Chapter 87: Retreat
[Assisted in slaying the Hive Tyrant. Emperor's Wrath +300]
Duvette stared at the System notification hovering at the edge of his vision and let out a long, heavy breath.
"Cheap," he muttered, and turned his head to spit a mouthful of bloody saliva onto the floor.
Though in fairness, Calgar had done the tanking and Calgar had delivered the kill shot. Three hundred for an assist was probably reasonable.
As the Hive Tyrant's enormous body collapsed with a finality that shook the floor, the Shadow in the Warp hanging over Cold Steel Ridge seemed to tear open along a seam. The suffocating psychic pressure that had been pressing on every mind in the mountain dispersed in an instant, replaced by something more chaotic and more primitive: the sound and movement of a killing machine that had just lost the will directing it.
The effect was immediate.
Stripped of its Synapse control, the Tyranid swarm, which had functioned minutes ago with the precision of a coordinated weapon, reverted in moments to a mass of organisms operating on instinct alone. They began moving in aimless circles, emitting harsh, directionless shrieks. Target discrimination collapsed. In the extremity of the confusion, some organisms turned on each other, tearing and trampling at whatever body was closest, purple fluid scattering across the ramp floor.
But not everything in the swarm chose to retreat.
The Tyrant Guards that had been guarding the Hive Tyrant went into a state that had no rational description at the moment of their master's death. Every trace of directed behavior burned away in an instant, replaced by a berserk fury that made them more immediately dangerous to everything in their immediate area than they had been in the structured assault. They were enormous, they were armoured against heavy weapons fire, and they had ceased to recognise any difference between human and Tyranid. They attacked whatever was nearest with the force of out-of-control armoured vehicles.
"Give them no chance to breathe! Encircle and eliminate, every last one of them!"
Duvette forced the words through a raw throat, fighting through the tearing agony running the length of both arms from Limiter Break's expiry, and pushed the order across the command channel.
The surviving soldiers of the 112th responded without hesitation. The brief moment of victory had not undone their discipline. They re-formed with speed, coordinated with the Ultramarines alongside them, and drove forward into the containment.
It was, in its way, reminiscent of something from an older age of the species: hunters from a primitive tribal band, working with crude weapons and the intelligence of a coordinated group, pursuing maddened animals across an ice plain. The scale was different. The principle was the same.
Under the sustained, organized concentrated fire of human soldiers who had not stopped being lethal when the battle's primary objective was eliminated, one Tyrant Guard after another raised its final roar and went down into the blood pooling on the ramp, reduced to inert wreckage.
When the last of the berserk creatures fell, the remnant of the swarm reached its threshold.
Obeying the oldest surviving biological instruction, the one that had nothing to do with intelligence and everything to do with survival, the remaining organisms retreated. They clawed into the crevices in the rock, pressed themselves into the shadows in the canyons, went still wherever they could find somewhere to be still. Waiting, in whatever way they were capable of waiting, for the hive mind's signal to return.
Cold Steel Ridge went quiet for the first time since the battle had begun.
The propellant smoke drifted and thinned in the polar wind, uncovering the full extent of what the position had been turned into.
Marneus Calgar drew a heavy breath. His Larraman cells had done their work with the speed that Astartes biology demanded; the catastrophic wound at his right shoulder had clotted and sealed, the blood stopping where it would have continued to leave an ordinary organism. The marble-hard planes of his face were sheened with sweat, and blood loss had pushed some of the colour from his skin, but his eyes had not changed at all. He had not gone down. He had not made a sound of pain. Nothing beyond the weight of his breathing communicated how severe what had just happened to him was.
He surveyed what was left of the position: exhausted soldiers, every one of them still standing. He raised his voice to reach every corner of the space.
"Prepare to withdraw. We have completed our objective. The main force has the time it needed."
He raised his remaining left hand, the Gauntlet still carrying the evidence of how the engagement had ended.
"Let us give voice to it, warriors of the Emperor. You have done nothing to shame his glory."
The sound the surviving mortal soldiers produced in the moment that followed was not the controlled volume of a formation response. It was release. Lasrifles with barrels still warm from overuse were raised overhead. Fists coated in dried blood hammered against breastplates. The voices built on each other in the enclosed space until they filled it, and the sound rolled back from the rock walls and kept going, carrying over the polar wind outside.
Duvette let the tension out of both arms. The chainsword hung at his side, still dripping. The alien blood pooling on the blade had a smell that no amount of future clean air was going to remove from his memory.
He turned toward Calgar. The Chapter Master's gaze was already on him.
It was a look that crossed the line between what Calgar was and what Duvette was as completely as that line had ever been crossed. Not sentiment. Not performance. Pure acknowledgment.
Around them, the withdrawal was already beginning. The surviving soldiers of the 112th moved in an organized flow toward the exit corridors. Among them, Ultramarines who had been fighting alongside mortal troops for weeks without particular acknowledgment were now, without direction or ceremony, assisting the 112th's severely wounded to move. The regiment had earned something in this engagement that no formal commendation could have produced.
Duvette walked, carrying what was left of his available energy, to where Calgar stood.
"I will remember what you and your soldiers did here, Commissar Duvette." Calgar's voice held the particular quality of a man stating a fact rather than offering a compliment. "Your command decisions in particular. After this is over, I will ensure that you and your regiment receive honours commensurate with what you have done."
Duvette's face showed exhaustion that was impossible to fully conceal, but he met the Chapter Master's eyes and gave a nod that carried the weight it was meant to carry.
"The honour was ours, Chapter Master."
"Prepare to withdraw." Calgar raised his gaze to the flame-stained sky above the exit corridors, visible in fragments through the damaged ceiling of the mountain passage. "We return to the flagship in orbit. Wounded are treated first, then redeployment. The war continues, Commissar. Until the last alien is destroyed."
"Until the last alien is destroyed." Duvette repeated it with the full weight of what it cost to say it after this.
The withdrawal order was executed without delay. The 112th left everything heavy behind. The Leman Russ tanks, the Chimeras, the Sentinels, whatever remained of the armoured regiment that had held this corridor, were steel wreckage now. They had done everything they had been positioned here to do. They were left where they stood.
For the loss of the equipment, Calgar made Duvette a direct personal commitment. When they were aboard the flagship, he would personally authorize the 112th to access the highest resupply priority available in the Ultramarines' logistics chain. The regiment would be back at fighting strength in the shortest time he could arrange.
They boarded the heavy transport landing craft that had come in for them. The great hydraulic doors descended and sealed, and the wind and smoke of Cold Steel Ridge were cut off on the other side.
The Hive Tyrant's death had collapsed the local Synapse network that had been directing the Tyranid aerial organisms overhead. Stripped of coordination, those organisms had scattered and retreated, leaving a gap in the sky above the position that was as close to a safe extraction corridor as this engagement was going to produce.
The transport lifted under the full load of its engines, shaking as it rose, the noise inside the hull significant enough to end conversation.
Duvette sat in the restraint harness and looked through the viewport as Cold Steel Ridge grew smaller below him: the polar ice plain, devastated and blackened in sections where the fighting had been most sustained, and above it the sky still flickering crimson-violet with what remained of the orbital engagement.
He fixed his gaze on the total personnel count in his HUD.
[Total Strength: 2,032 (all personnel included)]
Over six hundred more veterans. Gone in this single engagement.
He closed his eyes. Let out a breath. Said nothing, but the thought was there, directed at them with the particular precision of someone who means what they are thinking.
May your souls find the Golden Throne.
Their destination was already set in the navigation systems.
The heart of the human fleet. The pride of the Ultramarines. The flagship Macragge's Honour.
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