Chapter 38: In the Emperor's Name, All Heretics Shall Perish
Inside the cabin of a Valkyrie assault transport, the red tactical jump lights were flashing at a frequency that did unpleasant things to the chest.
Stroud sat on the metal bench with his back straight. Around him, eleven members of an elite scout squad sat in identical silence. He wore force-feedback power armour. The others wore full carapace.
This was the first drop batch. To drive the blade into Asphodel's heart, fleet command had pulled together an enormous assault formation of Valkyries. Anderson, Elias, Finn, and the others were distributed across the cabins of other transports. Nearly four hundred fully armed 112th elites were at this moment sliding out of the belly of the large transport and dropping toward the burning planet below.
The heavy armour plating blocked the roar of the anti-aircraft artillery outside. The sealed helmets blocked the engine screaming. Inside the cabin: only the quiet running of the life-support systems.
Stroud had his eyes closed.
Now that he was genuinely sealed inside this thing that could become an iron coffin without notice, he discovered that the frantic internal noise he had been carrying for a week had become, against all expectation, strangely quiet. The fear of the height, the resistance to falling — facing the clean simplicity of what was waiting below, none of it seemed worth the energy anymore.
In the helmet's comms channel, the internal frequencies of several squads had been linked.
Finn's flat, hoarse pre-battle prayer moved through the channel in a steady current. No one interrupted it. For the 112th's veterans, the old soldier's murmuring had become something they would have found uncomfortable to be without.
"Remember that bet of ours?"
Elias's voice cut in without preamble, breaking the prayer's rhythm. He named no one. Everyone in the channel knew who he was talking to.
"On mission speed, you will never match me." Stroud didn't open his eyes. The cold laugh came out immediately.
"Then you'd better make sure that bald head lands in one piece first." Elias's tone carried a particular edge.
"No difficulty. I'll fly in behind the big man. That head of his is more than large enough to absorb everything the anti-aircraft guns can produce." Stroud said it without any visible mercy.
Anderson's muffled roar came through the channel at once. "Back off. Keep talking and I'll tell the Commissar about you and Evan looking at filth on the data-slate three days ago."
Low suppressed laughter broke out across the channel. Whatever pre-battle tension and fear had been present dissolved completely in that moment, and what replaced it was the particular calm that comes when there is nothing left to do but face what is coming.
Then the airframe vibration intensified sharply. They had penetrated Ashek II's atmosphere. Under twenty thousand metres to the predetermined upper hive coordinates.
Without warning, a wall of screaming static forced itself into the channel. Behind it: heavy gunfire, the sounds of human beings reaching their end. A voice came through in fragments.
"Part of the anti-air network... down... barely holding... Emperor above, you have a three-minute window! Jump!"
The signal the Storm Trooper advance teams had paid for with their lives.
The laughter in the cabin stopped instantly. The Valkyrie's vector thrust engines produced a sound that was felt in the sternum rather than heard through the ears, forcing the craft into a hover at altitude. The hatch doors on both sides slid open on hydraulic pressure.
Savage freezing air poured in. The red jump lights reached their maximum frequency.
Stroud stood and walked to the open door. The wind hammered the surface of the force-feedback armour, producing a sharp constant scream against the plate edges.
On the visor, green data began to move.
[Final drop coordinate confirmed: A-1321-4581]
[Drop countdown... 3. 2. 1.]
The mechanical locks securing the grav-packs released simultaneously with a soft click.
[Unit A/213 has successfully deployed.]
Stroud did not hear that last automated prompt. At the instant the countdown hit zero, he stepped forward without hesitation into the burning void below.
Intense weightlessness took him at once. He spread his limbs, using the armoured body to cut against the roaring airflow on both sides. Around him, more than three hundred black figures were falling like a dense shower of meteorites, driving toward the hive city below with the particular quality of something that cannot be stopped.
From the perspective of ten thousand metres, those three hundred and more figures were extremely small. And below, the hive city that was enormous enough to blot out the visible horizon resembled a steel beast with its jaws open, quietly waiting.
As the altitude closed at speed, Stroud could make out the distant plain. Dense flashes of light were exchanging continuously across it.
The Titan Legion against Asphodel's Bane Engines, exchanging fire on a scale that remade the ground. Thick particle streams and plasma spheres wove together above the wasteland. Every impact shook the earth.
