03 - Savage Scars (40 page)

Seeing that the path ahead was secured and the rearmost vehicles of the Space
Marine column had ground ahead and were out of sight, Lucian looked around for
his executive officer.

“Major Subad!” he called.

A moment later, Subad was running towards him from further down the street.
“My lord?” he said as he came to a halt and saluted.

“Get the companies moving, major,” Lucian said. “The objective is in sight.”

Sarik pulled his shrieking, gore-streaked chainsword from the broken
torso of the barbarous alien carnivore, and brought it up into a guard position
as he sought another opponent. The only enemy left were the dead and the dying,
the Space Marines pushing forwards with boltguns raised as they secured the
area.

A muffled
thump-crack
rang out as a battle-brother put a bolt pistol
shell through a wounded alien’s head.

“Clear!” Brother Qaja shouted, and a dozen similar acknowledgments flooded
over the command net.

“Transports forward,” Sarik ordered, the roar of several dozen engines
revving to life sounding from behind as his order was enacted. The Space Marines
had reached a junction, and the outer limits of the Gel’bryn star port lay
around the next turn in the road. The ground was strewn with the spilled blood
and severed limbs of the alien carnivores, which crunched and split under
Sarik’s armoured tread as he walked forwards towards the corner.

The aliens had fought like nightmarish creatures from Chogoran legend, though
why, Sarik could not tell. The tau themselves had almost entirely evacuated the
city, and none had been reported for an hour at least. It seemed that the tau
had deployed the carnivores as a rearguard, but one that they must have regarded
as expendable given the imminent fall of Gel’bryn and its star port. Perhaps the
carnivores were bound to the tau by some unknown blood oath. Perhaps they had
simply been paid so handsomely they considered the nigh suicidal defence worth
attempting. All that really mattered was that they were xenos, and their mindset
quite literally alien.

Sarik cast such thoughts from his mind as he approached the turn. He skirted
the wall of one of the massive tau buildings, and as he came to the corner,
edged around to get his first look at the star port complex.

A huge, flat expanse of ground formed the bulk of the star port, with
numerous circular pads raised on fluted stilts providing the launch terminals.
Control and sensor towers soared high overhead, and arc lights shone down from
others, bathing the whole scene in a cold, white light. The nearest of the
landing pads, a mere three hundred metres from Sarik, was the scene of bustling
activity as tau ground crew rushed to and fro in preparation for a fat, vaguely
ovoid lander with four huge thruster units swivelled downwards and spitting a
backwash of flame. As the lander neared the pad, its engines cut out, and Sarik
thought for a moment its systems had failed. But no, the vessel had been caught
in the anti-grav sheath projected by the pad’s systems, and was being carried
safely downwards towards its docking station.

As the lander came in, Sarik saw a stream of tau warriors emerge from a
structure near the landing pad’s base, and make their way across the dry ground,
towards the elevators inside the structure’s supports. These must be the very
last of the tau, Sarik thought; the last shuttle out of Gel’bryn.

A squadron of sleek tau flyers rose from a landing pad further away, and
moved in towards the lander, assuming an overwatch formation, hovering as their
multiple-barrelled heavy weapons scanned the star port’s edges. That changed
things, Sarik thought. While he might have been prepared to let the lander go
unharmed, the presence of the heavily armed escorts made it a matter of military
necessity to engage it. The star port had to be captured without delay, and the
enemy flyers were an obstacle to be overcome.

“Your orders, brother-sergeant?” Qaja said as he appeared at Sarik’s side.

Sarik thought a moment, a plan forming in his mind. His gaze tracked
downwards from the rearing landing pad, and across the flat expanse of the
complex. The entire area was ringed with a line of low bunkers, and behind them
a ring of shield projectors, exactly the same as the one his force had broken
through at the very beginning of Operation Pluto.

“No delay,” Sarik told Brother Qaja. “Grand’s deadline may already have
passed, so this finishes, now.”

“Agreed, brother-sergeant,” said Qaja. Sarik had no need of his agreement,
but he valued Qaja’s opinion nonetheless.

“Those bunkers appear to be configured for anti-personnel work.” Qaja nodded
his confirmation as he studied the bunkers’ low gunports, seeing the
multiple-barrelled cannons pointing out threateningly. “We advance on foot
behind the Predators and Rhinos, then use krak and melta on the shield
projectors beyond,” Sarik continued. “After that, we take the landing pad. The
enemy surrender, or they die.”

“More likely they die,” said Qaja. “None of them have surrendered yet.”

“We haven’t yet given them the chance, brother,” said Sarik.

“Understood,” said Qaja, understanding well that Sarik was referring as much
to his own previous losses of control as to the breakneck speed of the advance.
“I’ll pass the order along. Ten minutes?”

Sarik smiled grimly as he took one last look at the line of bunkers. “Ten
minutes.”

The instant the Predators and Rhinos moved out, the bunkers opened fire.
Twinned cannons spat an incandescent rain of energy bolts from the dozen or so
bunkers that had the range and arc to target the Space Marines, hammering the
frontal armour plates of the vehicles. Even as dawn edged the horizon a deep
jade, the air was lit by livid blue pulses that chased the shadows from the
streets.

Sarik had deployed his lascannon-equipped Predator battle tanks and Razorback
armoured transports to the head of the formation. Six tanks from four different
Chapters ground forwards across the open ground leading to the bunker line,
Rhinos fanning out on either side. Energy rounds spat across the two hundred
metres between the bunkers and the tanks in constant streams, every round as
bright as a tracer, washing back and forth across the tanks. Where the energy
rounds struck, they produced a dull wallop and gouged out a lump of armour the
size of a clenched fist, but none could penetrate the tanks’ forward plates.

