way of fear but in the involuntary recognition of something at the absolute apex of a predatory hierarchy announcing its arrival.
Duvette clamped his teeth together hard.
He knew with complete clarity what had just announced itself.
The Hive Tyrant was here.
He turned his head very slightly and looked up toward the elevated position at the rear, at Marneus Calgar directing the battle with the composure of a man entirely at home in catastrophic violence, the force of his presence as palpable in the enclosed space as any weapon on the line.
The thought arrived in Duvette's mind with the quiet certainty of something he had known since the moment they took position on Cold Steel Ridge.
The fated confrontation between the son of the Primarch and the Hive Tyrant was coming. It was going to happen today. Here, inside this mountain, exactly as history had always recorded it would.