A blinding flash detonated to Stroud's left.
An anti-aircraft high-explosive shell went off in the air. The shockwave and the sharp fragments swept through the drop zone like a horizontal storm. Several fragments hit Stroud's force-feedback armour hard, producing a sound like grinding teeth.
The armour held. But the kinetic energy was enough to throw him off balance, sending him into violent spinning tumbles, departing his intended trajectory.
At the edge of his vision, two 112th soldiers who had no room to evade were hit directly.
Carapace armour had no answer for that class of explosion. They didn't scream. They came apart into two clouds of red mist in the air.
"Valen, Ivan are down. May they return to the Golden Throne." Stroud reported the casualties in the channel without heat. "Watch the anti-aircraft fire. These madmen are apparently not receiving us warmly."
"You somehow still have the presence of mind to say unnecessary things." Elias's voice came from the other end of the channel, the howl of wind audible behind it.
The Storm Trooper teams had paid with their lives to paralyse most of the network. But the surviving fire points were still cutting through the exposed drop formation like a harvest.
Stroud set his jaw and forced himself to ignore the sharp alarms the helmet's internal Cogitator was producing. He concentrated entirely on using the force-feedback armour's servo systems to stabilise his body position, simultaneously firing the jet-pack. Thrust erupted. He was pulled back onto the intended trajectory.
Their speed was approaching the sound barrier.
The void-proximity warnings began flashing. The grey line between the lower hive's contamination and the upper hive's controlled architecture came into view ahead: the Void Shield barrier, a wall of energy separating two entirely different worlds.
"Fire thrusters, control your velocity now!" Stroud shouted through the channel.
They had to bleed their speed to the threshold before making contact. If the Void Shields registered them as incoming projectiles, they would be treated as such and transmitted into the Warp before they reached anything they could hit.
Accompanied by a nauseating high-frequency vibration that went through the armour and through the body wearing it, more than three hundred soldiers forced their way through the Void Shield's energy curtain.
They were through.
"Activate grav-chutes!" Stroud issued the command through the thinning anti-aircraft fire.
His own jet-pack fired again. The enormous downward momentum was cancelled against the upward thrust, and his velocity began dropping rapidly.
Under a thousand metres now. The upper hive's surface was close enough to read. On an anti-aircraft tower directly below, Stroud could make out the details without difficulty.
Several destroyed Storm Trooper bodies were lying in the blood around the platform's edge. A group of cultists were at the twin anti-aircraft cannon, pouring fire into the sky without pause.
In that moment Stroud registered the threat before he consciously processed it. He used the jet-pack for a violent lateral displacement without pausing to think about whether it was dangerous.
An anti-aircraft missile passed past his shoulder plate at a range that singed the armour's surface coating. The heat made the coating sizzle.
"You heretic bastards!"
Stroud's curse was entirely unrestrained. He abandoned any attempt at controlling the drop and changed his angle of approach. Like a hunting falcon dropping on prey, he went into a vertical dive aimed at the tower that was still firing.
By the time the cultists on the platform registered the black figure crashing down on them from the side at speed, there was nothing they could do about it.
Stroud drew the large-calibre combat shotgun from his chest harness with about ten metres of altitude remaining.
In the last second before landing, one hand on the grip, he pulled the trigger at the people below.
The report was enormous.
Dense metal fragments detonated at near-contact range and blew the upper bodies of the two cultists at the anti-aircraft cannon into fragments.
Stroud hit the metal platform with the impact of something that does not stop for landings. The heavy force-feedback armour crushed the grating beneath his boots. He made no attempt to absorb the impact. The armour absorbed it for him.
"112th first batch, in contact!"
He roared it into the channel and went straight into the remaining cultists on the tower. The small arms they turned on him could not scratch the force-feedback armour's finish. He moved through them like something that had been sent specifically for this purpose, working through the platform's defenders with the shotgun until none of them were functional.
"What's the phrase, Finn!" Stroud drove several new shells into the chamber and shouted wildly into the channel while doing it, then used a single round to remove the head of a heretic emerging from the access hatch below.
"In the Emperor's name, all heretics shall perish."
Finn's voice came through the channel, flat and without inflection. Behind it, the precise and continuous screaming sound of the long-las at work.
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