The tanks moved at a stately pace, cautious not to advance too rapidly for
Sarik’s squads were following on foot. While Sarik judged the tanks to be all
but impervious to the bunkers’ fire, he was less certain about the power armour
his warriors wore. What the energy bolts lacked in armour penetration
capability, they more than made up for in raw ballistic force, meaning they
could wreck a Space Marine’s armour systems and cripple the warrior even without
cracking open his protective suit.

Striding along behind the lead Predator, Sarik rued the fact that the
crusade’s Terminators were being held in strategic reserve. All of the
heavy-armoured veterans belonged to the Iron Hands Chapter, and Captain Rumann
had made it quite clear they were being held back for boarding actions should
the fleet find itself engaged in orbit. Sarik conceded that he would have done
the same thing, though a squad or two of Terminators teleporting into the bunker
line would have made the current advance unnecessary.

“Fifty metres!” Brother Qaja called out over the roar of the tanks.

“Proceed,” Sarik said into the command-net.

Every armoured vehicle that was armed with a lascannon opened fire on its
prearranged target. Searing white lances of focussed energy speared the air,
slamming into the bunkers and blowing three to atoms within seconds. The weight
of fire immediately lessened, but the remaining bunkers swung their fire across
to the tanks that had fired, hundreds of energy rounds scything into them with
relentless ferocity.

The tanks ground on, their frontal armour plates soon transformed into
cratered slabs of smoking ceramite by the constant fusillade. One Predator, the
Executioner
of the Scythes of the Emperor Chapter, sustained three
successive shots to the armour plate immediately fore of the driver’s station,
and a fourth shattered the whole glacis. The round passed through the wrecked
armour and struck the driver a glancing blow to his left shoulder, rendering the
arm limp and useless. Despite his wound, the stoic driver continued with his
duty, keeping the
Executioner
steady while its commander directed round
after round of lascannon fire, taking revenge on the enemy in lethal fashion.

As the vehicles closed on the bunker line, a clear breach was opened where
three ruined structures smoked and spat fire into the dawn air.

“Squads forward!” Sarik bellowed. He had no need to use the vox-link for the
Space Marines were pressed in behind the armoured vehicles, ready to move
forwards and smash aside any resistance that still stood.

Squads deployed in pairs, one group using their boltguns to cover the other
as it rushed forwards to storm the bunkers with bolt pistols and grenades. Sarik
drew his chainsword with one hand, and took up a melta bomb in the other. While
Qaja and the rest of his squad covered him, Sarik joined an Ultramarines assault
squad deploying on foot rather than by jump pack, and joined the charge.

As he stepped out from behind the cover of a Rhino, Sarik located the nearest
operational bunker and gestured for the assault squad to follow him towards it.
The bunker was low and dome-shaped, with the twinned energy burst weapons
sweeping left and right from the fire port. The Space Marines came in at the
extreme edge of the bunker’s firing arc, but still the gunner saw them, sweeping
his fire in a wide fan that pulverised the ground and sent up fountains of dust.
The charge took only seconds, though Sarik was intensely aware of every single
energy bolt as it buzzed through the air towards him and his warriors. Seething
blue points of strobing light passed by, etching a trail of vapour where they
passed. One bolt struck an Assault Marine square in the chest, gouging a deep
wound, its edges flickering blue as the warrior went down. Sarik knew instantly
the Ultramarine would fight again.

Seconds before Sarik reached the bunker a final burst of defensive fire spat
directly towards him, and he dived to one side. The Assault Marine behind him
was not so fast to react. A dozen energy bolts slammed into the Ultramarine’s
helmet, the first handful destroying the armour, the remainder vaporising the
head. The warrior’s body continued to run for several seconds, his nervous
system locked on the last imperative it had received. Or perhaps the body was
driven even beyond the point of death to serve. Perhaps it was just the armour’s
actuators failing to register that the wearer was slain.

The dead Ultramarine only stopped moving when he slammed into the side of the
tau bunker, the headless body finally realising it was slain and toppling to the
ground in a heap. Sarik was the next warrior to reach the bunker, followed
within seconds by the eight remaining Ultramarines. The twinned cannons
continued to spit their blizzard of energy bolts, homing in on more distant
targets now that Sarik and the Assault Marines were too close to engage. The
stream of fire split the air in a thunderous barrage almost within arm’s reach,
charging the air and creating small crackles of energy that played across the
Space Marines’ armour plates.

Sarik edged around the curved form of the bunker, gesturing for the three
closest Assault Marines to follow him. The warriors carried bolt pistols in one
hand and frag grenades in the other, ready to storm the enemy fortification the
instant Sarik’s melta bomb had cracked it open.

Aware that enemy infantry might be guarding against an attempt to penetrate
the bunker, Sarik moved fast. As he cleared the bunker’s rear he looked for an
entry hatch, but to his surprise, found none.

“Thinking machines,” Sarik growled, realising that the turrets were
automated, controlled by the same heretical machine intelligences that animated
the tau’s gun drones and other such hated devices. He activated the melta bomb,
set it to a three second delay and clamped it to the base of the bunker wall,
praying that the charge would be sufficient to penetrate the armour.

The charge set, Sarik retreated back around the wall. He turned to the
Assault Marines, and nodded to the frag grenade the nearest was carrying. “Krak
grenades,” he ordered, and a second later the melta bomb detonated.

A ripple of nucleonic fire spread outwards from the bomb, eating the bunker’s
outer shell and reducing the material to streams of superheated lava. The
reaction lasted only seconds and was accompanied by a nigh deafening roar and an
instant pressure change as the air was consumed and more rushed in towards the
vacuum. When the reaction ceased, the entire rear of the bunker was a blackened
mass, a great bite taken out of it to reveal machine systems within.